Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Part Three: April Sixth, 1928 (The Jason section)


"Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say."

And so begins Jason Compson's assessment of his family on Good Friday, 1928. This section is the most lucid, blunt, and angry part of the book. Let down by all members of his family, Jason is a bitter man with little nice to say about anyone.

Jason is the spittin' image of his mother.

The sharing of thoughts or points of view by these archetypes brought some streams of thought for me I thought:

I don't think thoughts without punctuation, although feelings and incomplete fragments might mix it up when I'm 'not thinking', but when I think, I think in punctuated sentences. When I'm looking for greater clarity I sit down and write. How do other real life folks think inside their heads?

Stream of consciousness experimentation, while I can see the value for High Art, is in my opinion, a greater failure than normal in terms of 100% successful transmission of internal states or moving the plot with tension build up. Instead, you are left ten steps behind the information given and the reader is forced into filling in more blanks than normal, struggling to put together a coherancy to the story that may not exist at all, which MAYBE echos real life sometimes, usually when it's really hot outside. (joke)

These Modernists (???) seem to require greater input from the reader to help 'understand' the plot, which means our own life experiences and ability to do nuances will affect how each of us figures out what is going on. If reading is a personal experience to begin with, this kind of writing would explode with personal reading experiences. No wonder there are 10,000 critical articles. It's like a book cover with a drawing of a person but the face is left blank so you can put a picture of your face there.

Jason is really bitter, but ironically (?) he succeeds the best financially. As usual, the only financial ambition is expressed by a man, never the women, except by mom for her daughter to marry rich. Quentin uses money to escape, not to 'grow' productively.

Jason simply wants Caddie and her daughter to be virginal. The whole family is invested in the girls' virginity openly, but the entire family is castrated on a variety of levels. Their 'seed' is spectacularly poor or falls on infertile ground.