Bayard Sartoris

The great-grandson of Colonel John Sartoris. Along with his twin brother John, he serves in the First World War with the "British troops" (207); after John is "shot down in July of '18," Bayard is "the last Sartoris Mohican" (210). He inadvertently kills his grandfather in an automobile accident, and dies himself flying an experimental airplane. His death is described in more detail in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust, where Bayard is a major character, and where his recklessness is attributed to his 'Lost Generation' despair over John's loss. Faulkner revises that aspect of his character considerably in The Mansion: here Gavin Stevens blames Bayard's self-destructive "risking, chancing, fatalism" (212) on his being "bored" (210), but Maggie Mallison (Gavin's twin sister) blames it on being "frightened and ashamed" of his "un-Sartoris-like capacity for shame" (211).