How we cite our quotes: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
She told a story [...] "And so this here queen come walking up to the ditch, where that bad man was hiding. She was walking up to the ditch, and she say, "If I can just get past this here ditch." was what she say…"
"What ditch?" Caddy said. "A ditch like that one out there? Why did a queen want to go into a ditch?"
"To get to her house," Nancy said. She looked at us. "She had to cross the ditch to get into her house quick and bar the door."
"Why did she want to go home and bar the door?" Caddy said. (3.63-66)
Poor Nancy! She seems unable to cope with the reality of her plight and compelled to create another version of it, a fictional story that obviously resembles the truth of what is going on. And she's left to express her fear to children who can't fully understand, as shown by Caddy's questions. This is making us sad.
Quote #8
"What, Father?" Caddy said. "What's going to happen?"
"Nothing," father said. (6.3-4)
In this passage, the father defines reality without hesitation. Nothing is going to happen, he insists. Oh yeah? Are you sure about that, buddy? After all, he confidently said earlier that someone had told Nancy that Jesus was back in town. Her worries aren't entirely unreasonable. Yet Mr. Jason, by simplifying the situation, acts as if he has reality totally under his control, as if his version must be the correct one.
Quote #9
But we could hear her, because she began just after we came up out of the ditch, the sound that was not singing and not unsinging. "Who will do our washing now, Father?" I said. (6.9)
Okay, these two simple lines of the story really tell us a lot. The two chief versions of reality in the story are juxtaposed sharply here. In the first sentence, we have the abandoned Nancy's reality-unreality wailing, and in the second, we have Quentin's question, which shows the white family's indifference to Nancy's fate. Nancy must cope with the reality of mortal fear; the white family just has to worry about their laundry. Blegh.