those characters is finished. The principal characters whose stories Faulkner tells here are old Bayard, Simon, Aunt Jenny, Narcissa, Belle, young Bayard, Byron Snopes, and Horace Benbow. Along the way, and usually through these or other characters, other stories are told, chiefly those of Colonel John Sartoris (old Bayard’s father, Aunt Jenny’s brother), young John Sartoris (young Bayard’s twin), the Snopes, the MacCallums, young Bayard’s first wife and child, the Negro couple young Bayard stays with after old Bayard dies of a heart attack during the last of his car accidents, old Will Falls, and Dr. Peabody. In telling these multiple individual stories by means of the technical device of interweaving (so common to Romances), Faulkner tells an overall story.
This is the way, for example, that The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! are narrated. The overall story is full of violent contrasts between characters (here, for example, Horace Benbow and young Bayard, the old and the young, Narcissa and Belle) and similarities that are not always immediately obvious—here for example, all those who may be described, at the end, by applying the title to them. Flags in the dust is an image of defeat, of the flags carried into battle that have fallen into the dust because those who carried them were killed or wounded, or because the flags were taken down and thrown in the dust and others raised in victory in their place. Those who are defeated in this novel are Colonel John Sartoris, his brother Bayard, old Bayard’s son (John), young Bayard’s twin (John), young Bayard himself, old Bayard, Simon, Byron Snopes, and, in a very different way, poor futile helpless Horace Benbow and Harry Mitchell. Only the women survive and triumph in this novel, and there are only a few of them: Aunt Jenny, who survives all of the Sartoris males except Benbow Sartoris, the last; Narcissa, who manages to survive her doomed, guilt-ridden, destructive husband; and Belle, who survives in her narcotic sensuality.
When Ben Wasson cut this novel and made it into Sartoris, he really destroyed Faulkner’s original intent and masked the true nature of Faulkner’s genius, which, among other things, was for great narrative originality (as we see in The Sound and the Fury, which Faulkner was writing even as Wasson was cutting Flags in the Dust) and plenitude. It was often Faulkner’s habit to let his characters tell their own stories (or, as he said, to listen to what they were telling him and write it down as fast as he could) or, in a variation of this, to let his characters tell someone else’s story (as in Absalom, Absalom!) or, in still another variation, to let his characters tell their own story as well as someone else’s (as in The Sound and the Fury where the brothers tell Caddy’s story; or, as in As I Lay Dying, where the Bundrens and others tell their own and Addie’s story). Every telling, then, is biased by the nature of the character telling the story (his/her own, or someone else’s) or by the limited third-person point of view Faulkner often uses, and there is always more than one narrative going on at a time.
Reading Flags in the Dust long after one has read all the rest of Faulkner, which is what I did, provides one with a real revelation into how suddenly Faulkner discovered what he was to be about the rest of his life as a novelist. As Douglas Day points out, almost everything that was to concern Faulkner later is in Flags in the Dust—except the Indians. (FD x) Though it is not yet named here, Yoknapatawpha County as Faulkner was to draw it for us in 1936 is all here, as are the different kinds of characters he was to people it with. There are the Snopes, the country folk, such as the MacCallums and Suratt (later, Ratliff); there are the blacks, both comical, semi-comical, and serious (as in the Negro family Bayard stays with over Christmas); there are the old Folks (Aunt Jenny, old Bayard, old Will Falls, Dr. Peabody), treated both comically and seriously; there is the great southern family (the Sartorises); there is the Civil War, there are the obsessed (Byron Snopes and young Bayard); the doomed and destructive (the Sartoris twins); the tormented (young Bayard); there are the finely drawn women, who survive; there are the educated and useless (Horace Benbow, Faulkner’s first lawyer, later made more useful and somewhat less foolish in Gavin Stevens); there is the grand conception of the place (both Jefferson and the surrounding country); there is the land and the hunting; there are the new machines (the cars here, and later the planes) that destroy; there is Dr. Peabody; there is the obsession with the past, especially the Civil War; there is the family that tends to run out in the male line (we never do hear much of Benbow Sartoris later on); there is Frenchman’s Bend and Will Varner and the abjectness of both the poor whites and blacks; there is Flem Snopes, who was to preoccupy Faulkner for many years after he first conceived him; there is the interest in incest (Narcissa and Horace); the corruption of sensuality (Belle and Horace); the self lost in words and futile idealism (Horace); the violation of ontological virginity (the intrusion of young Bayard into Narcissa’s life); and of course there was the interest in violence and victimization, present in Faulkner’s novels from his very first one on; and more, much more. A definitive catalogue is neither necessary nor useful.
But also of equal importance with the discovery of this native territory and its inhabitants (with many more to be added in the novels that followed) was Faulkner’s discovery of how to deal with, how to present, this material and the rich teaming life that his extraordinary imagination was creating. Writing Flags in the Dust certainly made the writing of The Sound and the Fury possible. I mean by this that Faulkner discovered in Flags in the Dust how to put a whole complex and diverse novel together by locating his narrative centers in a series of characters. Carried to an extreme, this produces the inside narrations (the tours de force) of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!; and the multi-stranded narrative structure of Light in August where we go from Lena to Byron to Hightower to Joe Christmas to Joanna Burden to Hines (and others), over and over again, as the novel progresses, carrying each strand of the overall narrative up to a certain point, dropping it, switching to another, carrying it forward (or backward, as in Joe Christmas’s and Hightower’s case), and so forth on through to the end of the novel where Lena and Byron join up in the conjunction of strands that completes the story, ending this tragic tale of violence and destruction, as it began, with gentle comedy.
In Flags in the Dust these narrative centers are, in the order in which we first encounter them:
1. Old Bayard and old man Falls, and through the two of them, Colonel John Sartoris. Old Bayard is returned to and followed through the events that occur in the present, from the return of young Bayard from the war, to his death in Bayard’s car in 1919. Old Man Falls returns occasionally during the course of the novel, usually for comic scenes, but is never a major narrative center.
2. Simon, and through Simon, other blacks such as Elnora, Isom, and Caspey. Simon is always treated comically when he is returned to, and is followed to his death near the end of the novel when he is killed for his foolish old man’s philandering. Like his white counterpart, old Bayard, Simon is seen in a variety of relationships to other Sartorises and other blacks.
3. Aunt Jenny, who is the oldest Sartoris in the novel, and is one of only three significant women in the novel. Like old Bayard, she is returned to often and followed right through to the end of the novel, where she visits the graves of all the dead Sartoris males; to the very last page, in fact, where she comments ironically on the future of the last male Sartoris. She functions as one of the main narrative centers of the novel.
4. Narcissa Benbow, who is the first of the developing characters. Old Bayard and Aunt Jenny are static and are simply portrayed in the course of the novel. Narcissa actually develops and changes and is put into three very complex relationships: with her brother Horace, with Bayard, whom she marries, and with Byron Snopes. She is also in a contrasting relationship to Aunt Jenny and Belle. She is one of Faulkner’s more fully developed females and is an interesting and complex character in her own right.
5. Belle, who is the third and last major female character. She is important, but is never developed in the way that Narcissa is, and often functions as a kind of recessed character who influences and seduces Horace. She is a direct contrast to Narcissa. Like Narcissa, she is followed right through to the end of the novel, after she has divorced Harry and married Horace and moved to another town with him.
6. Young Bayard, whose return from the war starts the action in the present and whose death in
