Gavin Stevens

Gavin Stevens - "the M.A., Harvard and Ph.D., Heidelberg" (88) - is the most educated man in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, and one of its most talkative. He is County Attorney, but according to the story's narrator, his nephew, his "true dedicated vocation is meddling in other people's business" (88). Throughout The Snopes Trilogy, into which this story was interpolated, he appoints himself a champion in the struggle against Snopesism, and in many commentators' opinion, comes more and more in Faulkner's late career to serve as a spokesman for the author. However, Faulkner treats his claims as a knight errant with a good deal of irony too. His nephew says he had "known and loved [Gavin] as long as I could remember," often quotes his interpretations of the story's events - he even gives his uncle its last words, but only after showing how wrong he turns out to be about how to defeat Clarence Snopes (139).