Pacific Theater in World War II (Location Key)

The Second World War plays a smaller role in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions than the First, but three texts refer to combat in the Pacific. In "Shall Not Perish," written and published during the early years of the war, the only two young men from Yoknapatawpha who die in the war - Pete Grier, an enlisted man from Frenchman's Bend, and the son of Major de Spain, an officer like his father - are both killed in naval combat: Grier when the troopship he's on is sunk somewhere in the Pacific, and De Spain when, as Mr. Grier puts it, "he run his airplane into a Japanese battleship and blowed it up" (103). Charles, the narrator of "By the People" is about to be shipped to "the Pacific," though he does not give any further details about his military service - and when the same Charles, whose last name is Mallison, re-appears in The Mansion, his wartime service is set in the war's European theater instead. However, The Mansion does refer to a number of actions that took place in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor (281), Malaya (the Malay Archipelago, which includes the Philippines, 305) and Guadalcanal (309).