Skeet MacGowan|Skeets Magowan

He is Skeet MacGowan in his first appearance, in As I Lay Dying. He is Skeets McGowan in Intruder in the Dust and The Town. He is Skeets Magowan in The Mansion. But in all four he is a the kind of drugstore clerk that used to be called a 'soda jerk' or, as Faulkner writes it in the last two novels, a "soda-jerker" (42, 208) - the clerk who served sodas and ice cream at the lunch counters that used to be found in most drugstores. Defined another way, 'jerk' seems to describe his character too, especially in As I Lay Dying. There, when Dewey Dell Bundren comes into the store anxious to buy something to abort her pregnancy, he manipulates her into having sex with him. Because he's one of the narrators of that novel, readers get to experience his actions from his own perspective, which doesn't make them seem any less predatory and chauvinist.