In its account of modern changes in Yoknapatawpha, the narrative focuses on the generational experience of the "son" of the large plantation, who goes to World War II from "the seat of the tractor" with which he, rather than his father's tenants, works the land; upon his return he leaves behind "the long monotonous endless unendable furrows of Mississippi cotton fields" to live with his wife and growing family "in automobile trailers of G.I. barracks on the outskirts of liberal arts colleges" (193).
"The planter" is a generic figure in the novel's account of agriculture in modern Yoknapatawpha; he still owns the large plantation, but now is likely to work it himself with a tractor (193).
As part of its larger history of Yoknapatawpha, the novel describes the system of agriculture on the county's large plantations on the eve of World War II: the rows of "two-room shotgun shacks" where "the Negro tenant- or share- or furnish-hand" lived with his family are still there, standing "across the plantation road" from "the plantation mule-lots" and near to the fields in which sharecroppers and mules previously worked the soil together (193).
After the Civil War slave labor on Yoknapatawpha's large plantations was often replaced by tenant labor. This icon represents the two generations of sharecroppers mentioned in the novel's account of modern progress: the "men and women, Negro and white both, who were born to and who passed all their lives in denim overalls and calico," and their "sons and daughters," who wear "the installment-plan garments" advertised in national magazines (192). According to the novel's exaggerated account, the first group, "an entire generation of farmers," has vanished (193).
The narrative's account of modernity includes "the boom and ululance of radio," represented by the voices that are heard on it: "the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists" (192).
The grandson of Bayard Sartoris was "a combat airman on the Western Front" for two years during World War I, but after his return to Yoknapatawpha he causes his grandfather's death when loses control of the car he is driving on an icy road (190). Although not named in this novel, he is also Bayard, and is the central character in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust (1929), where the accident is described somewhat differently.
The son of Colonel Sartoris, "the banker Bayard Sartoris," appears briefly and ironically in the novel when, some time after he has a law passed prohibiting cars in Jefferson, he himself is killed in an automobile accident (190).
The "ex blacksmith's apprentice" who is building Yoknapatawpha's first automobile in his "back yard on the edge of town" is described as "a grease-covered man with the eyes of a visionary monk" (190). (In three later fictions this inventor is named either Buffaloe or Bullock, and is identified as an electrician.)
Although the narrative refers to him as "the Negro driver," the man who delivers ice around Jefferson in a wagon is probably more accurately described as an iceman. (Electric refrigerators did not become common household appliances in the US until the 1930s.)
