Unnamed People of Yoknapatawpha

Throughout the novel, Faulkner focalizes the narrative through the collective third-person "the people" in much the same way he uses "we" in "A Rose for Emily." While the narrative certainly portrays the dramas of self-interested schemers like Flem Snopes and Pat Stamper as well as the interior lives of various characters, he simultaneously develops the people of Yoknapatawpha or the "countryside" as a self-organizing social body, troping and naturalizing this body in at least two sections with the imagery of a "swarm of bees" (128), a "hive" or "a cloud of pink-and-white bees, ascending, mounting toward the crest of the hill where the church stood among its sparse gleam of marble headstones in the sombre cedar grove" (349).