Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Fri, 2015-06-26 14:56
Sartoris did his ground school and flight training Canada with the Royal Flying Corps and came to the war from there in 1916, as did many Americans who joined the war effort before the United States entered it in 1917. Faulkner himself enlisted in the Canadian Royal Air Force (as the RFC was renamed) in June, 1918, and trained as a cadet pilot in and around Toronto, but the war ended before he finished.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Fri, 2015-06-26 14:49
Though only alluded to in this story as "a plantation at Mississippi, where they grew grain and Negroes, or the Negroes grew the grain - something" (513-14), Johnny Sartoris' home appears in the letters that the narrator reads in July 1918. From them we can tell that Sartoris is from an upper-class Southern family with at least one unreconstructed Confederate in it - his great-aunt Jenny, who writes that the Great War is the Yankees' "war . . . not ours" (531).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Fri, 2015-06-26 14:24
In "All the Dead Pilots" the remains of Johnny Sartoris are buried in a cemetery "just north of Saint Vaast" (50). There are over a dozen places in France named for Saint Vaast, so our decision to identify the town in the story as Neuville-St. Vaast, near Vimy, is an interpretive judgment.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Fri, 2015-06-26 14:23
The town of Cambrai in northeastern France, mentioned in "All the Dead Pilots," was the site of a major battle between the German and Allied forces in 1917.
