Faulkner’s understanding of human nature comes through in this small scene. Quentin, away at university, is standing on a bridge when three young boys stop to consider fishing. There is one large wiley trout upon whose head a bounty has been placed:
"I’d take what I could get, then. I can catch just as many fish with this pole as I could with a twenty-five dollar one." Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They all talked at once, their voice insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words." (p. 117)
Not only an astute perception, but I see as well a tie in with Quentin’s childhood, the games they’d played and their values. And too, the value the Compson parents had placed on their children in their different personalities and their bearing of the burden of Benjy. And all the while, the trout swims safe and free.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology