Reading Flags in the Dust long after one has read all the rest of Faulkner, which is what I did, provides one with a real revelation into how suddenly Faulkner discovered what he was to be about the rest of his life as a novelist. As Douglas Day points out, almost everything that was to concern Faulkner later is in Flags in the Dust—except the Indians. (FD x) Though it is not yet named here, Yoknapatawpha County as Faulkner was to draw it for us in 1936 is all here, as are the different kinds of characters he was to people it with. There are the Snopes, the country folk, such as the MacCallums and Suratt (later, Ratliff); there are the blacks, both comical, semi-comical, and serious (as in the Negro family Bayard stays with over Christmas); there are the old Folks (Aunt Jenny, old Bayard, old Will Falls, Dr. Peabody), treated both comically and seriously; there is the great southern family (the Sartorises); there is the Civil War, there are the obsessed (Byron Snopes and young Bayard); the doomed and destructive (the Sartoris twins); the tormented (young Bayard); there are the finely drawn women, who survive; there are the educated and useless (Horace Benbow, Faulkner’s first lawyer, later made more useful and somewhat less foolish in Gavin Stevens); there is the grand conception of the place (both Jefferson and the surrounding country); there is the land and the hunting; there are the new machines (the cars here, and later the planes) that destroy; there is Dr. Peabody; there is the obsession with the past, especially the Civil War; there is the family that tends to run out in the male line (we never do hear much of Benbow Sartoris later on); there is Frenchman’s Bend and Will Varner and the abjectness of both the poor whites and blacks; there is Flem Snopes, who was to preoccupy Faulkner for many years after he first conceived him; there is the interest in incest (Narcissa and Horace); the corruption of sensuality (Belle and Horace); the self lost in words and futile idealism (Horace); the violation of ontological virginity (the intrusion of young Bayard into Narcissa’s life); and of course there was the interest in violence and victimization, present in Faulkner’s novels from his very first one on; and more, much more. A definitive catalogue is neither necessary nor useful.
But also of equal importance with the discovery of this native territory and its inhabitants (with many more to be added in the novels that followed) was Faulkner’s discovery of how to deal with, how to present, this material and the rich teaming life that his extraordinary imagination was creating. Writing Flags in the Dust certainly made the writing of The Sound and the Fury possible. I mean by this that Faulkner discovered in Flags in the Dust how to put a whole complex and diverse novel together by locating his narrative centers in a series of characters. Carried to an extreme, this produces the inside narrations (the tours de force) of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!; and the multi-stranded narrative structure of Light in August where we go from Lena to Byron to Hightower to Joe Christmas to Joanna Burden to Hines (and others), over and over again, as the novel progresses, carrying each strand of the overall narrative up to a certain point, dropping it, switching to another, carrying it forward (or backward, as in Joe Christmas’s and Hightower’s case), and so forth on through to the end of the novel where Lena and Byron join up in the conjunction of strands that completes the story, ending this tragic tale of violence and destruction, as it began, with gentle comedy.
In Flags in the Dust these narrative centers are, in the order in which we first encounter them:
1. Old Bayard and old man Falls, and through the two of them, Colonel John Sartoris. Old Bayard is returned to and followed through the events that occur in the present, from the return of young Bayard from the war, to his death in Bayard’s car in 1919. Old Man Falls returns occasionally during the course of the novel, usually for comic scenes, but is never a major narrative center.
2. Simon, and through Simon, other blacks such as Elnora, Isom, and Caspey. Simon is always treated comically when he is returned to, and is followed to his death near the end of the novel when he is killed for his foolish old man’s philandering. Like his white counterpart, old Bayard, Simon is seen in a variety of relationships to other Sartorises and other blacks.
3. Aunt Jenny, who is the oldest Sartoris in the novel, and is one of only three significant women in the novel. Like old Bayard, she is returned to often and followed right through to the end of the novel, where she visits the graves of all the dead Sartoris males; to the very last page, in fact, where she comments ironically on the future of the last male Sartoris. She functions as one of the main narrative centers of the novel.
4. Narcissa Benbow, who is the first of the developing characters. Old Bayard and Aunt Jenny are static and are simply portrayed in the course of the novel. Narcissa actually develops and changes and is put into three very complex relationships: with her brother Horace, with Bayard, whom she marries, and with Byron Snopes. She is also in a contrasting relationship to Aunt Jenny and Belle. She is one of Faulkner’s more fully developed females and is an interesting and complex character in her own right.
5. Belle, who is the third and last major female character. She is important, but is never developed in the way that Narcissa is, and often functions as a kind of recessed character who influences and seduces Horace. She is a direct contrast to Narcissa. Like Narcissa, she is followed right through to the end of the novel, after she has divorced Harry and married Horace and moved to another town with him.
6. Young Bayard, whose return from the war starts the action in the present and whose death in 1920 in an airplane crash, on the same day that his son, Benbow Sartoris is born, helps bring the novel to an end. The novel does go on after his death, but not for long—long enough to get him home and buried, to have the son christened with some name other than the two recurrent Sartoris ones (John and Bayard), and to show us the women surviving. Bayard is certainly the central character in this novel, or, if not that, the first among equals. Maybe it would be best to call him the centering character, just as Caddy and Addie, Joe Christmas, Temple and Thomas Sutpen are centering characters in their novels. He is returned to often, in a great variety of moods and actions. Through him, we learn of his twin, shot down in the War. Through young Bayard, the car (almost a character in this novel, just as planes are in Pylon), is introduced, and through the car, speed, power, violence, and death.
7. Many minor characters are introduced and function, briefly, as narrative centers: Dr. Peabody, Suratt, the MacCallums, Belle’s sister, Joan, and others. All of Faulkner’s novels are rich in the number and diversity of their characters.
8. Byron Snopes, old Bayard’s bookkeeper, who is obsessed with Narcissa and writes her all those letters she foolishly keeps and rereads and that are finally stolen by Byron and used in Sanctuary to blackmail Narcissa. Byron is returned to often and followed until his story is completed when, driven even crazier by Narcissa’s marriage to Bayard, he steals back his letters, leaves a last one, robs the bank, tries to seduce his fiancé, and flees the territory.
9. Horace Benbow is the last major narrative center, and the character Ben Wasson mostly cut out of Sartoris. He is introduced early in conversations between other characters but does not appear in the novel until relatively late (FD, 145). Like Bayard, he is returning from the war, not as a combatant, but as a worker for the YMCA. Just as Belle and Narcissa are contrasted, so also are Bayard and Horace—the man of violent action, tormented and doomed, who finds only a brief reprieve from his torment and doom with Narcissa; and the man of ideas, a person of “wild, fantastic futility,” a lawyer with no real practice, a glass blower who makes beautiful vases, oddly, a brilliant eccentric tennis player. Horace finally succumbs to the sensuality of Belle and is reduced to carrying the smelly dripping shrimp from the station to his home each week. Horace is very carefully portrayed by Faulkner and is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. Like Narcissa and Bayard, he is a developing character rather than one who, like old Bayard, is simply portrayed and remains static. He is defeated as surely as Bayard is, but in a very different way.
The last section devoted to him in the novel (FD 339-47) after he has had his strange brief affair with Belle’s sister and has married Belle and moved away to another town, is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the novel and one that most clearly delivers the many different applications of the title to the characters in the novel. It is a section which, in typical Faulknerian