Unnamed Listeners

While we read "Fool About a Horse" as a printed text, the text itself offers a lot of evidence that the narrator is telling rather than writing it, that Faulkner intends us to imagine it as an oral tale being performed for a live audience. Twice the narrator refers to "you," for example (123, 132), and at another point addresses his audience as "gentlemen" (128); the story's repeated use of the locutions "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" also suggests the dynamic of live performance (118, etc.). This icon represents that group of implied listeners. The text gives no indication of where the story is being told, or specifically to whom, but we follow the example of many other moments in the Yoknapatawpha fictions by speculating that it is being told to a group of country men gathered on the front porch of Varner's store. (In the earliest manuscript version of the story, however, the story-teller is named V.K. Suratt and is telling it to a few real "gentlemen" - a doctor and a Confederate General - in an office in Jefferson; see "Manuscripts Etc." under "Additional Resources." And when Faulkner revised the tale for inclusion in The Hamlet, it is told by V.K. Ratliff to Will Varner himself, while they sit together on a different porch.)