Harker

Harker is the night engineer of the municipal power plant in Jefferson in "Centaur in Brass." He is one of the "four people" who know that the town's water tower is Flem Snopes' "monument to himself" (149), and serves the story as one of its two narrative voices: the frame narrative, told by a voice that refers to himself as "we," uses Harker's first-person singular account, told inside quotation marks, to tell much of what happens. Harker himself seems to have learned much of what he knows from Turl, one of the "two Negroes" who know the whole story (149). It is not clear why Harker never tells anyone but the narrator about Flem's bad behavior, but he is conscientious about his job, to the point that he would "wake myself up hollering and sweating" because of the missing boiler parts that make the plant liable to blow up (154). Flem's manipulation of Tom-Tom and Turl amuses him, and he frequently baits Turl about his promiscuous behaviors; he thinks of himself as a shrewd observer, "thinking how they were all fooling one another while he looked on, when it was him that was being fooled" (158).