"Ambuscade" is the first of eight stories, all but one written in the mid-1930s, in which Faulkner imaginatively returns to the Sartoris family, while also going back in time to the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The stories are narrated by the Bayard who appeared in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, as an old man struggling with modernity, deafness and a weak heart.
In this novel Faulkner re-tells the story about "Colonel Sartoris" killing two "carpetbaggers" who were organizing emancipated slaves to vote. He first told it in Flags in the Dust, where the men he killed were not given names. This version of the story acknowledges that Sartoris' act makes him "a town hero"; here, however, they are identified as Calvin Burden I and II, and the event is told from the point of view of Joanna Burden, granddaughter and half-sister of the murdered men.
Johnny Sartoris is the central character in this second story about aviators in World War I. His twin brother is not mentioned at all, and the story's only other members of the family "appear" in the letter he wrote home just before he was killed in combat, addressed to "Mrs Virginia Sartoris" (whom he calls "Aunt Jenny"), where he also mentions "Grandfather," which must mean Bayard II (529).
One of two World War I stories featuring the Sartoris twins, Bayard III and John III. John has been killed in combat; his brother survives to do more than his share of the drinking among the story's multi-national cast of officers.
Again the only Sartoris to appear in this Yoknapatawpha fiction is referred to as "Colonel Sartoris" - but this is John Sartoris' son Bayard rather than the actual "Colonel" (119). Colonel John Sartoris had been dead for about two decades when, as "mayor" of Jefferson, this "Colonel Sartoris" remitted Emily Grierson's taxes in 1894.
The only Sartoris who appears in Faulkner's second Yoknapatawpha fiction is "old Colonel Sartoris" - and he only appears in Quentin's mind, when near the end of his section, and his life, Quentin evokes the idea of "death as a man something like" his own grandfather, and then imagines death, General Compson and Colonel Sartoris in their Confederate uniforms "on a high place" (176). Although his grandfather outranks the Colonel, Quentin pictures Sartoris "on a still higher place" while Grandfather and death wait for him to "come down" (176).
Faulkner brings the Stevens family saga full circle when the only member of the family who appears in his last novel is the same "Judge Stevens" who appeared three decades earlier in "A Rose for Emily." Like his first appearance, the Judge's role here is very brief - though again he helps resolve a problem by stepping outside the bounds of the law.
Gavin and Charles narrate five of the novel's 18 chapters, and several more are written in the third person from their combined point-of-view. The story they tell and witness essentially belongs to the Snopeses, but it includes a brief account of Charles' experience in World War II and a longer account of Gavin's relationships with two young women, one of whom he is married to at the end.
The Town provides a closer look at the Stevenses' family relationships than any other Yoknapatawpha fiction. Gavin Stevens narrates eight of the novel's 23 chapters, and is perhaps the major if anti-heroic character in two of its three main plot lines; this second volume of the Snopes trilogy is as much about him as it is about Flem - if not more.
Set in the 1950s, this story brings the Stevens family biography forward in several respects. "Uncle Gavin" has married, though his wife makes the briefest of appearances in the text. Charles (as Chick is called here) has fought in World War II, becoming the first member of the family to serve in the military. There is some generational disagreement between uncle and nephew about the prospects for America's democratic experiment. Together, however, the two men serve in the text as an audience rather than as actors.
