The house where Monk lives for ten years with "an old man named Fraser" is not described at all (45). In Intruder in the Dust, published a decade after this story, Faulkner includes a location called "Fraser's store," but there is no explicit connection between these two "Fraser"s.
The narrative refers to the house where Monk lives as a child with Mrs. Odlethrop as "a log house" (43). Faulkner sometimes uses the word "house" to refer to what we would call a "cabin," but the only detail we get about the site is that Mrs. Odlethrop keeps "a loaded shotgun standing just inside the front door" (43). That detail is explained by what the narrative says about the section of Yoknapatawpha in which the house stands: in "the pine hill country in the eastern part of our county . . .
Monk is held in the county jail, where the "other prisoners" are all black men who have been "picked up for gambling or vagrancy or for selling whisky" (42).
The "filling station" where Monk works and sleeps for seven years, and where the killing for which he is arrested occurs, is located "two or three miles from town" (45). It sells more than one kind of fuel. Besides gas for their cars, customers can also buy "the half-pint bottles" of moonshine whiskey that are buried "in the sand ditch five hundred yards away" from the station (46).
The "filling station" where Monk works and sleeps for seven years in "Monk," and where the killing for which he is arrested occurs, is located "two or three miles from town" (45). It sells more than one kind of fuel. Besides gas for their cars, customers can also buy "the half-pint bottles" of moonshine whiskey that are buried "in the sand ditch five hundred yards away" from the station (46).
Monk is arraigned by a Justice of the Peace before being tried before a judge and jury. The story doesn't say where the "J.P.'s office" is (42). Mississippi no longer uses this system, but at the date of the story there were Justices of the Peace in various parts of the county, so this office could be located outside Jefferson, in the neighborhood of the killing - or (as in other Faulkner texts) it could be in the county courthouse itself. As a kind of compromise, we have chosen to put the office on the Square.
Monk is arraigned by a Justice of the Peace before being tried before a judge and jury. "Monk" doesn't say where the "J.P.'s office" is (42). Mississippi no longer uses this system, but at the date of the story there were Justices of the Peace in various parts of the state, so this office could be located outside Jefferson, in the neighborhood of the killing - or it could be in the county courthouse itself. As a kind of compromise, we have chosen to put the office on the Square.
Courthouse Square is the physical, political and social center of Yoknapatawpha. It appears frequently in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. In this project we use the Square as the location for places in Jefferson that cannot be more specifically located; in this story, then, it provides the location from which Charles Mallison is narrating the story. In addition, we identify it as the place "about town" where Monk is often seen in his "cheap, bright town clothes" (46). The Courthouse itself, where Monk's jury trial takes place, sits in the center of the Square.
Bill Terrel, whom Monk meets in the penitentiary, was convicted for manslaughter in another part of Mississippi than Yoknapatawpha, though the name of the county isn't given in "Monk." In rehearsing Terrel's crimes, the story mentions the "filling station . . . near a railroad" where the killing took place (58), the train tracks onto which he and an accomplice threw the body of the man he killed, and the "courtroom" where his children refused to support his (false) alibi (59).
