Canada (Location Key)

Because his height made him ineligible to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, during World War I Faulkner enlisted in the Canadian Royal Air Force to train as an aviator. His training had not ended when the War did, so he never got to serve in combat. But both Warren and Jock in "Death Drag" get into the war after their pilot's training "in Canada" (194), and so does [Bayard] Sartoris in "All the Dead Pilots." These texts don't say where in Canada they trained, but the military flight school Faulkner attended was in Toronto. One important character in the fictions is a Canadian: Quentin Compson's Harvard roommate Shreve, who appears in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! In the second novel especially, Faulkner uses Shreve's birthplace as a way to provide an outsider's perspective on the intensely American and even more intensely Southern story he and Quentin explore, and it seems worth mentioning that, in the Genealogy at the end of Absalom!, Shreve is the only character who is unambiguously still alive. His training was medical. According to that Genealogy, he also served in France in World War I - as a captain in the "Royal Army Medical Corps"; he is "Now a practicing surgeon, Edmonton, Alberta" (309). According to the novel itself, he was born in Alberta. Apparently he can go home again. (See also the entry for Lake Louise in this index.)