Unnamed Narrator 10

The narrator in "A Courtship" who tells the story of Ikkemotubbe, David Hogganbeck and Herman Basket's sister tells us very little about himself. It's highly likely that he is male, though that is not definitively said. He is an Indian: his use of "us" to refer to the Chickasaws and his reference to "my father's house" (369) locate him inside Issetibbeha's tribe, as does his diction, for example when he calls the helmsman on the steamboat the "boy slave who turned the wheel" (366) or uses "moons and moons" as a temporal reference (377). But whether he is relating events that he saw firsthand or repeating a story about "the old days" that he was told is not clear (380). Nor is it clear when Faulkner imagines him telling the story, or to whom.