As a man barely into his thirties, we could say that William Faulkner, writing The Sound and the Fury, was unusually precocious in understanding some vague something about the ages of a person's life. Notwithstanding that I've always said Faulkner's fiction (like all such projects perhaps) took decades to truly mature into an appreciation of its wider context, there is a feeling for the trajectory of the individual life so eerily imbued in this novel. The teenage figure (Quentin Compson, who drowns himself in the Charles River) offers us a view of the teenage mind as one still capable of reflecting upon the entire content of personal memory. The teenager sees his entire history as though it is in front of his eyes, and the terrible weight of that is simply too much to stand, leading to Quentin's choosing death. Conversely, Jason Compson is around 34 during the present of the novel, and there is a sense in him that he can no longer retain the history of loss and pain he actually shares with Quentin. In fact, earlier passages in the novel's jumbled temporality show Jason— not Quentin, not Benjy— to be the most temperamental of the brothers. In a very real sense it is exhaustion that produces Jason's cynicism, but it is also the finite capacity of his memory. And then there are firmly middle-aged men, like Quentin's father, who have become completely inured to the discomfort of their personal history and whose lives boil down to an emotional desert of reading old texts, drinking to excess, but being safe from the kinds of suicidal ideation the young suffer, all on account of an aged indifference to memory. There has always seemed something very true about that trajectory to me. The older one gets the harder it actually is to remember what one remembers and in that there is a strange and very sardonic grace. Seems true to me, and odd a 32-year-old could encapsulate it so clearly. Though I myself am 38, and have only rounded (or am shortly to round) the halfway point in the road... so there's always the possibility that I don't actually understand yet.