Genre
Bildungsroman
Setting and Context
fictional place called Yoknapatawpha County, Jefferson, during the American Civil War
Narrator and Point of View
Narrator: Bayard Sartoris
Point of View: First person
Tone and Mood
Tone: questioning
Mood: suspenseful, adventurous
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Bayard Sartoris; Antagonist: war and pressure of honor that seemingly justifies violence
Major Conflict
Colonel Sartoris returns home with news of Union soldiers winning the war. He gives instructions to Granny to move a trunk of silver to Memphis.
Climax
Bayard decides against avenging his father's death and the man who killed him escapes.
Foreshadowing
"...because Southern men would not harm a woman, even if the letter failed to work."-unfortunate foreshadowing of Granny's death, it is repeated so often that it almost makes the reader anticipate the opposite outcome.
Understatement
"...the little man (who in conjunction with the horse looked exactly the right size because that was as big as he needed to look and--to twelve years old--bigger than most folks could hope to look)..."
Allusions
"...and which Granny called the library because there was one bookcase in it containing a Coke upon Littleton, a Josephus, a Koran, a volume of Mississippi Reports dated 1848, a Jeremy Taylor, a Napoleon's Maxims, a thousand and ninety-eight page treatise on astrology, a History of Werewolf Men in England, Ireland and Scotland and Including Wales by the Reverend Ptolemy Thorndyke, M.A. (Edinburgh), F.R.S.S., a complete Walter Scott, a complete Fenimore Cooper, a paper-bound Dumas complete, too, save for the volume which Father lost from his pocket at Manassas (retreating, he said)."
Imagery
Imagery of Sartoris home on fire:
"The smoke boiled up, yellow and slow, and turning copper-colored in the sunset like dust; it was like dust from a road above the feet that made it, and then went on, boiling up slow and hanging and waiting to die away."
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
"The bastuds, Granny!" I said. "The bastuds!" Then we were all three saying it--Granny and me and Ringo, saying it together: "The bastuds!" we cried. "The bastuds! The bastuds!"
Metonymy and Synecdoche
blue-coats: a name for Union soldiers
Personification
N/A
