Job Wylie was probably born a slave, owned by the man he still calls "Marse Hoke Christian" (233). He has worked in the Christian family drugstore ever since it opened "in eighteen-fifty-something," and in the present also works as Willy Christian's cook and housekeeper (226). Job is very loyal to the Christian family, though according to the narrator he also embodies Jefferson's "timid clinging to dull and rule-ridden-breathing" (239).
Born in the same Jefferson house as Willy Christian, his sister has "married an oil millionaire" and now lives in Texas (225). She feels enough concern for her brother's morphine addiction to return to Jefferson on one occasion, and for her family's local reputation to pay the woman Willy marries to leave town on a subsequent occasion.
This icon represents the people whom the narrator refers to several times as "them" - the townspeople who serve as an uncomprehending audience to Willy's life and to the narrator's own actions (225, 227, etc.). "They" are clearly white people who live in Jefferson.
Although the story's narrator has a particularly close relationship with Willy, he is also one of the group of twelve- to fourteen-year-old "boys" who "see a lot" of Willy, in two very different contexts (226). They stop by his drugstore after their baseball games, where he feeds them ice cream while listening to their accounts of the games, and they watch him inject morphine; he joins them in church as a member of Mr. Barbour's Sunday School class for boys.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Mon, 2017-05-22 14:06
Memphis, Tennessee, is the closest big city to Yoknapatawpha County, and appears more frequently in Faulkner's novels and stories than any other out of Yoknapatawpha location. In this story, the company that issued Wesley Pritchel's insurance policy has an office in Memphis.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Mon, 2017-05-22 13:59
Ellie Pritchel Flint is buried in the local "churchyard" (124), a burial ground adjacent to the church itself. In Faulkner's other Frenchman's Bend fictions, churches are located in several different places; in this story there is no textual description of the churchyard.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Mon, 2017-05-22 13:43
This clay-pit is in "the middle of [Pritchel's] farm" (119). The clay is "malleable" and embedded in it are Native American artifacts that once attracted "a party of archaeologists from the State University," but it becomes an important element in the story when it attracts a group of business men looking to "manufacture some kind of road material out of the clay" (119).
