"June Second, 1910" is the second section of The Sound and the Fury. It is often called "Quentin's section" because the stream-of-consciousness perspective throughout it is Quentin Compson's. Unlike the novel's other three sections that take place at the Compson home, this section takes place at and near Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts, where Quentin is attending his first year of university. The section also occurs at a different time from the other three. While their dates comprise the Easter weekend of 1928, Quentin's section occurs eighteen years earlier, near the end of his university year. 
     Standing back from the novel and looking at how its overall sequence of narrative time is structured, it becomes clear that it follows the traditional in medias res structure (see our visualization of this structure). The first section begins in the middle of the entire narrative on Saturday of the 1928 Easter weekend; the second section moves back in time to 1910; the third section will return to the 1928 Easter weekend (Good Friday); the final section moves ahead to Easter Sunday. The various levels of narrative complexity in the novel tend to obscure the in medias res structure, but the extended backward movement in narrative time in Quentin's section is the first indication of its existence. Even if Quentin's temporally anomalous section were removed from the narrative, the in medias res structure would exist in miniature form; the text would then move from Benjy's Saturday back to Jason's Friday and then ahead to Dilsey's Sunday. 
     Geographical place and chronological order are only two of the many differences between the structures of the novel's first and second sections. Another is the way in which the second section displays the mind's fluctuation between the present and the past -- Quentin's mind in this case. In the first section, Benjy's flashbacks are extended in length and triggered by external stimuli in the present and by sensory association. Caught on the fence's nail in the present, Benjy recalls getting "snagged on that nail" in the distant past; hearing the word "caddie" used by the golfers reminds him of his sister whose name sounds the same. This system of triggers remains intact throughout the section, although at times it seems more complex, particularly when a trigger in a recollection leads to the recollection of a different event without returning immediately to the present. In the second section, Quentin's recollections are more abstractly associative than Benjy's -- a thought, not only a sensation, will begin a labyrinthine process of fragmentary recollections, often abbreviated and intermingled with one another so that several can occur within the space of two or three lines of text. This different technique reflects differences in Faulkner's conception of the characters' mental processes.
     These differences in the narrative methodologies of the sections required different forms of textual representation in this hypertext edition. The extended flashbacks of the first section, and the fact that the several components of any one recollected event (such as the eighteen of Damuddy's death) were arranged in chronological order, were best displayed through the marginal coloured bars and numbering system of that section. In the second section the recollections are not long enough to permit the use of the coloured bars; the recollections are frequently as short as one or two words, and often two or more recollections inhabit a single line, making the coloured bars unfeasible as flashback indicators. This edition of the novel therefore contains two versions of the second section. One, called "Faulkner's narrative text" is digitally unedited; the other, called "the colour-coded narrative text," contains differently coloured text for each of the section's thirty-one recollected events. This permits the indication of more than one memory in a single line. On the right-hand margin is an index relating past events to specific colours. 
     Nor do the recollections in the second section arrange themselves in the chronological (if obscured) miniature narratives characteristic of the first section, where the text's first "Caddy's wedding" recollection is of the earliest part of that evening and the last is later in the evening. Instead, Quentin's thoughts flicker among many recollected events and the multiple recollections of one event are in no particular chronological sequence. One of the main events Quentin recalls is a conversation he had with his father at the end of the summer of 1909: it is recalled several times, but not in any discernible temporal sequence. Often Quentin returns to similar parts of the conversation, for instance, or to earlier parts of it.
     Yet another difference between the first and section sections involves the dynamics of the recollections themselves. Some critics have recognized how Benjy's recollections are so vivid that he literally inhabits them; that is, he seems not to be conscious of remembering per se, but instead re-lives an experience as if it is happening to him in the present. This is another way in which Faulkner manipulates time in the novel, in this case by having present and past fuse in the mind of one character. Quentin's experience of the past is usually rather different. Whereas Benjy consistently re-lives his past, Quentin usually remembers his. Often Quentin recalls something from his past in a way that suggests he is aware of the act of memory. Sometimes he even comments upon the memory and analyzes it. Less frequently, he re-lives a previous event the way Benjy does, with all the vividness of a present occurrence. 
     The "colour-coded narrative" version of the second section also contains underlined links to various references Quentin makes. Some are cultural and historical (he contemplates Afro-American superstition, for example, and refers to such events as Decoration Day). Others are intertextual -- the Bible, for instance, is invoked directly or indirectly dozens of times in his thoughts. Several visual displays of the section's narrative methodology are accessible as well.