Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople 4

Character Key Number: 
906
Display Name: 
Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople 4
Sort Name: 
Unnamed Jefferson Townspeople 4
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
Yes
Biography: 

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. The "they" in "Centaur in Brass" who watch Flem sitting on his porch steps after resigning from the power plant could be his neighbors in "a locality of such other hopeless little houses inhabited half by Negroes" (168), or passersby, or perhaps even the narrator himself.