![]() The time discrepancy is consistent throughout the final chapter.1 This chapter had been published originally as “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard.” The short story is set in the 1920s, some sixty years after the 1 “Dont you know folks have been looking for that money for thirty years,” Ratliff asks Bookwright (1051), and Bookwright speculates that buried cloth bags would not survive intact “After thirty years” (1069). Thirty years after the start of the Civil War places this final chapter in 1891 moreover, Bookwright’s observation that “Ab Snopes first rented that place from the Varners five years ago” (1069) shifts the start of the storyline to the late 1880s. ![]() Book Four, however, disrupts the temporal frame when the narrative voice dates the “news of Sumter ” at “thirty years ago” (1046). Varner “did not practice much then and during the last forty years she had lost even that habit” (819) and in Book Three, when Ike Snopes runs across what had been the Old Frenchman place to rescue Houston’s cow, he crosses “old fields where not even a trace of furrow showed any more, gutted and gullied by forty years of rain and frost and heat into plateaus choked with rank sedge and briers” (889). ![]() In Book One, for example, Bookwright reckons that the “store and that gin had been running themselves at the same time for nigh forty years all right, just one fellow between them” (785) in Book Two, Mrs. This time frame is reinforced at various points throughout the first three books of the novel. In the forty years since the end of the Civil War, Will Varner has acquired most of the extensive land holding that had been the Old Frenchman place he has established himself as the “chief man” in this “rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson.” The novel opens on a spring day in about 1905 when Ab Snopes limps into Varner’s store (731-35). 220 THE ELEGIAC OPENING SCENE OF THE HAMLET. I figure what must have happened before to lead people to that particular moment, and I work away from it, finding out how people act after that moment. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ĬLAUDE PRUITT Independent Scholar Discovering the Timeline in Faulkner’s The Hamlet There’s always a moment in experience.
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