It is well known that, beginning with Sartoris, William Faulkner discovered that his " own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about...." As his rural native soil "opened up a gold mine of other peoples," he tried toward the end of 1926 to compose "something of a saga of an extensive family connection of typical 'poor white trash'" as well as "a tale of the aristocratic, chivalrous and ill- fated Sartoris family." Although the former, then called Father Abraham, the Ur- The Hamlet, was soon abandoned, the latter, Flags in the Dust, the original version of Sartoris(1929),became the first product of the author's endeavor to begin the chronicle of his Yoknapatawpha County. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to explore the significance of this work as the start of the chronicle, focusing on his invention of the Sartoris family.
Flags in the Dust is designed horizontally to reflect the post- war malaise and sense of paralysis which is embodied in the young generation of young Bayard and Horace Benbow, the returnees from Europe, the antithetical mental twin of the author, as against the generation of old Bayard and Miss Jenny, who tend to apotheosize the heroism of the Confederate soldiers. Vertically, this work is meant to illuminate the dramatic rendering of the idea of the presentness of the past, the control of the past over the present, which is manifested in the self- destructive way of life of young Bayard, internally oppressed by the curse of the legendized Sartoris name.
The introduction of this historical sense into the novel indicates Faulkner's growth as a different writer from the one of Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes. For he succeeds in bringing what is called yeast into the text, the yeast which is to expand intertextually in his Yoknapatawpha novels as important motifs-- the fall of the aristocratic families, the rise of poor whites like the Snopeses, the white- black relationship, the incestuous brother- sister relationship, and so on. He seems as early as the composition of this work to have made in his mind a rather minute literary map of important motifs to be developed later.