Stonewall Jackson

The title character of "Monk" is known by that name during his time in Yoknapatawpha, but at his arraignment for murder he insists that his name is "Stonewall Jackson Odlethrop" (47). Gavin is sure that, mentally handicapped as he is, Monk could "never have heard of Stonewall Jackson," the famous Confederate general, and so his only explanation for Monk's pride in the name is that he "inherited [it] from the earth, the soil," that it was "transmitted to him through a self-pariahed people - something of the bitter pride and indomitable undefeat of a soil and the men and women who trod upon it and slept within it" (48). This monument built out of Gavin's grandiloquent prose suggests General Jackson's high status among the (white) people of the South, though the context in which Monk asserts his connection to that tradition makes the story's attitude toward it ambiguous.