Yoknapatawpha
Jefferson. Seat of Yoknapatawpha. Almost all the action of the novel set in the present takes place in and around Jefferson. Byron Bunch and Joe Christmas work at the sawmill, Reverend Hightower lives on a quiet street, Byron Bunch and Lena live in the boardinghouse, and Joanna Burden lives on the outskirts of town. Lena literally walks into Jefferson in the beginning of the novel and walks out again at the end, providing the frame for the rest of the events. As she enters the town, a fire burns in the distance–at Joanna Burden’s house, where Joanna has been murdered. The rest of the novel provides the background explaining what has led up to this moment.
Reverend Hightower observes the town through his window and receives news of the outside world through his visitor, Byron Bunch. Hightower’s carefully maintained isolation crumbles as the outside events intrude on his home, both through Byron’s stories and through Joe Christmas’s murder there late in the novel. Joanna Burden’s isolation, not self-imposed as Hightower’s but forced on her by her neighbors, also crumbles, as Joe Christmas enters first her servants’ quarters, then her home. The scene of gruesome death, her property also gives hope when Lena gives birth in her servants’ cabin.
The people of Jefferson, named and unnamed, also play a role. Whether hounding Hightower out of his church, turning on Joe Christmas when they learn he is partly African American, or helping Lena when they really cannot afford it, these people show the compassion, pettiness, sensitivity, and bigotry of Jefferson.
Other locations. Faulkner constructs much of his narrative out of the stories of how its characters have come to Jefferson and thereby portrays a variety of places. For example, he describes the Alabama farmhouse that Lena left and the road that took her to Jefferson in a vain search for her unborn child’s father. A long section of the novel occurs in the orphanage where Joe Christmas’s grandfather placed him, the McEachern house in which he lived after his adoption, and the many roads and towns he wandered. Hightower recalls the house where he grew up hearing the stories of his grandfather’s exploits in the Civil War, his seminary, and the Memphis hotel room in which his wife committed suicide. One of Joanna Burden’s sections recalls the Burdens’ long trek from New England, around the country, and finally to Jefferson, where Joanna’s relatives are shot by Colonel Sartoris for allowing African Americans to vote during Reconstruction, leaving her alone and isolated.
In order to explain the circumstances of the brief present time of the novel, Faulkner gives the factors that shaped each character’s motivations, responses, and actions. For example, the reasons behind Christmas’s murder of Joanna goes back to his experiences in the orphanage, in the McEacherns’ home, and during his travels.