Boon Hogganbeck

"Tough, faithful, brave and completely unreliable; he was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds and had the mentality of a child" (18) - this is how Lucius as narrator sums up the man whose love of a car and a Memphis prostitute lead them together into the misadventures recounted in the novel. Readers of the Yoknapatawpha fictions meet Boon earlier in the context of hunting; most notably, he is the man who kills Old Ben, the bear in "The Bear." In this novel he figures as the impulsive giant who both serves and is taken care of by Yoknapatawpha's aristocrats. While it is known that his great-grandmother was a Chickasaw Indian, the rest of his origins remain vague, and it's hard to determine how old he is during the trip recounted in the novel. Our best calculation puts his birth in the 1860s, making him about 40 on the trip. By the end of this story, he settles down as a husband and father, but there is no suggestion that he has changed much as a man.