StevenssInM

Gavin and Charles narrate five of the novel's 18 chapters, and several more are written in the third person from their combined point-of-view. The story they tell and witness essentially belongs to the Snopeses, but it includes a brief account of Charles' experience in World War II and a longer account of Gavin's relationships with two young women, one of whom he is married to at the end. The most interesting aspect of the Stevens family in the novel is the way, mostly indirectly, it reveals the complicated "father-son" relationship between "Uncle Gavin" and his nephew, which is a large part of so many of Faulkner's later fictions. As Charles puts it, "I had spent the first eleven or twelve years of my existence in the middle of Uncle Gavin, thinking what he thought and seeing what he saw" (234). Nor does he really outgrow that dependency: when Gavin courts Linda Snopes, a young woman of his own generation, the one Charles is jealous of is Linda.