Rider

One of Faulkner's most memorable black characters, Rider is depicted from two different perspectives in the story. Each perspective - that of a third-person narrator and then that of the white deputy sheriff who tells his wife about Rider in the tale's second section - describe him as powerful, even superhuman in his strength, "better than six feet and weighing better than two hundred pounds" (238). At 24 he is the head of a sawmill work gang, and he rents a cabin from Carothers Edmonds. At 24 he is the head of a timber gang at the mill, and he rents a cabin from Carothers Edmonds. Although "Spoot" is "the name he had gone by in childhood and adolescence" and the one used by his aunt (249), the name he later assumes, "Rider," is also a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken in course" (249). But each narrative represents his overwhelming grief at the loss of his wife very differently. To the racist deputy, Rider seems to lack "the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings" (252). But in the main narrative, readers see a profoundly emotional man who, as he himself says in the last line we hear him speak, "just can't quit thinking" (255) - which is the same problem that haunts Faulkner's aristocratic white males like Quentin Compson.