Jason the Jerk

While reading the chapters on Benjy and Quentin were a struggle I found Jason's chapter very straightforward and easy to follow; it is easily my favorite chapter so far. However, Jason progressively became my least favorite character. He is mean spirited, racist, narrow-minded, disrespectful, unreasonable and just a downright jerk. Jason begins his chapter very bluntly by stating,  "Once a bitch always a bitch," this is reiterated again at the end of the chapter. Along with the way he treats women in this chapter it becomes very obvious that Jason looks down on the women in his life and sees them as a burden. He treats the servant, Dilsey, with such ignorance and disrespect, continually referring to her in derogatory terms and shows no gratitude toward her even though she is the one that is holding the family together more so than he. Jason enjoys the power of being in charge and taking care of Caddy's daughter Quentin turns out to be such a struggle that Quentin fears and abhors him and Jason appears abusive. In one scene Quentin is challenging Jason and Jason retaliates, "I dragged her into the dining room. Her kimono came unfastened, flapping about her, dam near naked. Dilsey came hobbling along. I turned and kicked the door shut in her face." He displays his ignorance and disrespect to Dilsey and Quentin.

We also learn that Jason does not like being wrong. On one occasion he finds Quentin out of school (again) riding in a car with a boy. Jason decides to follow but loses them in a field. When his mother tells him that Quentin told her she was being followed by Jason he denies it and lies saying that someone else had his car. When his employer crosses him and asks him where he was Jason lies by telling him he had an appointment and when the employer presses for more information Jason gets angry and doesn't want to talk about it. Jason is a bit out of control and has some anger issues which are displayed in this chapter.

Jason is also very concerned with appearance. In the same instance of following Quentin there is a scene where he is standing in the street looking for her thinking that he must look crazy and he says, "Like a man would naturally think, one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband, whats the reason the rest of them are not crazy too. All the time I could see them watching me like a hawk, waiting for a chance to say Well I'm not surprised I expected it all the time the whole family's crazy." He then spends the rest of that paragraph describing other instances where people might think they are crazy.

I think Jason is concerned with his family name which is why he continues to support his mother and niece but overall he treats everyone with such disrespect which shows that he is just a very angry person.