Charles Mallison Jr.

Charles Mallison, Jr. - or "Chick" - is the only child of a family that is connected, through marriage, with Yoknapatawpha's oldest, most aristocratic families. He plays a major role in several of Faulkner's late fictions, becoming the youngest in the line of young idealists that includes Quentin Compson and Ike McCaslin. He narrates a sizeable portion of this novel, as well as The Town, the earlier, second volume in the Snopes Trilogy. As a character he spends most of his time and energy helping V.K. Ratliff and his uncle, Gavin Stevens, in their resistance to the activities of the Snopes clan. Well-educated and energetic, Chick attends Harvard and the University of Mississippi and serves in World War II as part of a bomber crew, only to be shot down over Europe and captured. He briefly is on the verge of having a dalliance with Linda Snopes Kohl. His age shifts around a good deal in the various texts in which he appears; even in this novel he says he was "three" in 1916 (204) and 24 in 1939 - putting his birth at some point between 1913 and 1915.