Makeup Blog: week of Feb 4-8, Paper Topic

For my first paper of the class I decided that I wanted to explore the emotional and mental processes of Quentin Compson's suicide my running it parallel to Sylvia Plath's suicide. I did this by looking into Quentin's character with his interactions with others, especially his father, and by analyzing the final poem the Plath wrote before the infamous oven suicide. Here is the ending of my paper which hopefully ties in all of my ideas with my thesis:

Suicide is seen by many as a last ditch effort to escape the world around them, and we can see in both of these instances that it does not come lightly. Quentin makes the choice out of skewed morality and family pressures. Sylvia Plath chooses to take her life because of depression and an underlying disease, but she was resolved in her decision. Both people, whether fictional or actually living, had been trapped by something and it resulted in them ending their lives. Lovers of literature hate to see a bright light go out forever, so Plath’s suicide was a daunting blow to them. However, despite the fact that Quentin Compson is not a real person, Faulkner succeeds in connecting him with the reader. We see Quentin struggle to keep his family intact, and we are saddened when he fails. The readers of both of these works get a better view of internal struggle and a possible, albeit not the best, permanent solution.