Charles Mallison

Charles ("Chick," 196) Mallison is the "almost eighteen" nephew of Gavin Stevens. Still in high school, where he wears the uniform of a "cadet lieutenant colonel" in the R[eserve] O[fficer] T[raining] C[orps] (205), he "thirsts" for the glory that is being won by the young men already fighting in Europe (206). His uncle's "Philistine" (247), Charles learns chess, law, and not a little about life from his uncle. He plays a pivotal role in preventing the murder around which the novel's plot is organized. More pervasively, he provides the point-of-view from which the third-person story is told (in narratological terms, the narrative slips from the heterodiegetic to Charles through free indirection). When Pearl Harbor is attacked and the U.S. enters the war, he enlists immediately. Though at the end he is still in training - with the Army Air Corps - in part the story of "Knight's Gambit" traces the maturation of an adolescent, Chick, into an adult, Charles. As both a character and, often, a narrator, he appears frequently in Faulkner's fictions, though usually in the shadow of his Uncle Gavin.