Only one of the three town boys - young men from Oxford instead of the university - who spend time with Gowan is named. This entry represents the one whom the narrative refers to as "the third" (30). Of the three, he seems the least affected either by all they drink or by the way Gowan boasts about his status as a "gentleman" (34).
Of the three "town boys" who spend time with Gowan (29), Doc is the only one given a name. He is also the most vividly characterized. He spreads broken glass across the road to show his resentment against the class system, waves a woman's panty around to establish his credentials as a man about town, makes fun of Gowan's references to "Virginia" to his face (33), and at first even refuses to drink with him. Not even the whiskey dissolves his grudge.
Only one of the three town boys - young men from Oxford instead of the university - who spend time with Gowan is named. This entry represents the one whom the narrative refers to as "the first," because he speaks first. He wants to know who "that son bitch" driving Temple away from the dance is (30). We hear the class resentments in that voice he tells his friend Doc things like "you're not good enough to go to a college dance" (30). But after Gowan offers the three a ride, he is willing to lead him to Luke's and then to the Shack, to buy and then drink whiskey.
During the 1920s (when William Faulkner actually worked there for a time, while struggling to become a writer), the U.S. Post Office at the University of Mississippi was located inside a part of the University Store Building, which served the community as a kind of student activities building. The postal "clerk" whom Horace Benbow speaks with in Sanctuary doesn't look much like Faulkner looked when he worked there; he might have been tempted to write himself into the novel, but according to his biographers Faulkner hated the job.
In Sanctuary Faulkner locates the railroad station in Oxford right where it really was during Faulkner's lifetime, and essentially right where he locates the imaginary Jefferson railroad station that appears in so many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions. In this fiction, a very drunk Gowan Stevens spends the night in the Oxford train station, apparently in the bathroom. Horace Benbow gets off and on board trains there, but also uses the bathroom. While in there, both men see Temple Drake's name "scrawled on the foul, stained wall" (34, 172).
"The Shack'll be open," says one of the town boys with whom Gowan has been drinking in Sanctuary, adding that it's "at the depot" (33). The place is described as "a confectionary-lunchroom," but it is open late at night too, and the one man inside it (wearing "a soiled apron") is willing to bring the young men the fixings - sugar, water and lemon - so they can make and drink what Gowan calls "whiskey sours" (33). This is in Oxford, where Faulkner lives as he is writing the scene, but if he has a real Oxford eatery in mind we haven't been able to identify it.
