SartorissInFD

For his first published Yoknapatawpha fiction Faulkner drew deeply on his own family's history, in particular the figure of his great-grandfather Colonel William Falkner (the novelist added the 'u' to his last name in his twenties) . Falkner's statue (in Ripley, Mississippi) is at least as grand as the marble representation of Colonel John Sartoris that looms over both the town cemetery and the lives of his descendants. Like Colonel John, Colonel William was a plantation aristocrat, a Confederate officer demoted by his regiment, a railroad builder shot by a former partner - and also, in a part of his biography his great-grandson leaves out of his fictional recreation, a best-selling novelist. It is safe to say that of all Yoknapatawpha's recurring families, the Sartorises were the ones that Faulkner himself was most personally invested in; as is the case for the younger Sartorises, working out the terms of his relationship to the memory of the Colonel was not easy, psychologically or morally, which partly explains why Colonel Sartoris appears so frequently in his texts. On the first page of this novel he is both long gone, and "a far more palpable presence" then either of the two living men in the scene (3).

As a Lost Generation writer, however, Faulkner uses the Sartoris family in this novel chiefly to represent the greatness of the Southern past and the bleakness of the modern present. That so many Sartoris men are named either John or Bayard simultaneously binds the past and present together, and drives home the idea that, if the names endure, so much else has been lost - especially in the two wars that frame the story: the Civil War, where the first Bayard was killed, and the Great War (as World War I was originally called, apparently without any ironic intent), where the last John died. Altogether twenty Sartorises appear in the text. Curiously, it has the least to say about the generation that Faulkner's parents belonged to, the first generation born after the South's surrender. Nor do any of the later texts tell their story. By the end of the novel all the adult Sartoris males are dead. At the end of the novel, on the other hand, the last Bayard's widow gives birth to a son, whom she names in a way that tries to exorcise the family's "ghosts of glamourous and old disastrous things" and provide some kind of future (403). Faulkner will go on to write more than two dozen stories and novels with Sartorises in them, but as one might expect, his imagination will have trouble imagining that.