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PATRICIDES AND NEAR-PATRICIDES HAUNT FAULKNER'S YOKNAPATAWPHA novels. Young Bayard accidently (?) kills Old Bayard in Flags in the Dust. Sarty Snopes may have precipitated his father's death in "Barn Burning." Joe Christmas may well have killed Simon McEachern in Light in August. Linda Snopes uses Mink as her surrogate in killing Flem in The Mansion. Perhaps The Unvanquished provides another surrogate killing: Bayard waiting until Redmond murders John to launch himself into the world on his own terms. Fairly or not, all these characters feel themselves constricted by patriarchal presence. In patricide they seek freedom from malign patriarchal oppression, sometimes physical, always psychological, sometimes intended, sometimes not.
Though the families in these patricidal fictions are variously dysfunctional, two of Faulkner's later children, happily, come of age in functional families. Charles (Chick) Mallison and Lucius Priest both seem to have families with fathers who provide and model the discipline that shapes them, yet they feel no oppression in that discipline, and they experience no strong patricidal impulses toward their fathers and father figures. These exceptions to the patricidal pattern seem to stem in part from the aims of the discipline administered by their fathers; in addition to disciplining the boys, they also free them, for they aim their discipline at preparing the boys for independent adult life. In addition, when these boy protagonists of Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers separate themselves from their birth families, they gather ad hoc families in which they adopt and adapt the models of fatherhood they have experienced as they see new needs and develop new purposes. In doing so, they see that chief among those purposes is to use the strength their patriarchal societies give them as rising fathers to protect, strengthen, and free the most vulnerable members of their communities just as their parents had protected, strengthened, and freed them. As they begin functioning as responsible fathers themselves, they demonstrate the nature of such a position in the novels' racist and sexist communities, leading to the novels' ultimate recognition that any form of fatherhood embedded in a patriarchal society will not be enough to end the racism and sexism the young protagonists oppose. They must not only practice a responsible form of fatherhood...