LITERATURE: The Sound and the Fury The Antagonistas

My God, Jason’s the family prick, ain’t he?

We ate a while.  I could hear Ben in the kitchen, where Luster was feeding him.  Like I say, if we’ve got to feed another mouth and she won’t take that money, why not send him down to Jackson.  Hell be happier there, with people like him.  I says God knows there’s little enough room for pride in this family, but it don’t take much pride to not like to see a thirty year old man playing around the yard with a nigger boy, running up and down the fence and lowing like a cow whenever they play golf over there.  I says if they’d sent him to Jackson at first we’d all be better off today.  (p. 222)

Jason was a tattletale as a boy.  He resents the burden of Benjy, the sins and subsequent wealth of Caddy, Quentin for being sent to Harvard, his father for being soft, and his mother for still wanting to accept her children.  He has taken Caddy’s daughter, Quentin, in to the household after his father’s death, and rules with the brutality of a tyrant.  He allows his mother to symbolically burn Caddy’s checks for Quentin, unknowing to her that they are duplicates while he cashes the originals and keeps the money.  He is rude and crude and overbearing to the loyal Dilsey and her family who have cared for the Compson family for decades, and with the lack of respect for the "niggers" he seems to have less for women, and even less for his own family.

He’s a head trip all right.

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