The story does not say exactly what Major de Spain does for a living, but when Quentin goes to "his office" he notes the "expensive, unobtrusive clothes" which de Spain wears at work (198). His "secretary" works in a separate room (198). It seems likely that this office is on the Square.
On the day they hunt Old Ben, Uncle Ike places Quentin "on [a] stand" (191) in a "part of the bottom" he has never seen before (192). A hunting stand can be a platform attached to a tree, but in Faulkner's hunting stories it is more likely just to be a position where the hunter is supposed to remain, typically with his back against a tree, until the hunting horn blows everyone in.
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 Quentin is narrating the story.
Submitted by johnmcorrigan@g... on Tue, 2016-09-27 07:05
These women and (mostly) men stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's "hotel" in The Hamlet. In the Ike Snopes' narrative, Faulkner refers to them as "last night's new drummer-faces" - i.e. traveling salesmen who are staying for one night (182). While they can be classified as a group, these individuals are constantly coming and going, staying in Frenchman's Bend for variable amounts of time. Typically only men stay in Yoknapatawpha boarding houses, but in this case we know that Mrs. Armstid stays at Littlejohn's while her husband recovers.
