SartorissInT

Most of the references to members of the Sartoris family in this second novel in the Snopes trilogy are linked to the family bank and the role it plays in the story of Flem Snopes' climb up the ladder that begins (in the first novel in the trilogy) in a sharecropper's cabin and will end (in the last novel) in a mansion. The bank was founded by the son of Colonel John Sartoris; readers of earlier Yoknapatawpha fictions know him as Old Bayard, or at least Bayard, but for some reason in this novel the various narrators all refer to him only as "Colonel Sartoris." His father - whom one of the narrators notes is the "real Colonel" and who is also called "the old Colonel" (43) - is mentioned only a few times. "The Sartoris boys, Colonel Sartoris's twin grandsons," are also mentioned: the one who dies in World War I is simply called "the other one" (123), but his brother Bayard's restlessness as a survivor of that war who comes home but like so many other members of the Lost Generation can't "settle down" is described in more detail. "Mrs Du Pre" and "Miss Narcissa Benbow" are very briefly referred to, in connection with housekeeping, marriage and bank business (124). The episode in the family history that is described most vividly is Bayard's accident in his "big low-slung racing car" (123) that leaves "Colonel Sartoris still sitting in it with his eyes still open" (124); his particularly modernist death is what creates the opening for Flem to move another step closer to the mansion.