Mr. Compson differs from his children in the sense that while they all struggle with time itself, Mr. Compson struggles with the idea of time’s existence, leading him to believe in almost nothing. Mr. Compson is not trapped in time, not stuck in the past, and is not trying to conquer it, rather he thinks that time is just there, just something else that people made up. When Macbeth says, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” that can almost be taken in a literal sense for Mr. Compson (MacBeth v.iv.xxvii-xxviii). The “sound and fury” or the various conditions that exist are “signifying nothing” in his opinion. For example, he said “men invented virginity not women” (Faulkner 78). Using the word invent makes it seem like it is something…show more content… A gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged” (Faulkner 104). By saying that, Mr. Compson appears to be saying that time is just something we carry around, something that does not actually exist. It is an interest concept that he mentions before. He said figuring out the time was “constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial” (Faulkner 77). Mr. Compson appears to have conquered time in a different way than Quentin since Mr. Compson seems to not believe in it. By not believing it or spending so much time focused on it, he does not become obsessed with time like Quentin. The problem with his theory is that it played a large part in Quentin’s death: “clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (Faulkner 85). By saying that the clock must stop for time to come to life means that everything else must end in order to truly live in time. Even breaking the clock physically, as Quentin does, was not enough to stop the clock since it ticked…show more content… Mr. Compson’s views align with the idea of living in the moment and just taking life as it comes.
For Quentin Compson, time haunted every single moment of his life, and, for him, death was the only way to escape time. Quentin’s father warned him of the dangers of time, but Jason, clearly, did not listen to his father’s warning since time ruins him. When Quentin is given the watch, his father tells him “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then”(Faulkner 27). This warning should have been a sign to Quentin that time can be dangerous, but instead the warning worsened Quentin’s situation. He spends his life attempting to get away from time, attempting to not let it take over, but, in the end, time conquers him. Rather than forgetting about time every now and then, Quentin’s effort to forget time turns into an effort to conquer time. Mr. Compson also tells Quentin that battles are not won because “the field only reveals to man his own folly and despair” (Faulkner 27). This portion of his father’s