Two by William Faulkner

Ironically, two things struck me most by this story. The first was the vivid language Faulkner used in his descriptions. "The salesman was asleep on the wet ground now, drawn into a ball against the dawn's wet chill, unshaven, the dashing city hat crumpled beneath his cheek, his necktie wrenched sideways in the collar of his soiled white shirt, his muddy trousers rolled to his knees, the brightly-polished shoes of yesterday now two shapeless lumps of caked mud" (86). Faulkner's writing, though often ambiguous and confusing, tells a story in an interesting perspective with beautiful descriptive language, which can throw the reader for a loop. The second thing I noticed was the theme of racial segregation. This theme, as we noted in class, is very common throughout Faulkner's stories. On the first page of the story, the salesman is described as "young, not yet thirty, with the assurance, the slightly soiled snap and dash, of his calling, and a white man" (76). However, during the negotiation on page 91, they "faced one another in the darkness, two shadows, faceless," which levels the playing field. Though one of the men may be white and the other black, in the dark there are no faces, no upper hands based on race.