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).
Although the boy who narrates the story of "Uncle Willy" says very little about himself, he is a recognizable version of other juvenile narrators in Faulkner's fiction, and a way for Faulkner to provide a perspective on both the story's unconventional protagonist and the conventional small-town world of Jefferson. He likes playing baseball with his friends and eating the ice cream that Job makes at Willy's drugstore, is uncomfortable in school, and is willing "to do anything [Willy] asked me to do" (239).
At the end of "Smoke" the story's narrator identifies himself as a member of the grand jury that hears Gavin Stevens's explanation of Anse Holland and Judge Dunkenfield's murders ("we, the jury," 27). Hence, although we don't know his name, because Mississippi juries at this time were exclusively white and male, we do know his race and sex. He is recounting the events from "six months" after the murder of Old Anse (4), and therefore probably not long after the murder of Judge Dukinfield.
The twelve-year-old boy who narrates "Race at Morning" is the child of a share-cropping couple. He is devoted to Mister Ernest, the landlord who adopted him at age ten after both his parents abandoned him. He is earnest and hard-working, and passionate about hunting, but also illiterate - though as Will Legate notes, he "knows every cuss word in the dictionary, every poker hand in the deck and every whisky label in the distillery" (296).
The narrator of "Hair" never gives us his name, but we do know he has a daughter and that he's from a town that's similar to the "North Mississippi and Alabama" (137) towns he visits as a salesman. After leaving his position as a bookkeeper for a bank, he took to the road selling a "line of work shirts and overalls" (137). He is curious about people, and what little he reveals about his opinions of their behavior suggests misogynistic thinking: "all women are born with the badness in them" (133).
The narrator of "Death Drag" describes the unusual appearance in his little town of three barnstormers and the town's reaction to them and their stunts. He identifies himself as one of the town's older citizens, a "groundling," or non-flyer (197). Interestingly enough, the narrator qualifies his identification of Ginsfarb and Jake as Jews: "That is, [the spectators] knew at once that two of the strangers were of a different race from themselves, without being able to say what the difference was" (188).
The narrator of "Centaur in Brass" remains unnamed. (When Faulkner develops the episode in The Town, Chick Mallison retells the story as he heard it from his cousin Gowan.) This narrator, like that of "A Rose for Emily," refers to himself in the first-person plural, "we believed," "our ears," etc. (149, 150), and serves as a kind of communal voice for "our town" (149); but he also occupies a privileged narrative position as one of four people who know what the water tower means to Flem Snopes, "that it is his monument, or that it is a monument at all" (149).
The unnamed narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" seems to be a captain like Spoomer, who greets him as an equal while the gunnery sergeant stands in recognition of his rank (518). However, he doesn't seem to enforce his rank; the gunnery sergeant who is the source of much of his information has no qualms about discussing the antics of officers Spoomer and Sartoris with him, for example. He is an inventor, a wartime military mail censor, and a casualty of war "trying to get used to a mechanical leg" (512).
The unnamed narrator of "Ad Astra" served during World War I as an American flying in a British squadron (408). In his only explicit references to himself, he talks about the "pleasant" but tense feeling that precedes the moment "in combat" when "you know something is about to happen" (421). Until the last pages of the story he remains a silent witness to the events, but he reports what the others say and do clearly and without bias.
"A Rose for Emily" is a first-person narrative, but the identity of its narrator is very hard to establish. It seems very safe to say that his race is "White" - note, for example, how consistently he refers to Tobe as "the Negro" (120, 121 etc.). We also assume the narrator is male; at times the differing actions and motives of "the men" and "the women" are narrated with equal detachment (119, etc.), but phrases like "only a woman could have believed" mayor Sartoris' fiction about the taxes make it seem more likely that narrator is a man.
