3/23

"There was a clock, high up in the sun, and i thought about how, when you don't want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares. i could feel the muscles on the back of my neck, and then i could hear my watch ticking away in my pocket and after a while i had all the other sounds shut away, leaving only the watch in my pocket. i turned back up the street, to the window. he was working at the table behind the window. he was going bald. there was a glass in his eye- a metal tube screwed into his face. i went in."

This passage represents one of the biggest motifs in this book, which is how importantly people view the concept of time. The repetition of all the things that involve time stress the importance to Quentin, who represents the scholarly up right member of the family. Because this is something that is important to him, it consequentially is something that is important in society. This is reflecting the importance of the precedence of time set by Benji, who has absolutely no sense of time, and because of his disability, it shows that society thinks time is important. This is why their "respectable" son thinks its very important, and Benji has no idea of what is so important about it.

second post.

"So I hushed and Caddy got up and we went into the kitchen and turned the light on and Caddy took the kitchen soap and washed her mouth at the sink, hard. Caddy smelled like trees."

This quote syntactically draws all the readers attention to Caddy. The fact that Benji is once more saying that Caddy smells like trees, shows that he is beginning to see her as he used to, when she was still a virgin. Her washing herself is a metaphor for purity and her virginity, and that's why Benji is once again saying she smells like trees, because that is the Caddy he has always known and loved.