Jason's Hard-Knock Life

In order to consider Jason Compson an arch-villain one would first have to consider who the main character of The Sound and the Fury is. This in itself is a fairly tough question considering all of the different viewpoints from which the narrative comes. In my opinion, Caddy is the main character, even though we do not get any information from her viewpoint. Typically, when one thinks of a villain, they think of the character that is in opposition to the main character. I just do not see Jason as being in that much opposition to Caddy. True, Jason does not like Caddy at all, but he is more frustrated with his life in general than with any one particular person. He despises that is stuck working to support his mother and Quentin and a “kitchen full of niggers” (242). He does not understand why Quentin got to go to Harvard while he got stuck working to support the family. Jason is angry at life and takes his anger out on the people around him.

The definition for a villain on dictionary.com is, “A cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel.” This, to me, does not describe Jason. His harshness and cruelty come from what he considers to be unfairness in his own life. He is not at all “devoted to wickedness or crime.” He is mean because he is unhappy not because he takes pleasure in it. It’s just how he is. His circumstances in life have not allowed him to do things purely for himself and he resents that.

Jason’s chapter adds to its two predecessors by being the most coherent of the three. A lot of things that were hinted at in Benjy’s and Quentin’s chapters are made clearer in Jason’s chapter. Also, Jason’s chapter gives us a different view of Caddy, who is arguably the main character. It is important that we are given a view of Caddy from a sibling who does not like her. Both Benjy and Quentin were very much attached to Caddy and therefore had a clouded perception of her. Jason did not at all share in this attachment and therefore gives us an equally clouded perception, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, allowing us to create a fuller picture of what Caddy was really like.

Are there parallels in The 42nd Parallel?

I will be honest, during my first read through of John Dos Passos’ The 42^nd Parallel, I had no clue how the whole thing tied together. I still do not have a very good idea as to how the sections relate to each other, but I will give it my best guess. Dos Passos uses three different headings to distinguish his sections—“Newsreel,” “The Camera Eye,” and “Mac.” The most coherent section is the one entitled “Mac,” although I do not know why it has that name. This section tells the story of Fainy McCreary and is relatively easy to follow.

The “Newsreel” section only occurs twice and, for the most part, appears to be information that Fainy could be reading from a newspaper that he picked up. The people mentioned in both of the “Newsreel” sections were actual people who were alive during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Also, the lyrics to the songs that are interspersed in the sections are from songs that were written during the same time period.  A final indication that the “Newsreel” sections could be news that Fainy is reading is that a lot of the news reported in the sections takes place in the Midwest, close to Chicago. My best guess for the “Newsreel” sections is that Dos Passos is relating news to the reader that would have been relevant to the setting of Fainy’s story.

“The Camera Eye” section, on the other hand, occurs four times. This section, to me, is the most strange. It comes to the reader in a stream of consciousness form, and it is not completely in English. Also, the mechanics of this section are completely random—there is no punctuation and very little capitalization. I just do not know what to do with this section when trying to relate it to Fainy’s story. To me, it is a “camera eye” view into someone’s mind, but I am not sure whose mind it is.