The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

"Saxophone girls and boys" is the narrator's name for the generation that came of age in the 1920s, and so are too young to have experienced the Great War, as World War I was called (512). These modern young people know only modern aircraft and not the history of the unstable planes, like the Sopwith Camel, that the pilots flew thirteen years earlier in the war. Their "slipstream-proof lipstick and aeronautical flasks" are made for use in private airplanes, with safety features like "welded center sections and parachutes" (512) among similarly sheltered occupants.

These are the "dead pilots" that the story's title refers to, and they are of two kinds: the aviators like Sartoris, who were killed in the First World War, and the ones who physically survived the war and now live alienated from the present day that has moved past their sacrifices. The survivors are said to have "died" psychologically on Armistice Day, living on only in "snapshots hurriedly made, a little dog-eared with the thirteen years" that have elapsed since November 11, 1918.

The unnamed narrator seems to be a captain like Spoomer, who greets him as an equal while the gunnery sergeant stands in recognition of his rank (518). However, he doesn't seem to enforce his rank; the gunnery sergeant who is the source of much of his information has no qualms about discussing the antics of officers Spoomer and Sartoris with him, for example. He is an inventor, a wartime military mail censor, and a casualty of war "trying to get used to a mechanical leg" (512).