William Faulkner

William Faulkner
I had a harder time understanding the purpose behind this story then the others. I really didn’t get it. The only “lesson” I could pick out of everything was that the white person was also more important then the African American. Even though Nancy was having some sort of mental breakdown and supposedly going to be murdered very soon, the mother was worried about herself begin left alone in the house, then Nancy walking home by herself. It shows how selfish the white race was and how things have changed since then.
Nancy was a very unique character. She obviously has a whole lot of problems to deal with. It was hard for me to figure out exactly what was going on with her. Was she actually going crazy? Or was Jesus really out there to get her at a moments notice? Maybe, he was coming to get her because of the relationships she held with some of the men around town. She did go to jail for saying that Mr. Stovall still owed her for the last three times. Everything seemed very vague to me with the whole story.
I did like the character of the father in the story. He seemed to genuinely concerned with Nancy, while still trying to keep up the proper relationship between a white man and an African American woman in that time. He tried to send her home but still came to check up on things when she would start to cry softly. I think his wife must have felt a sort of jealousy when he would walk her home because she was scared of the dark.
I would like to have read more about this story. It would have been nice to see if Nancy ends up dead or not and by whom. Maybe she wasn’t really scared of Jesus but just used him as an excuse for something else she was scared of. There were times that she didn’t like being a negro and felt that only God knew how she would end up.