Four generations of the family are at least mentioned in this first of Faulkner's Indian stories, which foregrounds the attempt of Issetibbeha's personal slave to escape the custom that requires his death as part of the funeral ceremonies for the Man. But the short story also recounts, briefly, how Issetibbeha's father Doom, the son of the sister of the chief and so not in the line of succession, became the chief after the "sudden" death of his uncle and his uncle's son (318).
Although the Sartorises are minor characters in this novel, which is about Snopeses and largely narrated by Stevenses, Faulkner acknowledges the family's status in the Yoknapatawpha fictions when Maggie (Stevens) Mallison tells her son Charles that "Sartorises are different from other people" (211). Actually, in this novel they're a bit different than they are in earlier texts.
In the last story of Knight's Gambit, also called "Knight's Gambit," the last-born Sartoris makes the family's final appearance, chronologically, when Charles Mallison notes that in the early days of World War II Benbow Sartoris is "already in England" on a "hush hush" mission for the Army (251). Nothing more is said about the mission, but by serving in the military, Benbow carries on a Sartoris family tradition: his father and four other ancestors fought in three previous wars.
Most of the references to members of the Sartoris family in this second novel in the Snopes trilogy are linked to the family bank and the role it plays in the story of Flem Snopes' climb up the ladder that begins (in the first novel in the trilogy) in a sharecropper's cabin and will end (in the last novel) in a mansion.
"Miss Jenny" - as Mrs. Virginia Sartoris Du Pre is referred to throughout this novel - is confined to a wheel-chair, but still as forthright and impatient as ever. She scolds Horace Benbow as if he were a Sartoris too. The only other characters named Sartoris here are also members of the Benbow family: Horace's sister Narcissa, the widow of (Young) Bayard and to all appearances the head of the household at Sartoris, and Bayard and Narcissa's son, Benbow Sartoris, who is ten-years old and represents the last descendant of both the old Yoknapatawpha families whose names he bears.
For his first published Yoknapatawpha fiction Faulkner drew deeply on his own family's history, in particular the figure of his great-grandfather Colonel William Falkner (the novelist added the 'u' to his last name in his twenties) . Falkner's statue (in Ripley, Mississippi) is at least as grand as the marble representation of Colonel John Sartoris that looms over both the town cemetery and the lives of his descendants.
As in The Town, in this novel the two Benbows who appear are defined in the context of the Sartoris family. Again Narcissa is the woman Bayard marries, though this novel revises the story to suggest that it was "Mrs Du Pre" who picked her out for him (210). Benbow Sartoris is mentioned when, again, Charles Mallison is on a hunting trip to Sartoris, though by now Benbow is seventeen and "considered one of the best bird shots in the county" (228).
The two Benbows whose names appear in the novel (they themselves do not appear) are identified as part of the Sartoris story. "Miss Narcissa Benbow" is referred to in passing as the woman Bayard Sartoris persuaded to marry him (124). Their son Benbow is mentioned as too young "to hold a gun" when Charles Mallison refers to the hunting trip he and Aleck Sander make to Sartoris (254).
In the last story of Knight's Gambit, also called "Knight's Gambit," the last-born Benbow makes the family's final appearance, chronologically, when Charles Mallison notes that in the early days of World War II Benbow Sartoris is "already in England" on a "hush hush" mission for the Army (251). Sartorises were known for their military service, but before Benbow Sartoris the closest a Benbow had gotten to war was when Horace worked for the Y.M.C.A. in France during World War I as a non-combatant.
