Unnamed Girl in a Book

In Requiem for a Nun Temple compares her own experience overcoming trauma to this fictional character. Although Faulkner blurs the details, saying that the book in which this woman appears was written by "somebody - Hemingway, wasn't it?" (121), it's very likely that Temple is thinking of Maria, a character in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. According to Temple's account, this character freed herself from the past by "refusing to accept it" (121).