Colonel John Sartoris

John Sartoris is the patriarch of the Sartoris family, one of the founders of Yoknapatawha, a large land- and slave-owner, and one of the major figures in Faulkner's fiction. He had two daughters (unnamed in Faulkner's works) and a son, Bayard. Although his wife is mentioned, until he marries Drusilla Hawk in this novel Sartoris is a widower. During the Civil War he fought for the South as both a regular and an irregular Confederate Colonel. He is seen through the eyes of the narrator, his son Bayard. As such (in the beginning of the novel), he appears as a larger than life figure who raised a regiment and came "within spitting distance" (52) of Washington D.C. while fighting with Stonewall Jackson in Virginia. After he gets voted out of his command by the "politicians and fools" (51) in his regiment, he returns to Mississippi and, with his troop of irregulars, harasses and fights the Union army in that area. Later in the novel, an older Bayard sees him less as a hero and more as man with "intolerant" eyes (236); the eyes of a man who has "killed too much" (231). After the South's surrender, Sartoris returns to his home to rebuild the plantation house that was burned by Yankees during the war, to build Jefferson's railroad, and to make sure that the newly emancipated slaves do not vote. (This novel provides the third time Faulkner recounts how he killed the Burdens to disenfranchise black voters; the first is in Flags in the Dust, the second in Light in August. This third time the killings are intertwined with the comedy of his marriage to Drusilla.) Throughout the novel, Bayard's attitude towards his father changes (just like the reader's); in the end, the once larger-than-life hero can been seen a taunting bully who brings on his own death by tormenting his former friend and business partner, Ben Redmond. On the other hand, also at the end his about-to-be-widow defends him as a hero who's actions are good for "all the people, black and white" (223). Bayard's final statement about him is ambiguous enough to accommodate both conclusions: his father's dream was "something he had bequeathed us which we could never forget" (253).