Unnamed Narrator

The narrator of "Centaur in Brass" remains unnamed. (When Faulkner develops the episode in The Town, Chick Mallison retells the story as he heard it from his cousin Gowan.) This narrator, like that of "A Rose for Emily," refers to himself in the first-person plural, "we believed," "our ears," etc. (149, 150, and serves as a kind of communal voice for "our town" (149); but he also occupies a privileged narrative position as one of four people who know what the water tower means to Flem Snopes, "that it is his monument, or that it is a monument at all" (149). That knowledge he was apparently gained from the man called Harker, who shares the role of narrator, telling much of the story himself in quotation marks.