Sartoris

The American southerner named simply "Sartoris" in "Ad Astra" is Bayard Sartoris, one of the major characters in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust (1929); there his inability to get over the death of his twin brother, described briefly in this story, symbolizes his membership in a lost generation. Like the other central characters in the story, Sartoris is a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. He "never did talk much; just did his patrols and maybe once a week he'd sit and drink his nostrils white in a quiet sort of way" (414). After he avenges his twin brother's death in air combat, he seems more concerned with drinking than with speaking or fighting.