ABSTRACT
William Faulkner's new novel,.Jntruder in the Dust, is the story of a Negro with white blood who refusesto behave with the submissiveness demanded ofhis color in the South and has developed so rigid a pride that, even when wrongfully charged with the murder of a white man, he can hardly bring himself to stoop to defend himself against his race enemy. The narrative dealswith the adventures ofthe handful ofpeople in the community (theJefferson, Mississippi, which is the locale ofmost ofFaulkner's fiction) who, having come to respect Lucas' independence, interest themselves in his case and' exert themselves to save him from lynching. These champions include a boy of sixteen, who had once been rescued by Lucas when he had fallen through the ice; the boy's uncle, a local lawyer, who has lived abroad and has, to some degree, been able to surmount provincial prejudices; and an old lady of the
best local quality, who had grown up with the accusedman's dead wife in the relation of mistress and maid. All the happenings are presented from the point of view of the boy. It is his loyalty to the old Negro that leads to the discovery of evidence that the crime has been committed by someone else; and his emergence, under the stimulus of events, out of boyhood into comparative maturity is as much the subject of the book as the predicament of the Negro. The real theme is the relation between the two.
