Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 15:53
Pearl Harbor is the site of the American naval base on the Hawaiian Islands. The United States entered World War II when Japan attacked it on 7 December 1941.
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 14:06
When his older brother Pete tells the narrator that Pearl Harbor is "across the water," the boy uses "that Government reservoy up at Oxford" as his reference point for a body of water (81). Sardis Lake, as it is called, was built as a reservoir and flood control project during the Depression, one of the Roosevelt Administration’s public works. Opened in 1940, it flooded 14 miles of the Little Tallahatchie, the river that Faulkner used to mark the northern boundary of Yoknapatawpha.
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:57
The University of Mississippi at Oxford was always already absent when Faulkner first created Yoknapatawpha - if that isn't too Faulknerian a way to say that one of the main differences between Faulkner's world and the one it's largely based on is that there's no university in Jefferson. After 1940 Faulkner could be said to have left out another major part of the landscape of Lafayette County: what the narrator of "Two Soldiers" refers to as "that Government reservoy up at Oxford" (81).
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:50
The bus station – or as he calls it, the "dee-po" - where the narrator is put on a bus to Memphis is "down another street" from Courthouse Square; it's "a regular bus dee-po like a railroad dee-po," containing "a ticket counter and a feller behind it" (89). Historically, the Oxford train station was converted into a bus depot in 1937, when passenger rail service was discontinued.
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:44
Courthouse Square is the physical and social center of Yoknapatawpha County. On weekends it can be crowded with the wagons of country people in town for the day, but when the narrator reaches it, with “daylight coming . . . and the street lights still burning,” it is “empty” of everyone but him and the policeman whom he calls "the Law," presumably the man called the night marshal in other texts (89).
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:36
As he enters Jefferson, the narrator says he can "smell breakfast cooking in the cabins" (88). In Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fictions, "cabins" are almost invariably occupied by blacks, so it's likely that that is who lives at this southern edge of town.
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:32
While in a number of fictions there is a large Negro residential district northwest of the Square, in As I Lay Dying as the Bundrens come into Jefferson from the south they pass a number of "negro cabins" that border the road "on either hand" (229). In Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fictions, "cabins" are usually occupied by blacks. However, race is not mentioned when the young narrator of "Two Soldiers" also enters town from the same direction, and no people are visible, but he can "smell breakfast cooking in the cabins" (88).
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:28
Pete Grier has "graduated from the Consolidated" (82), which refers to a rural school that combines a number of grades into one building. The text doesn't say where it is, but in other Yoknapatawpha fictions there is a school building in Frenchman's Bend; in "Shall Not Perish" it is located further from Jefferson than the Grier place.
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:23
The school in Frenchman's Bend plays a larger role in the collective story of Yoknapatawpha than the schools elsewhere in the county or in Jefferson do. In fictions set before 1940, the "schoolhouse" is a "one-room" building (The Town, 38).
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-06-26 13:20
Road from Frenchman's Bend to Jefferson that the narrator walks along at night on his way to Memphis to find his brother Pete. The narrator refers to the road as a "highway," and it may have been at least partly paved by 1941, though probably not. The narrator notes that the distance from his house to Jefferson was twenty-two miles.
