The railroad station appears frequently in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, as the main portal linking Jefferson to the larger world. In The Hamlet in only appears once, obliquely, as the site through which the traveling salesman who has been courting Eula Varner flees after being attacked by the local young men who are competing for her attention.
As Mink is being driven to jail, they pass the Whiteleaf store. When the men who had been "squatting and spitting on the gallery stand suddenly up," the deputy sheriff remarks that "There are folks here too that act willing to believe their name is Houston for maybe ten or fifteen minutes anyway" (283).
"Ratliff sat there with his bland brown smoothly-shaven face, and his neat tieless blue shirt and his shrewd intelligent eyes" (7). V.K. Ratliff, a sewing machine salesman and traveler covering four counties (and also one of Faulkner's favorite characters), is a bachelor, intelligent, observant, and highly articulate in his regional vernacular. One of the three main narrators of The Town, certainly the most succinct, knowledgeable, and humorous of them, Ratliff helps the others keep track of the Snopeses' behavior in Jefferson, particularly that of Flem Snopes.
Linda is the natural daughter of Eula Varner Snopes and a Frenchman's Bend suitor named McCarron. Although Linda lacks her mother's voluptuous appeal, she is very attractive to men in her own right, as the reactions from Chick, Gavin, and Matt Levitt all demonstrate. She seems like contested territory on a number of fronts; various people attempt to direct her education, inheritance, and marital status throughout the novel. While Eula exacts a promise from Gavin that he will marry her daughter, Linda herself is reluctant to accept his conditional offer of matrimony.
Daughter of Will Varner, the richest man in Frenchman's Bend, Eula is married to Flem Snopes after she becomes pregnant by another man. She arrives in Jefferson with her illegitimate child in a wagon pulled by mules and driven by Flem's ambition. Her sexual power has a mythic status; Charles Mallison describes Eula's effect on men: "There was just too much of what she was for any just one human female package to contain and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory . . .
Nominally the central character of The Town, and of the larger Snopes Trilogy, Flem Snopes is the son of Abner Snopes, the husband of Eula Varner Snopes, the putative father of Linda Snopes, and the anxious focus of Gavin Stevens and V.K. Ratliff, two of the novel's narrators.
