The central character of Intruder in the Dust is never named by the narrator, who only refers to him with various forms of the pronoun "he." On page 67 he refers to himself as "Charles Mallison junior," which is his legal name. His mother and Miss Habersham refer to him a few times as "Charles" (37, 102).
The white people who crowd into Jefferson's main streets in anticipation of the arrival of a lynch mob from Beat Four are from everywhere in Yoknapatawpha except Beat Four. It begins to form on Sunday morning, with a small group made up of young men from town. As it grows larger through that day and into Monday afternoon, it seems to be dominated by country people: "the men and the women and not one child, the weathered country faces and sunburned necks and backs of hands, the clean faded tieless earthcolored shirts and pants and print cotton dresses thronging the Square" (133).
Although like their parents these black children are keeping out of sight, Chick pictures them where they "should have been" on a Monday morning in Yoknapatawpha: "in the dust of the grassless treeless yards halfnaked children should have been crawling and scrabbling after broken cultivator wheels and wornout automobile tires and empty snuff-bottles and tin cans" (143).
As other Yoknapatawpha fictions make explicit, Varner's store is the social center of Frenchman's Bend, which explains why Hampton leaves the pillow and quilt there for their owner to claim.
"The family farm" that feeds the Gowrie clan is run by Bryan, the third of Nub's six sons (161). Five of them apparently still live with their father "in the twenty-year womanless house" - "womanless" since Amanda Gowrie died in 1926 (214).
"The family farm" that feeds the Gowrie clan in Intruder in the Dust is run by Bryan, the third of Nub's six sons (161). Five of them apparently still live with their father "in the twenty-year womanless house" - "womanless" since Amanda Gowrie died in 1926 (214).
The first small mob that spills into the Square on Sunday morning includes several of the young men whom Chick saw and heard in the barbershop earlier that day, including this "oiler from the cotton gin" (42).
Chick's fantasy of Miss Habersham's long drive through the counties around Yoknapatawpha climaxes when, along a lonely country road, she is confronted by "a man in his nightshirt and unlaced shoes, carrying a lantern," who asks her where she's trying to go (185).
