Vernon Tull

Vernon Tull is a farmer in Frenchman's Bend who appears in ten different Yoknapatawpha fictions. In As I Lay Dying he narrates six of the novel's sections, which gives readers a particularly intimate connection to him; in these chapters he is one of the novel's more reliable commentators, particularly when he suggests that it might be a mistake for a person "to spend too much time thinking" (71). Many of the references to him across the canon specifically mention his family; in The Hamlet the narrator calls him "the face of the breathing archetype and protagonist of all men who marry young and father only daughters and are themselves but the eldest daughter of their own wives" (10). In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," on the other hand, he is described as "a well-to-do bachelor" (142) who is wealthy enough to cover the note for "one thousand dollars" with which he buys a one-third share of the Old Frenchman's place (149). Despite some inconsistencies, overall he appears as good-natured, kind, and almost entirely free from the kinds of conflicts that drive so many of Faulkner's other characters.