The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The Second World War plays a smaller role in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions than the First, but three texts refer to combat in the Pacific. In "Shall Not Perish," written and published during the early years of the war, the only two young men from Yoknapatawpha who die in the war - Pete Grier, an enlisted man from Frenchman's Bend, and the son of Major de Spain, an officer like his father - are both killed in naval combat: Grier when the troopship he's on is sunk somewhere in the Pacific, and De Spain when, as Mr.

Four miles from Holcomb House and on the "edge of Memphis, Tennessee" is the residence of Brother J.C. Goodyhay (295). In The Mansion Mink Snopes stays three nights in this "small frame house" (293). The place is surrounded by a "tiny savagely untended yard" which is prelude to "even more violent desolation" in the "backyard," which "contains another house not dismantled so much as collapsed - a jumble of beams, joists, window- and door-frames and even still-intact sections of siding" (293).

Somewhere between Lake Cormorant and Memphis, Mink stops at Beth Holcomb's to do yard-work. It's four miles from Brother Goodyhay's house, which is "on the edge of Memphis" (295). Adjacent to "a vacant lot," Holcomb's "small house" sits in "a small untidy yard" with "dead clematis vines" (291). The "minuscule front gallery" of the structure leads in to a sparsely furnished kitchen with "stove, sink, refrigerator, a table and chair" (292).

Mink Snopes is forced to stop here when he hitchhikes from Clarksdale on his way to Memphis in The Mansion. A real hamlet in DeSoto County located in north-west Mississippi, Lake Cormorant possesses only one distinguishing feature in the novel, for it is home to "a small tight neatly-cluttered store plastered with placards behind a gasoline pump" (285).

The shipyard where Linda Kohl works during World War II in The Mansion is in a real Mississippi town on the Gulf of Mexico. Historically, Pascagoula is part of an important military-industrial complex that includes the U.S. Naval Station Pascagoula on Singing River Island and the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation on the east bank of the Pascagoula River. In addition to the shipyard, the narrative includes the beach, the hotel where Linda and Gavin Stevens stay in separate rooms, and a "joint . . . with the radio going full blast" where they eat supper (276).