William Faulkner’s fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is one of the most familiar locales in all of world literature. The families who inhabit the county—the Sutpens, McCaslins, Snopeses, and Compsons, among others—have family lives more vivid and more well-documented than many real families. As in the South in which Faulkner himself grew up, in…
Tag: That Evening Sun
That Evening Sun – Setting
New Kinds of Narration “That Evening Sun” is an example of the different kinds of narration that writers such as Faulkner pioneered. Although very traditional in comparison with some of Faulkner’s other experiments—part of The Sound and the Fury, for example, is narrated by a mentally retarded boy who has no sense of the passage…
That Evening Sun – Literary Devices – Point of View – Narrator
Point of View and Narration Quentin Compson, one of Faulkner’s most memorable characters, narrates the story. In the story, he is a nine-year-old boy, but as a narrator he is twenty-four. Faulkner has Quentin narrate in both voices: the story begins in the voice of the adult Quentin, but soon switches to the voice of…
That Evening Sun – Themes
Race Relations The troubled race relations that have characterized the South throughout its history are the backdrop for “That Evening Sun,” even if they are not the main concern of the story. Nancy, the main character in the story, is a typical African-American woman of the South in the Jim Crow era. “Jim Crow” was…
That Evening Sun – Characters
Caddy Compson Caddy is the middle child of the three Compson children of “That Evening Sun.” She likes Nancy and can sense Nancy’s fear, but is too young to understand what is frightening Nancy. Candace Compson See Caddy Compson Jason Compson At age five, Jason is the youngest of the Compson children. He is quite…
That Evening Sun – Summary
“That Evening Sun” opens as a reminiscence: the narrator, whose identity is unknown at first, reports that in Jefferson, ”the streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees.” The time is approximately the turn of the century. The narrator first introduces Nancy, a…