This chapter looks at the consequences of the inability to negotiate borders because of deeply entrenched narrative patterns that circle back upon themselves, perpetuating communal values that stoke division. The chapter examines the quintessential victim of the Southern Lost Cause—Faulkner’s Quentin Compson—who is a divided self because he left the South. He is even before he leaves Mississippi for Boston, “two separate Quentins,” one “preparing for Harvard in the South” and the other “still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost.” Through Quentin, Faulkner makes clear the dangers of divisions between black and white, between North and South, and the inability of Southerners to successfully navigate the psychological borderlands and leave behind the crushing past of the South. Faulkner’s Quentin is the most indelibly inked reminder of the consequences of border narratives gone awry and a warning of the harm of building walls and not bridges.
