That evening sun go down in Faulkner's work

¶ … Faulkner, it is understood that the world his stories create is one that is rich with the kind of sparse detail that Hemingway loved, is filled with the dark view on humanity that so marked Flannery O'Connor, and is as striking as any painting by Francis Bacon. Faulkner lived in a literary world where reality and tales spun on the fringes of reality, moral stories, character studies, all blended together to show his southern presence in every word, paragraph, and tale. His short story, "That Evening Sun," is filled with the references to his fictional Yoknapatawpha and Jefferson in which the characters find themselves appearing in a variety of stories and novels. The characters, the setting, the revelations are all familiar territory and yet they are as engaging and involved as any of his work. We don't mind seeing Caddy and Dilsey again because they are as familiar to Yoknapatawpha as Faulkner is himself. This particular story's purpose then, is not to expand upon these characters so much as it is to express a singular purpose - to illustrate, through the example of Nancy and Jubah, the stark destructive reality of what it means to be an oppressed person and the absolute, crippling fear that an inability to control one's life and fate has upon not only the victim, but upon the victimizers as well.

The South has always had a rocky time when it comes to discussion of race. The post-war South was a place that had been defeated and then broken in a way that can only be described as catastrophic. The loss of identity, the destruction of the power structures, the dissolution of the plantation economy, the sudden freeing of slaves, the social upheaval that was wrought upon the South reverberated for generations and, perhaps only now in the 21st century, have the majority of those vestiges begun to fade. but, a vast number of people know exactly what the South was like before 1964. They know that "free" was just a word, that disenfranchisement was the common state for Black Americans, and that the social destruction of the South was framed squarely on the backs of the ex-slaves and their children, and grand children, and great grandchildren. Faulkner, a white Southern man, whose literary career started in 1919 and though he died in 1962, continues to be prolific.

There are no absolutes in Faulkner's work, no black and white (no pun intended) views on the world. He does not preach, but neither does he shy away from any particular topic. His stories are filled with brutality and gentility, kindness and hate, fear and elation, destruction and creation, and result in some of the most compelling histories of the 20th century. "That Evening Sun" is but a chapter among many in the lives of these characters and, as such, is just a single but incredibly deep view into the soul of the time and place.

The story begins with the Compson children, giving us the child's-eye-view of one of the most tragic and adult themes: Nancy's status as whore, her beating and imprisonment, her attempted suicide, her pregnancy of unclear origin, the fear of the dark, and the overriding fear of Jubah. Of all of these, it is the specter of Jubah, her ex-husband, and the either imagined or real danger of his return that piles the tension on to this story. Jubah is both a real and a symbolic danger. In him we find that there is genuine history - he is aware that he is not the likely father of the baby that Nancy carried - which makes the reference to cutting the baby out of her like he would harvest a watermelon that much more menacing. His significance is deeper and darker than the kind of oppression that whites had been piling upon blacks in the South, because he represents the darkest kind of evil that man can make. Jubah is the embodiment of the twisted nothing-to-lose destructive force that only centuries of slavery and hereditary de-humanizing brutality can create. Jubah, is the tortured child of Omelas allowed to grow up and walk among the community - the idyllic Southern structure broken, everyone must now deal with the horrors they created.

The structure of the story, being told through the semi-comprehending eyes of Quentin, the oldest of the Compson children, gives equal weight to the words of the adults as it does the barely-comprehending children whose focus is so fractured and unformed that they do not see beneath the surface of the words of the adults. They do not understand the references made by Judah to the watermelon, they do not understand the real reason the Nancy is afraid, they do not comprehend that her fear is so crippling that her entire sense of reason and propriety is lost.

Repeatedly, Nancy is seen moaning in a manner that one could associate with a loss of the self - a hiding and a self-soothing that only trauma can bring about.

Psychologically, we can clearly understand that Nancy's fears are due, in great part, to the absolute lack of a true foundation of security in her life. This is exemplified in the references by Jubah to white men being able to come into his home, kick him out, take his livelihood and life, and all without his being able to defend himself. This meant that the blacks of the south had no recourse, no protections, no ability to create a sense of safety. On Maslow's hierarchy, the southern blacks were forced to remain among the very first rungs of food and shelter, and even then those could not be secured.

That the children do not understand this is symbolic of the kind of awareness that the rest of the South would allow itself. White adults would not acknowledge that their past sins as a race created the destructive realities of the present. Therefore, only children could inhabit both worlds and even though they did not understand what they were hearing or seeing, their ability to cross between without restriction is the only way for both stories to be told with complete honesty. This is supported by Faulkner's lack of narrative detail. All descriptions of scenes and places, of people and actions, are contained in the dialogue. Because so much of this dialogue is of the children as well, who clearly cling only to particular words and phrases, who act their age, and who do not have a sense of priority or propriety, Faulkner was able to put forth the entire question of support and friendship between whites and blacks directly on the table.

What Faulkner clearly tells us in this story is that while there is some feeling of continued responsibility on the part of Jason Compson Sr.'s part for Nancy, that sense is maintained because of their close personal relationship. Nancy has taken care of the Compsons in various ways, and therefore the Compson's owe Nancy at least the minimum of respect and care. Jason Compson Sr. treats Nancy as a person in their relationship, in their discussions. but, he does not take responsibility for her, nor does he find fault in the manner in which she lives. This character, then, demonstrates a very Southern way of viewing race - that blacks live the way they live because that is in the nature of things.

While this story touches on these issues - it absolutely acknowledges the fact that there is no immediate remedy, that equality, better housing, health care, opportunities for success are all secondary and even tertiary concerns. For Nancy, Dilsey, and Jubah, survival is paramount.

To the children, Nancy's fear is on an equivalent level to their own frights experienced at Halloween. In this context, they cannot comprehend a fear of the soul, but rather experience a fear of surprises.

These children know, at the end of the day, that they have a home, a family, and a security granted to them based upon the color of the skin. While this knowledge may not be conscious, it is present and important to the story. Nancy, on the other hand, knows that she is in constant danger for the entirety of her life, that she will never know physical security and peace, that she cannot have marital or familial stability, and that her future is always in doubt. The fear then, that she expresses at Jubah, is more a fear of the darkness of her present and future - it matters now if the threat of Jubah is real, because he is symbolic of soul-crushing weight that such a state causes in a person.

We can interpret the ending of the story as being that the Compsons turn their backs on Nancy to leave her to her death.

Quentin's own observation of "the white people going on, dividing the impinged lives of us and Nancy," reveals an awareness of the split - that Nancy is staying on that side of the ditch, no matter how often she inhabits the kitchens and bedrooms of whites.

That the story begins with a description of life fifteen years previous, and includes her origin story (how she lost her teeth, how she was connected to the Compsons, her relationship with Jubah and as a whore, all formed a mosaic - each element being singular and symbolic of a much larger reality for the black southerner.

Greg Barnhisel, in his critical essay on "That Evening Sun," observed that, "Faulkner rarely hit upon a more effective combination of the dark side of history and of individual human drives than he did with "That Evening Sun."

In this story, the two combine, and a young boy who is rapidly approaching maturity must puzzle together what is happening and what his own place in the impending tragedy might be....Quentin, from his unique perspective, gives the reader simply information, not interpretation, for the majority of the story, (Barnheisel, npag)

The totality of the impact of slavery and all of the myriad after-effects are conferred upon Nancy through Quentin's narration. "In a sense, it is the past - the past's crushing weight, the past's legacy - that is the main theme of the story, as often it is with Faulkner" (Barhnheisel npag). Here we find greater confirmation of this theme, "Segregation, the legacy of slavery, is the condition that produces most of the ironies that Faulkner uses in "That Evening Sun" Mr. Stovall is not punished for visiting Nancy sexually and it is Nancy who is carted off to jail after Stovall kicks her teeth out. Nancy is beaten severely after she attempted suicide in jail.

These ironies are the children of slavery and segregation - they are the cultural realities of a system so inherently corrupted by the evil it institutionalized that whenever good appears, it seems that it can only do so through the innocent accidents of children.

What Barnhisel observes is that there is a direct connection between history and the present and that knowledge, while it sheds light, does absolutely nothing to resolve the situation. Faulkner, he notes, strives to express the core reality, to use the characters and their words to expose the rotten core of the Southern soul. Clearly, knowing that this kind of duality exists cannot help but corrupt all those who touch it.

Which, of course, explains why Mrs. Compson is so self-centered, mistaking Mr. Compson's situational compassion and at least surface-level understanding of the needs of propriety for an impulse to abandon her and, in the words of Quentin, "You could tell that by the way she said it. Like she believed that all day father had been trying to think of doing the thing that she wouldn't like the most, and that she knew all the time that after a while he would think of it." Barhniesel acknowledges this and brings us

Carol Gartner's essay looks at the fact that "Nancy's situation introduces broader questions about black-white relationships in the post-Civil War South, never far below the surface of Faulkner's novels or stories. The results of the system of slavery, more than present conditions, lead Nancy to seek the Compsons' help and induce Mr. Compson to do his limited, ineffectual best to help her. Finally, however, Mr. Compson is as powerless to protect Nancy as Jubah is powerless to stop Nancy's white predators - 'When a white man want to come in my house,' Jubah says, 'I ain't got no house," (Gartner, 295).

Here, we find additional support for the central theme put forth - that there is indeed a pervasive corruption of the soul of the South that slavery and segregation wrought, and that all that can be done is to expose it, show the horrific effects to the light, and force people (then well before the civil rights movement) to face the reality of their lives - that Southern "culture" is one that is at once the history and "charm" of the Plantation Economy, and the destruction of life - the absolute tainting of every person - that slavery brought about.

The Evening Sun" references a fear that once the sun goes down, Nancy will surely die. Of course, symbolically, we know that a sunset represents just that. The title means much more than that as well.

It means that the impact of slavery, though in its wane, is not gone, that the sun has not set on the problem of race in the South. Additionally, it references twilight. We know that during the twilight hours, our vision is, perhaps, at its worst. Symbolically, this references the tiredness of the issue of race within the South, that everyone is exhausted and afraid, that no one can see the truth of their lives at this stage. It follows then, that this is the time of greatest danger - that when the guard is down, when the people are tired of dealing with their own problems, their awareness or ability to care for or deal with others' relatively insurmountable problems becomes nearly impossible.

Everyone has given up, in this story, and instead of acting upon things, they are simply riding a wave. but, we have to wonder about the actions of Mr. Compson. Nancy has made every attempt she can think of short of barricading herself in the Compson's house, to keep from being alone in her home at night. Mrs. Compson and Dilsey function in a realm of awareness that completely shuts out the corruption of the soul. To them, Nancy is simply making trouble for the family and for herself - she is trying to deal with an innate awareness that the children cannot tap into and that the other women of the story have refused to acknowledge. That leaves only Mr. Compson to represent the smallest shred of an attempt to "deal" with the situation. He is not so inhuman as to completely ignore Nancy - his attempts to soothe her, or to give in just a little to her fears, are clear. but, his effectiveness is not.