Res Grier's younger son is never given a first name, although he appears in three different short stories, narrating each in somewhat differing voices. Here, he watches his father closely, obeys him as best he can, and tells the story in dialect and detail, with implicit love and humor.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Thu, 2013-05-30 06:49
Like every other part of the social landscape in Yoknapatawpha, cemeteries were rigorously segregated. The cemetery where Rider's wife Mannie is buried in "Pantaloon in Black" is a 'Negro' one, or perhaps what Flags in the Dust calls, in reference to a different graveyard, "the negro ground that lay beyond the cemetery proper" (396).
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Wed, 2013-05-29 16:32
Gavin Stevens is a lawyer, working and living in Jefferson. Throughout much of Faulkner's work Gavin is depicted as a bachelor, fond of small talk, often pretentious, on the porches of stores in town. It is often noted that Gavin studied at Harvard and Heidelberg. Afterwards he returned to Mississippi to get a degree from "the state-university law school" (89), which he uses to solve mysteries and pursue justice in Yoknapatawpha.
Submitted by chad.jewett@uco... on Wed, 2013-05-29 16:26
The narrator of "Tomorrow" does not identify himself, except as the nephew of the man he invariably calls "Uncle Gavin." As a relative of Gavin Stevens, it can be assumed that he belongs to one of the older upper class families in Yoknapatawpha, but in this text he mainly serves as a point of view from which to watch Gavin recover the past that solves the mystery. He played the same structural role - a kind of Dr. Watson to Gavin's kind of Sherlock Holmes - without any name at all in the earlier "Monk," but in "Tomorrow" he gets a kind of name when Gavin addresses him as "Chick" (93).
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Mon, 2013-05-27 15:53
The Atlantic Ocean is the scene of events involving characters in two fictions. Both are traveling to America, but in very different circumstances. When Horace Benbow returns from France at the end of World War I in Flags in the Dust, his inept experiments with glassblowing start a fire in his cabin on the liner he's a passenger on. The situation remains comic, but the captain asks him to stop until they reach land, "what with all the men on board" (158). This last detail suggests the liner is currently serving as a troop ship, though Horace himself was a noncombatant.
Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Thu, 2013-05-23 12:47
Little description is given in this story of the Sartoris plantation main house itself. It seems to be a typical plantation 'big house': a two-story structure with stairs in a central hallway, with rooms on either side of the hall. Bedrooms occupy the second floor, while downstairs rooms include a dining room and another room (probably a parlor) with a fireplace, hearth, and a musket on pegs above the mantel. The mansion also has both a front porch and a back porch.
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Wed, 2013-05-22 15:56
The enslaved Negroes on the Choctaw plantation in "Red Leaves" hide their drums "in the creek bottom," "on the bank of a slough" (328). The drums are used in what seems to be part of a regularly enacted tribal ritual, although story does not explain why they feel it is necessary to hide the drums from the Indians who have enslaved them, or the meaning of the ritual. While the protagonist of the story, also a slave, hides in the barn while waiting for his master to die, he listens to the drumming.
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Wed, 2013-05-22 15:50
In the vernacular of Faulkner's Mississippi, a creek or river 'bottom' is the low land along its banks. This terrain is characterized by swampy wetland, 'sloughs' full of stagnant water and dense undergrowth. A great many scenes in the fictions take place in 'bottoms' in various parts of Yoknapatawpha, including the banks of the river that forms the county's northern boundary. On his 1936 map Faulkner labels this the Tallahatchie, the real river that forms most of the Lafayette County's northern boundary.
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Wed, 2013-05-22 15:47
The Indians' "barn" in which the enslaved protagonist of "Red Leaves" hides seems like a more conventional structure than the 'big house' made from a steamboat: it is also called a "stable" and it includes a "dusty loft" (329).
