The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

John Doe is not a character in the story but a name Gavin Stevens uses to represent the shared experience of the veterans of World War I. Talking about these survivors Gavin says: "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi," than the other vets from around the country (243).

Joe Ginotta is not a character in the story but one of the three hypothetical men whom Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of the First World War: according to Gavin, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also Joe Ginotta of East Orange, New Jersey" (243).

Charley Longfeather is not a character in the story but is one of the three hypothetical men that Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of World War I: Gavin says, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also . . . Charley Longfeather of Shoshone, Idaho" (243).

Harry Wong is not a character in the story but one of the three hypothetical men whom Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of World War I: Gavin says, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also . . . Harry Wong of San Francisco" (243).

This man "grabs Max" to prevent his loss of control during his fencing "lesson" with Sebastian Gualdres (190).

During the chess game with Stevens, the narrator compares his thinking to that of "airmen," who measure duration "by contiguous and not elapsed time" (184). (Faulkner draws here on his own experience of flight training.)

When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War, Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247).

The woman with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship are so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

At the Greenbury hotel, "Harriss seemed to be well known not only to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters" (208).

At the Greenbury hotel, "Harriss seemed to be well known not only to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters" (208).