Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople 9

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 almost every instance 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. "A Bear Hunt" distinguishes the unnamed townspeople from the people who live in the country. At one point the narrator characterizes them generationally: "younger citizens of the town" who know Luke Provine only as a healthy, shiftless man who “makes no effort whatsoever to support his wife and three children,” and "older men who remember the Butch . . . Provine of twenty years ago," when he still possessed a "driving, inarticulate zest for breathing which has long since burned out of him" (64).