Lucius Priest III

Lucius Priest III is the grandson of Lucius Priest II, who is the grandson of the first Lucius Priest in Yoknapatawpha. Technically, it is Lucius III who narrates The Reivers, though he speaks only two words in his own first-person voice: the first two words of the text, "Grandfather said" (3). The rest of the novel is apparently being spoken to him by this grandfather, Lucius II, who addresses him as "you" in the story's intermittent asides. We know his name is "Lucius" because Lucius II mentions that "you, me and my grandfather" were all named after the same person (32), we can tell he is being told the story in 1961, and it can be inferred that he lives in Yoknapatawpha (though not in either his great-great-grandfather's or his grandfather's homes), and that he already knows something about the major actors and local settings of the story he is listening to. Otherwise, however, he is not described. As the invisible source of the narrative, he occupies a complex place in the novel - simultaneously at its center and absent from it.