Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople 12

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. In "Uncle Willy" the narrator refers to this group as "them" - the townspeople who serve as an uncomprehending audience to Willy's life and to the narrator's own actions (225, 227, etc.). This group includes the "town trade" that begins patronizing Willy's drugstore after the new clerk cleans it up (233), and Willy's neighbors on the "quiet side street," the "country people who have moved to town within within the last fifteen years" who are particularized as "mail carriers and little storekeepers," "ladies with sun-bonnets," "little children" and "grown girls" (237). This group also includes the "men" in stores who ogle Willy's wife when she arrives in town (237). This group does not include the boys who play baseball with the narrator (and who unthinkingly admire Willy), the adult members of the narrator's church (who intervene in Willy's life in an effort to redeem him), or the "good women" (who effectively drive Willy out of town); these collective characters have their own entries in this index.