That Evening Sun Analysis

We have to zoom back a bit to get where Faulkner is coming from in this story. It's set in the U.S. South—in the fictional town of Jefferson in the nonfictional state of Mississippi, to be exactâ...

Yup: Quentin says "I" in this story as he narrates, so that clearly makes it a first person tale. Whether he's a central narrator or a peripheral one, however, depends a bit on how you read the sto...

This story is pretty much the textbook definition of Southern Gothic. Let us count the ways:Southern Gothic literature takes place in the first half of the twentieth century—check. All those cute...

The tone or attitude Faulkner writes this story with is so serious you'd think he was carving his words into granite. Notice, for example, the absence of jokes. Some of the children's behavior migh...

Faulkner, being a Nobel Prize winner for literature and all, writes some pretty dazzling prose. Emphatic is our first descriptor: imagine some towering granite statue taking thundering steps across...

Time for some blues: the title "That Evening Sun" comes from the words to "St. Louis Blues." This blues song opens with the line "I hate to see that evening sun go down" and tells the story of a wo...

The end of the story shows the father and his three children walking the lane back home as Nancy is left abandoned in her house, wailing. The twenty-four-year-old Quentin who is narrating seems, th...

William Faulkner is known to be one of the most difficult authors, with all his Modernist techniques and big vocabulary and long sentences. However, this is one of his easiest stories to get a grip...

Let's Learn about Quentin and NancyThe beginning of the tale lays the groundwork for the rest of the story. We see that the adult Quentin, our narrator, seems at first untroubled by recalling the...

Faulkner's fictional town of Jefferson is part of his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, which he drew maps of, just like we drew fictional maps as kids. Except he did it as an adultâ€...

This short story has some sexual content, none of it direct and none of it actually in the forward motion of the tale—that is, the stuff that happens on stage. Still, the sexual content plays a f...