Jefferson Townspeople

This icon represents the people whom the narrator refers to several times as "them" - the townspeople who serve as an uncomprehending audience to Willy's life and to the narrator's own actions (225, 227, etc.). "They" are clearly white people who live in Jefferson. This group includes the "town trade" that begins patronizing Willy's drugstore after the new clerk cleans it up (233), and Willy's neighbors on the "quiet side street," the "country people who have moved to town within within the last fifteen years" who are particularized as "mail carriers and little storekeepers," "ladies with sun-bonnets," "little children" and "grown girls" (237). This group also includes the "men" in stores who ogle Willy's wife when she arrives in town (237). It does not include the boys who play baseball with the narrator or the adult members of the narrator's church who try to save Willy.