Hawaii|Pearl Harbor in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

"Hawaii" figures in two different ways in the stories Faulkner is telling in the novel: in Act I of the drama, Temple tells Gavin that her family "may go on to Hawaii in the spring" (44); they don't, but by 1929 an average of about 22,000 tourists visited the islands annually. In the prose introduction to Act III, as part of the account of how the racial demographics of Yoknapatawpha change during the 20th century the narrator mentions "Pearl Harbor," by which he means the surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii on 7 December 1941 that plunged the nation into World War II (193).