Gavin Stevens

Gavin Stevens is one of the three major narrators of The Town - and, given the amount of time the other two narrators spend describing his behavior and opinions, probably its central character. He is the son of Judge Lemuel Stevens, twin brother of Margaret Mallison, and uncle of Chick Mallison. He is Yoknapatawpha's most educated inhabitant, with degrees from Harvard, Heidelberg and the University of Mississippi. He serves Yoknapatawpha officially as, in turn, the City and the County Attorney, but is even more diligent in his attempts to save both Jefferson at large and the two women in Flem Snopes' life from the modern malaise he associates with the Snopes family. He is an idealistic, obsessively talkative, and optimistic man, often given to considering complexities, especially his own; he is smitten by Eula Snopes and later, in a different way, by her daughter Linda, and is troubled by his desires for them: "contriving by clumsy and timorous artifice the accidental encounters in which he still would not and never quite touch, really want to touch, too terrified in fact to touch; but only to breathe the same air, be laved by the same circumambiance which laved the mistress's moving limbs" (219). His opposition to the Snopeses and to Manfred de Spain is absolute, but rarely effectual. One of Faulkner's favorite characters, he appears in 16 Yoknapatawpha fictions, often in a major role.