The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The narrator had been curious about how zippers work, and had practiced on one in either the "drugstore [or] the ten-cent-store in Jefferson" (105). This made him the family expert on zippers, which paid off when his brother sent his mother a bag with a zipper from San Francisco.

The narrator is inspired by the pictures in the art museum to think "of men and women and children . . . from all over the United States" (110). This reference is later elaborated on as "North and South and East and West. . . . It was America, and it covered all the western earth" (115).

The story is organized around two casualty reports from the Pacific theater in World War II, both involving the deaths of young men from Yoknapatawpha. Pete Grier is killed in action when the troopship he's on was sunk somewhere in the Pacific, and Major de Spain's son dies when, as Father puts it, "he run his airplane into a Japanese battleship and blowed it up" (103).

While no scene in the story takes place in what used to be called "the Holy Land" and is now referred to as the Middle East, the narrator notes that Grandfather was "so old that it would seem to me he must have gone clean back to the old fathers in Genesis and Exodus that talked face to face with God" (111).

In 1941 the Philippine Islands were an American protectorate, with Commonwealth status. The Japanese invaded them a day after their attack on Pearl Harbor, which the narrator learns by "listen[ing] to the radio tell about Pearl Harbor and Manila" (103).

The U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was the site of an attack by Japan in December 1941.

The narrator recalls his brother, Pete Grier, sending presents from a drugstore in San Francisco home to the family . San Francisco was a major troop embarkation port during World War II.

An alley off of the town square and near the movie theater, where the Griers "hitched" the wagon in which they came to town on Saturdays (113) - note that the Griers still use a mule-drawn farm wagon for transportation in the 1930s.

The narrator and the rest of the Grier family would frequent the "picture show" (112) in Jefferson on Saturdays. Although the town's movie theater is mentioned in 10 other texts, this is one of the few times the story takes us inside to watch a movie.