Sartoris is born, helps bring the novel to an end. The novel does go on after his death, but not for long—long enough to get him home and buried, to have the son christened with some name other than the two recurrent Sartoris ones (John and Bayard), and to show us the women surviving. Bayard is certainly the central character in this novel, or, if not that, the first among equals. Maybe it would be best to call him the centering character, just as Caddy and Addie, Joe Christmas, Temple and Thomas Sutpen are centering characters in their novels. He is returned to often, in a great variety of moods and actions. Through him, we learn of his twin, shot down in the War. Through young Bayard, the car (almost a character in this novel, just as planes are in Pylon), is introduced, and through the car, speed, power, violence, and death.
7. Many minor characters are introduced and function, briefly, as narrative centers: Dr. Peabody, Suratt, the MacCallums, Belle’s sister, Joan, and others. All of Faulkner’s novels are rich in the number and diversity of their characters.
8. Byron Snopes, old Bayard’s bookkeeper, who is obsessed with Narcissa and writes her all those letters she foolishly keeps and rereads and that are finally stolen by Byron and used in Sanctuary to blackmail Narcissa. Byron is returned to often and followed until his story is completed when, driven even crazier by Narcissa’s marriage to Bayard, he steals back his letters, leaves a last one, robs the bank, tries to seduce his fiancé, and flees the territory.
9. Horace Benbow is the last major narrative center, and the character Ben Wasson mostly cut out of Sartoris. He is introduced early in conversations between other characters but does not appear in the novel until relatively late (FD, 145). Like Bayard, he is returning from the war, not as a combatant, but as a worker for the YMCA. Just as Belle and Narcissa are contrasted, so also are Bayard and Horace—the man of violent action, tormented and doomed, who finds only a brief reprieve from his torment and doom with Narcissa; and the man of ideas, a person of “wild, fantastic futility,” a lawyer with no real practice, a glass blower who makes beautiful vases, oddly, a brilliant eccentric tennis player. Horace finally succumbs to the sensuality of Belle and is reduced to carrying the smelly dripping shrimp from the station to his home each week. Horace is very carefully portrayed by Faulkner and is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. Like Narcissa and Bayard, he is a developing character rather than one who, like old Bayard, is simply portrayed and remains static. He is defeated as surely as Bayard is, but in a very different way.
The last section devoted to him in the novel (FD 339-47) after he has had his strange brief affair with Belle’s sister and has married Belle and moved away to another town, is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the novel and one that most clearly delivers the many different applications of the title to the characters in the novel. It is a section which, in typical Faulknerian fashion, comes after the masterful sequence which narrates what Bayard did after old Bayard dies in the car accident (FD 301-38). The two contrasting males, both so completely defeated, are brought together in this juxtaposition that reveals so much about how Faulkner worked as a novelist, showing us at the same time his great stylistic range, the verbal virtuosity, if you will, that was to characterize all of his work.
The narration by progression from one main character to another could be charted very precisely in the novel, as precisely, in fact, as the more obvious reuse of this technique by Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, where each shift is indicated for us by the name of the character. Furthermore, a careful study of the structure of the novel shows that, though Faulkner did in fact move the narrative forward by switching from narrative center to narrative center, he carefully blocked out the overall material of the novel into nine major units and it is this division into larger units that reveals the major concerns of the novel to us. Flags in the Dust was a much better made novel than the many editors who rejected it ever perceived it to be. Unit I—or all of the early part of the novel from pages 3 to 104—is really mainly concerned with the Old People and the blacks: that is, with old Bayard, old man Falls, Aunt Jenny, Simon and the other Sartoris blacks, and Dr. Peabody. Though the Old People and the blacks and their generally comic goings on are the main focus, Faulkner introduces, but does not develop, three of the other characters who will dominate the rest of the novel and give it its more serious concerns: Narcissa, Bayard, and Byron Snopes. It is Bayard’s return from the war that really starts the action of the novel in the present, just as it is his death that ends it. Parallel to this is the return of Horace and his marriage to Belle.
Unit II of the novel—pages 105 to 144—is primarily concerned with young Bayard and is a consecutive narrative which begins when he nearly scares Simon to death in the car, then goes into town and gets drunk with Rafe MacCallum, rides the wild stallion and has his accident, is taken back to town to have his head bandaged, but instead of going home, continues his drunken activities with Suratt and Hub, and later still, with Mitch, another drinking companion, and some Negro musicians, going around Jefferson serenading all of the single women in town, including Narcissa, and is finally put in jail for the night by the marshal. Up to this point in the novel, we have really known very little about young Bayard. We know him to be violent and somewhat sadistic (as with the episode in the car with Simon), we know him to be tormented and guilt-ridden—especially over the death of his brother. It is in Unit II that we see that there is more to young Bayard than this, and it is here, also, because of an interlude in the middle of the Unit devoted to Narcissa, that we get a clear foreshadowing of what will be the major focus of Unit IV—young Bayard and Narcissa.
Unit III—pages 145 to 199—is entirely devoted to Horace Benbow, to his relationship to his sister Narcissa, and to his relationship to Belle and the Mitchells. Horace is obviously the major male contrast to Bayard. Both return from the war, the one as a pilot, the other as a YMCA non-combatant. One is a tormented doomed man of action, the other is a troubled (not tormented) man of words. Both enter into relationships with women in the course of the novel, Horace with Belle, young Bayard with Narcissa, and both are defeated by the end of the novel, one by the woman and one by himself. Everything about these two male characters is contrasted in the novel, even the style in which their various Units is written, and the way in which each is defeated. Bayard returns and buys a racing car. Horace returns and takes up glass blowing. Horace returns seeking the “meaning of peace,” knowing probably that he won’t find it—especially when he leaves Narcissa for Belle—and Bayard returns, apparently seeking something that he missed or failed to achieve in the war: honor, a glorious death, victory in combat, something that would have satisfied his violent nature. Like every part of this novel, Unit III is very carefully constructed and masterfully written in a style that is appropriate to it. The focus is on Horace throughout, though we do get brilliant brief characterizations of Narcissa, the nature of her relationship to Horace, of Belle, and of vulgar Harry Mitchell. The Unit is filled with literary quotations and allusions, as would be appropriate to this Horatian character, and mostly depicts the slow, passive, apparently helpless succumbing of Horace to Belle’s sensuality. By the end of the Unit, Horace has abandoned his beloved and serene Narcissa for Belle, even though he knows it will not be a good marriage and that Belle will get fat and lose the very characteristics that attract him to her. Units II and III are probably the best examples in the novel of how Faulkner organizes his material in terms of narrative centers and limits the point of view and style to that narrative center—here Bayard, in Unit II, and Horace in Unit III. They are also fine examples of the violent contrast—in selves and style and material—that characterize this and so many other Faulkner novels.
Unit IV—pages 190 to 283—is primarily devoted to the relationship between Bayard and Narcissa. However, like Unit I, it makes use of multiple narrative centers and in this way finishes up most of the comical business having to do with old Bayard’s wen and brings the Byron Snopes-Narcissa part of the novel to its conclusion. What initiates and organizes the Unit is first of all another of Bayard’s accidents, this time the near fatal one where he turns over in the creek and is saved by the two Negroes. It is during his long convalescence with his broken ribs that the strange courtship between Narcissa and Bayard takes place. Almost against their wills, they fall in love (insofar as Bayard can fall in love), marry, and have what appears to be a happy tranquil relationship for a short period of time. This Unit ends, appropriately enough, with a
