Colonel Sartoris

Colonel Sartoris looms large over Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust - originally published in 1929 as Sartoris. In that novel he was killed fifteen or more years before the Compson children were born. In The Sound and the Fury, published in the same year as Sartoris, he appears only once, when Quentin thinks nostalgically of the past, an older South than the one he was born into, when his grandfather (Colonel Sartoris' contemporary and a fellow Confederate officer) occupied "a high place" from which the two men in their uniforms look "beyond the cedars" and see something that apparently Quentin himself cannot (176).