Chick Mallison

The central character of Intruder in the Dust is never named by the narrator, who only refers to him with various forms of the pronoun "he." On page 67 he refers to himself as "Charles Mallison junior," which is his legal name. His mother and Miss Habersham refer to him a few times as "Charles" (37, 102). But "Chick" - the name used by both Aleck Sander (111) and his uncle Gavin (115, etc.) - is the name that best represents his character in the story, since he has lived almost every moment of his sixteen years as "a swaddled unwitting infant in the long tradition of his native land" (94). Finding himself at odds with those cultural and racial assumptions, he breaks out of his ideological "cocoon" (11) by taking on the quest to save a black man from being lynched. Chick is the youngest in the line of Faulkner's knightly idealists, the sons of the aristocratic class who confront the dragons of southern history and society. Chick's quest is successful, but readers will have to decide for themselves how far, ultimately, the novel lets him get from the traditional values of his culture and his caste.