Homer is the classic Greek epic poet to whom The Iliad and The Odyssey are attributed. His blindness is part of his mythic status. To Gavin Stevens, Homer is proof of what mankind can achieve: despite his disability, he "charted the ultimate frontiers of passion and defeat and glory and ambition and courage and hope and fear" (200).
During the late 18th century the two Harpe brothers - "Big" and "Little" - were notorious for their many crimes in the area of the frontier that included northern Mississippi: it is possible that they killed as many as fifty people before they were separately executed in 1799 and 1804. The narrator of "A Name for the City" rejects the idea that the Harpes were the unnamed bandits who were held briefly in the settlement jail.
These Yoknapatawpha farmers are part of "Knight's Gambit" in two ways. As a larger group, they become part of the audience that watches as Mr. Harriss transforms a traditional county plantation into a kind of Hollywood set. Some of them cross "the whole county" to watch the landscapers and builders at work (161), and "farmers" are specifically included in the groups of spectators who attend the sporting events that are staged there (163).
In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers to the combatants involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.)
The "white people" who live by the railroad tracks in Jefferson's "purlieus" don't live in "cabins," a word they associate with the Negroes in a nearby neighborhood - a distinction, the narrative says, they will "fight" to maintain (252-53). Their sense of insecurity suggests that their own social and economic status is not much above that of the blacks who are almost their neighbors.
In "Knight's Gambit" the tutors employed to educate the Harriss children at home are described, with some irony, as "the best masters and tutors and preceptors in what the ladies of Yoknapatawpha County anyway would call the best of company" (145).
In "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison says that "without doubt" Gualdres must have used an "interpreter" to him help him enlist in the U.S. Army in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war (254).
"Knight's Gambit" treats "the men from town" who travel out to the Harriss plantation at various times to watch the construction and, later, the polo matches, as a separate group from the county people who are parts of the same group of spectators. Among these men are "merchants and lawyers and deputy sheriffs," who can spectate "without even getting out of their cars” (163).
This "boy" delivers Markey's telegram to Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" (208). Most delivery boys and men in the fictions are black, which would give additional possible meaning to the term "boy," but since Faulkner does not specify this character's race - and based on the character who delivers telegrams to Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury - we assume this one is white.
When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247).
