That Evening Sun Memory and The Past Quotes

The introduction to the story illustrates how memory drifts by association from topic to topic. The mind often travels from one topic to a second one that's associated with the first in some way, and then moves from the second topic to a third associated topic, and keeps going and going until you decide to strop strolling down memory lane. Here, Quentin moves from the present Monday, to Monday fifteen years ago, to black women carrying laundry bundles on their heads, to a specific woman, Nancy, doing so—and if you keep reading, he keeps remembering via association for quite a while.

This is a bit of a difficult passage. You see, the adult Quentin who is narrating this story is, as he's remembering, presenting most of it from his nine-year-old perspective. But here he feels empathy for Nancy: " What is it?" I said. " What is it?" —while other characters ignore her feelings. But he still hasn't come to terms with the way his family treated her plight with indifference, the way they contrasted with him. The adult Quentin chalks up his leaving the kitchen not to the discomfort he must have felt as a child at her despair—"It ain't none of my fault" —and instead says (essentially) "Oh, you know, the kitchen was cold and kind of sad and stuff… that's why I left." The point is that memory plays tricks on you. Quentin is remembering the past, but he doesn't quite want to process or re-experience what truly happened at this moment.

So who's right, Jason or Caddy? We can't tell. Each is remembering things a different way, it seems, perhaps influenced by what they wish were true. Memory dupes us, and Modernists such as Faulkner love to point out how that happens.

Nancy is telling a story that's really a re-imagining of what just happened to her—the frightening trip to her house. She's already remembering, in other words, a very recent event… and already her mind is altering how she feels about it. Seemingly under pressure from her own mind's fear, she basically refers to herself as a queen, even though the story she's telling is supposedly fictional. It turns out that memory can play tricks even with the very recent past.

Here we seem to have something of an example of confirmation bias—the way that people looking for something tend to find what they already believe. Jason now believes he didn't want to go, but evidence suggests he did a few pages back, to prove he wasn't afraid. Memory is terribly susceptible to confirmation bias, and once more, Modernists such as Faulkner take pains to paint the workings of the mind and memory. Leave it to a literary movement as notoriously complicated as Modernism to tackle something as notoriously complicated as memory, eh?

This weird little subject change is famous enough to get its own title: critics call this passage "the Lovelady digression." One way to make sense of it is to think that the adult Quentin, narrating this story, might be uncomfortable with his memory approaching the conclusion where his family abandons Nancy. So he goes off a tangent about Mr. Lovelady, which happens to be suitably creepy, so in a sense, it's still an associative path for his mind to take.

Now Mr. Jason gets to throw in his belief about where Jesus has gone. He has apparently forgotten that (as he put it) "a Negro gave Nancy word of Jesus returning to town." Mr. Jason is the one who brought that up in the first place. True, maybe Jesus hasn't returned to town, but look at the conviction with which Mr. Jason states his position. Memory is selective; people tend to see things as they want to see them.

Arguably, the fact that the adult Quentin chooses to focus on this quote in his narration shows that he has learned something. At the beginning of the story, he's kind of "meh, whatever" about the black women carrying the laundry—not remarking on it one way or the other. But this quote shows how powerless and selfish he was as a child. By including the quote, perhaps the adult Quentin shows that he has learned something from this experience fifteen years earlier.

That he concludes his memory here is more evidence that the adult Quentin now comprehends the terrible indifference his family has shown to Nancy. Just moments ago, they abandoned her, and all they can do now is engage in childish name-calling.