. This living in the past ideology is the key to understanding what Faulkner is trying to say about the decay of Southern culture and traditions. “The watch ticked on. I turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it.” (Faulkner 80) Quentin cannot stop time. Just as the decay of the southern culture cannot be stopped, and though he does not necessarily correlate the decline of southern aristocracy as an affect of the Civil War, he does blame it on the evolution of time. He is totally consumed with the past, and at times can think of nothing else. This inability to move on with his life leads to a fixation with protecting his sister, Caddy. However distorted his fixation may be, it stems from the old Southern chivalry views. Slowly destroying his mentality by his inability to let go of the past, he becomes determined to stop time itself, an effort that will eventually force him to take his own life. The Quentin section best illustrates the social decay of the rich southern families as he literally destroys himself. The cause of this decay is clearly slavery, but the implications of this decay are much farther reaching than merely the Southern aristocracy. Many people believe that slavery instantaneously ended with the Civil War but this is not correct. The continuing remnants of slavery are observed in the Compson’s primitive black servants. Just as Quentin idealized the past as with a picture of the old South as a wonderful and glorious place, they romanticize about it and even wish to stop time in order to return to the past just as much as Quentin. Sadly, like Quentin, their views of the past and time are terribly distorted with the inability to remember the horrors of the past that were characterized by Southern slavery, a cancer constantly decaying the moral and ethical base of the South, Many events during the time period a person lives uncontrollably effect a ...
