SartorissInRE

Again the only Sartoris to appear in this Yoknapatawpha fiction is referred to as "Colonel Sartoris" - but this is John Sartoris' son Bayard rather than the actual "Colonel" (119). Colonel John Sartoris had been dead for about two decades when, as "mayor" of Jefferson, this "Colonel Sartoris" remitted Emily Grierson's taxes in 1894. Bayard Sartoris did not fight in the Civil War, but he will often be referred to as "Colonel Sartoris" in the fictions, as if his father's rank in the (defeated and disbanded) Confederate army was something he inherited, the way European aristocrats inherit their titles. It is another way in which reading Faulkner can be challenging, but it also firmly connects the older Sartorises with Old South and its aristocratic culture; Bayard isn't even called "Mayor Sartoris," as if an elected position were not as prestigious as an honorary inherited rank. (Faulkner's narrators will refer to John's son only as "Colonel Sartoris" again in the final volumes of the Snopes trilogy.)