Colonel Sartoris

The character whom the narrators of the novel call "Colonel Sartoris" inherited his title as the son of Colonel John Sartoris. In most other Yoknapatawpha fictions he is called by his name, Bayard Sartoris, though in the next Snopes novel, The Mansion, the narrators again refer to him only as "Colonel Sartoris." In those other fictions there is no record of his being in the Civil War at all, but here Gavin Stevens calls him "our present banker-honorary colonel who had been only an uncommissioned A.D.C. on his father's staff, back in that desperate twilight of 1864-65" (43). In this novel he is defined almost entirely by his actions as the founder and first president of the Sartoris bank, which is the point where his life intersects Flem Snopes'. Faulkner provides a new detail concerning him, his bank and Byron Snopes, the Snopes who figured most prominently in Flags in the Dust (1929). It turns out that Colonel Sartoris hired Byron out of loyalty to the memory of his father's command. Sartoris was badly frightened by an automobile, which led him to try banning them in Jefferson; it seems ironic, then, that he is killed in an automobile accident. His death precipitates a series of changes in both the bank's leadership and the social structure of Jefferson.