This is one of the Sutpen family's "two older boys" (that is, older than Thomas) who leave the family's home in the mountains "some time before" their mother dies and their father moves the family east (181).
"Warsaw" (along with Dunkirk) appears in the narrative in its account of how black farmers and field hands in Yoknapatawpha left the region or became otherwise unavailable for working on the big plantations (193). The pairing with "Dunquerque" (as Faulkner spells it) makes it clear that the reference is to the beginning of World War II in Europe: Poland was invaded by the German army on 1 September 1939; the U.S. government began drafting young men, including young Negroes, in 1940.
The narrator measures the way that 20th century America is becoming "one nation" (rather than a North and a South) by noting the "Brooklyn exchange students" who attend college on the G.I. bill "at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas universities" and sell "tiny confederate battle flags" at football games (194).
Measuring the distance between 20th century Jefferson and its southern past, the narrator notes that the sons of the remaining Confederate veterans of the Civil War - "those tottering old men in gray" - had fought and died "in blue coats in Cuba," a reference to the Spanish-American War of 1898 (189).
The narrator speculates about what kinds of local stories the people who lived in Yoknapatawpha could tell their friends or relatives from elsewhere who "passed through Jefferson on the way to New Orleans or Florida" (196).
Stanford, the prestigious university in Palo Alto, California, is mentioned as one of the places at which the novel's hypothetical non-Southern reader may have been educated: "yourself the stranger, the outlander from B.A. (or perhaps even M.A.) at Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford" (205).
Temple and her family take refuge from the events in Yoknapatawpha by going to a beach in California. As Temple tells her son, the beach is "far from Jefferson" (61), but the text gives no additional details about it. We are assuming the beach is in Southern California, perhaps as far south as San Diego.
At the start of World War II the U.S. government created internment camps to which the Japanese-Americans living on the west coast were removed as a possible threat to the war effort against Japan. The novel refers to "a California detention camp for enemy aliens" (194), though almost two-thirds of the 110,000-120,000 people interned were American citizens, and though it's not clear that any were "enemies." Two of the ten camps on the U.S.
Charleston, South Carolina, a major port on the Atlantic, is mentioned in the novel as one end of the "constricting loop" that Union forces are drawing around the remaining Confederates during the last months of the Civil War (184).
Texas is mentioned three times in the novel. It is one of the places in "the West" to which the Confederate soldiers who are not willing to surrender at the end of the Civil War decide to go (204); this is a role "Texas" plays in a number of the fictions - a generic place to escape to and start over. "Texas" is also vaguely defined as the location of some of the "universities" that veterans of World War II choose to attend on the G.I. Bill (194).
