Although it's a printed text, "Fool About a Horse" provides 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.).
One of many of Faulkner's "boy" narrators, this twelve-year-old son of tenant farmers is more probably an adult when he tells this story about how Pat Stamper bested both his "Pap" and "Mammy." Although he is a sympathetic companion to his father, he is also a careful reporter and analyst of Pap's behavior. At least from his older perspective, he can see Pap's weaknesses for horse- and mule-trading, and for alcohol as well.
The woman whom the narrator of "Fool about a Horse" calls "Mammy" is named "Vynie." She works hard and frugally to contribute to her family's farm income, so she is resentful, suspicious, and caustic about her husband's misadventures in horse-trading. When his foolishness results in the loss of the milk separator she wanted, she cries for the first time in her son's experience. Still resolute, she goes off alone to recover the separator, but in the end she is as big a fool about that machine as her husband is about the horse.
"Old Man Anse Holland," as Ratliff calls him (33), lives within walking distance of the farm that Ab Snopes is farming as his tenant. Holland is clearly wealthier than most of the farmers in the area: he owns a number of mules, and never seems to miss any of the possessions that Pap trades away. Although Ratliff "walks up" to his place, he doesn't describe it.
In "Lion," Boon Hogganbeck "busts past the doctor's wife when she opened the door" (196), demanding that the doctor go to the hunting camp to save the wounded Lion.
In "Lion" Major de Spain "calls" this secretary to send a telegram to Boon (198). The secretary does not make an explicit appearance, and may be either male or female.
In "Lion," Quentin invokes the mystical powers of nameless Polynesian chiefs (who were looked upon as being "both more and less than men," 186) to show how absolute is Lion's rule over the other dogs in the hunting camp.
In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses, when Boon Hogganbeck boards the train to Memphis at Hoke's, he buys "three packages of molasses-covered popcorn and a bottle of soda pop from the news butch" (188, 218 - although in the novel it's a bottle of "beer"). "Butch" is short for "butcher," a term that used to be used to refer to men or boys who sold newspapers, sweets and other goods that would appeal to passengers on a train.
