Unnamed Confederate Veterans 5

In The Town Gavin Stevens refers with both irony and sentimentality to the remaining veterans of the Civil War as the "heroes of our gallant lost irrevocable unreconstructible debacle"; "half a century" after the end of the Civil War these old men are revered by "all" the people of Yoknapatawpha (44). As Charles Mallison explains, the descendants of these men are often "called General or Colonel or Major because their fathers or grandfathers had been generals or colonels or majors or maybe just privates" (10). The military titles of two major characters in The Town - "Colonel" Bayard Sartoris and "Major" Manfred de Spain - are of this honorary nature, inherited from their fathers.