Rider

One of Faulkner's most memorable black characters, Rider is depicted from two very different perspectives in his chapter in the novel. Each perspective - that of a third-person narrator and then that of the white deputy sheriff who tells his wife about Rider in the tale's second section - describe him as powerful, even superhuman in his strength, "better than six feet and weighing better than two hundred pounds" (238). Rider is the only major black character in the novel who is not a descendant of Carothers McCaslin and Eunice. At 24 he is the head of a sawmill work gang, and he rents a cabin on the Carothers-Edmonds place which for the last six months he has shared with Mannie, his new wife. But each narrative represents his overwhelming grief at Mannie's death very differently. To the racist deputy, Rider seems to lack "the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings" (252). But in the main narrative, readers see a profoundly emotional man who, as he himself says in the last line we hear him speak, "just can't quit thinking" (255) - which is the same problem that haunts Faulkner's aristocratic white males like Quentin Compson.