Labove

The child of a poor family in "the next county" (114), Labove works his way through the University of Mississippi doing menial jobs and playing football. At 21, Labove is hired to be the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend; Will Varner lends him a horse so that he can continue to earn his degree in law at the university, while tending to the school during the weekdays. Faulkner initially describes him as "gaunt, with straight black hair coarse as a horse's tail and high Indian cheekbones and quiet pale hard eyes and the long nose of thought but with the slightly curved nostrils of pride and the thin lips of secret and ruthless ambition" (117). He possesses "a forensic face," moreover, "the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary." Labove is above all a misanthrope, a man who would in past ages have been a monk, "a militant fanatic" ready to turn his "uncompromising back upon the world" (117). He arrives in Frenchman's Bend "in a perfectly clean white shirt which had been washed so often that it now had about the texture of mosquito netting, in a coat and trousers absolutely clean too" (118). Despite this initial appearance of austere cleanliness, the people around him perceive "the hungry mouth, the insufferable humorless eyes, the intense ugly blue-shaved face like a composite photograph of Voltaire and an Elizabethan pirate" (122). Despite and perhaps because of his monastic isolation and disinterest in the people around him, Labove becomes obsessed with Varner's young daughter, Eula, and so stays on as schoolmaster even when his studies are finished.