Unnamed Sheriff 1

The county sheriff in The Sound and the Fury is a man with "vigorous untidy iron-gray hair and his gray eyes were round and shiny like a little boy's" (301-02). He exercises his judgment - about Jason Compson in particular - when he refuses to help Jason chase after his niece on Easter Sunday. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions. Obviously in some of these cases - at least when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment - Faulkner may be thinking of the same unnamed character, or one of the half dozen "Sheriff Hampton"s who also appear in the fictions, but from the texts themselves there is no way to establish that.)