1“Knight’s Gambit might appropriately have been entitled ‘The Education of Gavin Stevens,’” writes Michael Millgate in The Achievement of William Faulkner (269). Like him, many critics have commented on the importance of Gavin Stevens in this collection of crime stories. Even Faulkner himself, in a letter to his editor Saxe Commins in 1948, explains: “I am thinking of a ‘Gavin Stevens’ volume, more or less detective stories” (280). The attention given to him has led the character of his nephew Charles (or Chick) Mallison, who appears in four of the six stories, to be overlooked. In his article “‘Nice Believing’: Mystery and Mysteries in Light in August,” Sean McCann compares Light in August with Knight’s Gambit and writes, for instance: “Stevens’s nephew Chick Mallison plays in that collection a version of the sidekick role so common in classic detective fiction” (75). The aim of this article is to show that Charles Mallison is more than that and that Knight’s Gambit could in fact have been entitled “The Education of Charles Mallison.” Indeed, this collection could be read not only as a collection of crime stories, but as a form of Bildungsroman. Son of an absent father, Chick follows his uncle, the county attorney, on his mission to solve the criminal mysteries of Yoknapatawpha County, from the age of twelve in “Tomorrow” to almost eighteen in “Knight’s Gambit.” He observes his uncle and narrates the stories in which he appears. In the course of these narratives, the young boy will turn into a man, achieving maturity and self-knowledge. This growth is facilitated by his uncle Gavin Stevens, who serves as father figure and substitutes for the actual absent progenitor. Still, Charles Mallison is not only a character in these stories; he is also, more importantly, the narrator. Telling these stories about his uncle, but also himself, grants him what Paul Ricoeur calls narrative identity, enabling him to achieve personal identity.
2The symbolic filiation between Charles and his uncle is especially visible as Chick’s father is conspicuously absent. He is never present in the diegesis and only referred to twice in the stories. Interestingly these mentions are both related to his death: in “An Error in Chemistry,” Chick talks about his “own father before he died” (132) and in “Knight’s Gambit,” he refers to books that “he would heir in his turn from his mother and father who had heired them in their turn” (149). Chick’s direct predecessor being absent, both symbolically and physically, the authority figure becomes his uncle. This authority is made apparent in “Knight’s Gambit” when the narrator describes Stevens’s “mild voice, which he—Charles—knew anyway, and, if it had been addressed to him, would have leaped at once to hold his hat” (145), and even more so when Chick needs to disturb his uncle during his translation of the Old Testament, but “his instinct was to stop, avoid evade—anything rather than violate that interdiction, that hour, that ritual of the Translation which the whole family referred to with a capital T” (216).
3Gavin Stevens is not only Charles Mallison’s uncle, for he can also be said to be his symbolic father, whose first characteristic is to embody the Law through speech. As a county attorney, Gavin Stevens represents the Law, as asserted by Max Harriss in “Knight’s Gambit” (“‘You’re the Law here, aren’t you?’” [144]). Alain Geoffroy, in “Defaulting Fathers in Faulkner’s Knight’s Gambit,” also sees Gavin Stevens “as not only a representative of the law, but as a symbolic father whose authority only can re-establish order: like a psychoanalyst, Stevens unveils the truth, which puts everyone back to his or her legitimate place” (179). Stevens’s role as a symbolic father also introduces the subject into the realm of language. And that is what he does with his nephew Charles in different ways: he teaches him how to write legal documents as is shown in “An Error in Chemistry”—when “Uncle Gavin was supervising [him] in the drawing of a brief” (115)—but he also manages to make county people talk, which enables Charles to learn what he would never have known otherwise. He frees people’s speech because he is more than an epitome of the Law. He represents a form of greater good, as his nephew says in “Tomorrow”: “It was as if people looked at his face and knew that what he asked was not just for his own curiosity or his own selfish using” (96). However, he does not merely encourage people to speak, as he is also a great talker himself, teaching Chick about life. Patrick Samway asserts that “his [Stevens’s] primary role, it seems to me, is to communicate through word and action the wisdom that is part of the family’s and community’s heritage” (149). It is through Stevens’s language that Chick Mallison can identify himself in terms of geographical and individual filiation.
4Yet, Stevens is not only a symbol of authority; he also represents knowledge and experience of life. In “Tomorrow,” when Charles and he are trying to figure out why Stonewall Jackson Fentry, a farmer, refused to free Bookwright who was being tried for the murder of Buck Thorpe, who had seduced his seventeen-year-old daughter, Charles as narrator explains: “But Uncle Gavin says it don’t take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered, he died” (103). The somebody he refers to is W. Somerset Maugham in Of Human Bondage, published in 1915. In this novel, when the main character Philip learns that one of his old friends has died, he ponders on man’s mortality, especially his own. He remembers the story of an Eastern king on his deathbed when “the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end” (572). This nihilistic vision of life recalls another of Faulkner’s fathers, Mr. Compson, who, in The Sound and the Fury, gives his son Quentin a watch and tells him: “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s” (76). This indirect comparison with Mr. Compson emphasizes Stevens’s fatherly stance, but also his propensity for passing down the bits of wisdom he deems necessary to turn the boy into a man. He also portrays himself as even wiser than a direct predecessor by accentuating their age difference through a hyperbole (“Because I know one octogenarian of fifty who will put nothing past seventeen and eighteen and nineteen” [Knight’s 183]). This hyperbole enables him to say that the young Harrisses are dangerous “because they have never had anybody to tell them they are young and stupid whom they had enough respect for or fear of to believe” (184). What he implies here is that, contrary to them, Charles has him, whom he both respects and fears, to tell him he is young and stupid, when the need arises. And he does so in “Tomorrow,” when Chick explains that he would have freed Bookwright, Stevens answers: “[Y]ou wouldn’t have freed him either. Don’t ever forget that. Never” (110). Stevens’s claim, that he knows what Chick would have done better than he does, verges on threat, and, being the last words of the short story, reveal the power and influence the uncle exerts on the nephew’s identity.
5The investigations involving Charles Mallison can thus be interpreted as rites of passage, as John T. Irwin explains:
[T]he father-figure’s task is to bring the young man from adolescence to maturity, to conduct a kind of rite of passage by establishing, through a veiled, and sometimes not so veiled, competition with the young man, the older man’s authority to instruct him, a paternal authority able to command the young man’s respect and thus allow him to learn from the older man. (108)
6Indeed, these detective stories reflect the evolution of the young man who goes from witness to agent. In “Monk” and “Tomorrow,” Charles merely tells the story of his uncle trying to help Monk and Bookwright; in “An Error in Chemistry,” he takes on more substance as he becomes an actor in his own stories: he depicts himself as being mentored by his uncle and at the end of the story, he helps his uncle and the sheriff arrest Joel Flint. However, even if there is a progression in the young man’s role in these investigations, he follows his uncle, but never initiates the actions. In “An Error in Chemistry,” he understands the implications of Old Man Pritchel’s recipe for the cold toddy, but a bit too late as it is his middle-aged uncle who reacts first: “Uncle Gavin sprang toward him” (132). It is only later that young Charles intervenes: “Then we were all three on him” (133). In spite of a better apprehension of things, Charles does not surpass the uncle yet. However, the last story, “Knight’s Gambit,” presents the maturation of the teenager and his growth from boyhood to manhood. Indeed, the beginning of the narration reveals that Charles is in the same maturity stage as in the previous short stories, as he is always a bit too late or behind his uncle. When the Harriss and Cayley girls start fighting in Stevens’s house, it is the uncle who “g[ets] there first, between them this time” (195) while Charles is merely an observer. The young man realizes this when he is undressing, looking at his uniform and thinking about his wish to go to war:
. . . each time he looked at it, in the eyes of that heart’s thirst (if that’s what it was), certainly in the irremediable regret which had been his these last months after he realised that it was too late, that he had procrastinated, deferred too long, lacking not only the courage but even the will and the desire and the thirst . . . (206)
7His uniform, even if it is an actual army khaki is an ironic symbol of his manhood: a military uniform epitomizes courage and masculinity, but the mock outfit he wears on Thursdays for the drill at the Academy reminds him that he is merely impersonating a soldier. The sorrow he feels stems from the fact that he wants to be a man, but realizes that he is still only a boy because he has delayed action. This incident is illustrative of him in the course of the stories, but the end of “Knight’s Gambit” shows an evolution. Indeed, this time, Charles is the one who solves the mystery when he understands that Max Harriss has bought McCallum’s horse to kill Captain Gualdres. Then he dares to interrupt his uncle’s ritual of translation, which means defying his uncle’s authority, thus asserting his own identity. Finally, his uncle lets him drive them to the Harriss residence, granting him a new adult status. That is further emphasized at the end of the story when Charles comes back as a soldier, and meets his uncle at the station for a few minutes before leaving again:
[S]imply because he wore the uniform, a trained expert in a hundred-ton machine costing a hundred thousand dollars had expended three or four dollars’ worth of coal and pounds of hard-earned steam to tell an eighteen-year-old boy that he had spent enough time gossiping with his uncle . . . (257)
8Charles has finally become the soldier he wanted to be, and this manhood is further dramatized by the fact that an “expert,” meaning an authority in his field, has too much respect for him to shout at him “as he would have five years ago (or for that matter, five months ago)” (257), but blows the whistle at him. The symbolic relationship between uncle and nephew has thus brought about an evolution in the young man’s maturity, but achieving a new self-comprehension must also come from himself, through his narrative.
9In “Monk,” the first story he tells, Chick’s narrative identity is very fragile, as the incipit shows: “I will have to try to tell about Monk” (41). From the beginning, he expresses his feeling of inadequacy in his role as narrator, in his ability to convey through words what he wants to signify. This perceived sense of narrative insufficiency is further emphasized by the repetition of the phrase “as I said” which is used four times in the course of three pages (46-48). This recurrence is a way for him to assert his narrative authority, but only achieves weakening it as a narrator should not have to insist on his previous statements. Furthermore, the fact that two of these occurrences appear between parentheses, hence as an aside, paradoxically stresses their importance as they appear although they are not considered essential.
10Along with this form of narrative self-sabotage, Chick’s storytelling is fraught with phrases revealing uncertainty, like “I think” or “I don’t think” that are repeated three times in the span of a few lines (50) or “I don’t believe” (51), that cast doubt as to the verity of what is being said. Chick, as narrator, also addresses the reader twice with the question “You see?” followed by “If it were true” (48) and “It just does not add up” (52). Not only is he here bringing into question the congruity of his own story, but his addressing the reader directly shows his own frustration at his story. Yet the most undermining is his uncle’s response: “‘It adds up, all right’” (53), showing that although Charles cannot find meaning in the story, his uncle can, hence shattering even further his narrative control. This uncertainty is further made clear in “An Error in Chemistry” when he explains “I don’t believe he even looked after them as they went out, though I couldn’t be sure because of the glare on his spectacles” (130): the double irresolution creates mistrust in the reliability of Chick’s story.
11Conversely, Gavin Stevens seems to have a strong narrative authority, at least at first, as is shown in his description in “Knight’s Gambit”:
What surprised him was his uncle: that glib and talkative man who talked so much and so glibly, particularly about things which had absolutely no concern with him, that his was indeed a split personality: the one, the lawyer, the county attorney who walked and breathed and displaced air; the other, the garrulous facile voice so garrulous and facile that it seemed to have no connection with reality at all and presently hearing it was like listening not even to fiction but to literature. (147-48)
12The number of adjectives related to speech in Gavin’s characterization and their repetition convey the impression that it is the man’s main attribute, which is further emphasized by the idea of a gap in his identity between the commonsensical, down to earth body of the lawyer and the ethereal voice of the artist. The simile comparing the voice “not even to fiction but to literature” endows it with a form of universality and abstraction that grants Stevens in turn a superior narrative status. That quality is again highlighted later in the story when the narrator praises the “quick fantastic voice which lent not only a perspicacity but a sort of solid reasonableness to the most fantastic inconsequence” (188): the polysemic repetition of the word “fantastic” coupled with the antithesis expressed in the last part of this quote brings out the all-encompassing nature of Gavin Stevens’s voice.
13In this narrative emulation between uncle and nephew, the former seems to have the upper hand. However, this voice that seemed to grant Stevens narrative authority proves, in fact, to be a façade meant to hide the truth. This new perception of his oratory skills is visible in “Knight’s Gambit,” when the narrator characterizes it by saying “the voice which talked constantly not because its owner loved talking but because he knew that while it was talking, nobody else could tell what he was not saying” (154): the voice is clearly described as disconnected from Gavin Stevens through the use of the pronouns “he/it.” What is striking is that the voice, which is usually the mark of an ontological presence, here becomes a form of masquerade miming presence so as to conceal the absence of authenticity. The access to truth can only be achieved through the examination of the lawyer’s silence. Indeed, for all Stevens’s propensity to talk, the reader is made aware of a period of Gavin’s life when he becomes voiceless: “this was the year during which his uncle seemed to have stopped talking very much about anything” (162). Near the end of the story, it becomes obvious that this period of silence was when he learnt that the woman he loved had married another man and become Mrs Harriss. His absence of speech is the manifestation of his grief showing that, for Gavin Stevens, ontological authenticity cannot be articulated. His narrative control therefore appears efficient, as he determines what he wants people to know about him and offers them no more information, but also so restrained that it prevents him from achieving truthfulness and thus a form of narrative identity.
14On the other hand, Charles’s narrative authority strengthens itself in the course of the different short stories as the uncertainty of the first story he tells gives way to a more controlled narration in “Knight’s Gambit.” It could be argued that Charles is not the narrator of this short story as it is told in the third person, but I would contend that he is not merely the focalizer. In Figures III, Gérard Genette explains the different forms of perspectives and the different classifications involving point of view and voice and he quotes Friedman and his sixth type: “story told by a character, but in the third person,” remarking on “the obvious confusion between the focal character (what James called the ‘reflector’) and the narrator” (my translation; 205). Such is the case here as the story could be told in the first person without making any changes apart for the pronouns. An element of the story corroborates this theory, when Chick is discussing the case with his uncle and the narrator says: “And he repeated that too, with his mouth still open probably” (Knight’s 146). The presence of the adverb “probably” is telling as, if the narrator were heterodiegetic and omniscient, there would be no doubt as to whether Chick’s mouth was open or not. Only Chick as narrator could wonder if he, as a character, could have his mouth still open. It is the trace of a doubling between Charles the narrator and Charles the character—the two being merged in the other short stories. Paradoxically, this doubling is the sign that Charles’s narrative identity is strong enough to stage himself in his story as if he were a regular character.
15In his work Time and Narrative, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes three different times in narrative mimesis: mimesis I is the prefigured time that reflects lived experience and that he defines as “a pre-understanding of the world of action” (54). This mimesis is then configured, emplotted by the narrator during mimesis II that serves as a mediator between mimesis I and mimesis III, which is the time of reading and refiguration. In other words “[w]e are therefore following the destiny of a prefigured time that becomes a refigured time through the mediation of a configured time” (Time and Narrative 1, 54). Telling one’s story means connecting life events and creating a temporal unity that brings coherence to a life thus perceived as a whole, giving it meaning. Apart from this unity, reinforced by the fusion between character and narrator, the narrative of one’s own temporal experience leads to self-identification and enables a hermeneutic interpretation of one’s own story and thus a better self-knowledge. This is what happens in “Knight’s Gambit,” when Charles stages himself as a soldier in his own fantasy: “each time he looked at it, . . . the khaki altered transmogrified dissolved like the moving-picture shot, to the blue of Britain and the hooked wings of a diving falcon and the modest braid of rank” (206). The simile referring to cinema clearly strengthens the passage’s ties to fictionality, emphasized by the progression of the three verbs signifying a form of grotesque transformation from the fake uniform he wears to an actual British soldier’s uniform. In so doing, Charles configures his lived experience of his drills at the Academy into a fictional episode in which he is a pilot for the RAF. Fantasizing that he is a fighter allows the young man to envision himself, as if from an external point of view, as a soldier, a man. This mimesis II thus enables Charles to see himself from a distance and make a hermeneutic interpretation of himself, leading him to a better self-understanding.
16His narrative identity does not only stem from the hermeneutic interpretation he can make of himself as a character. It also emanates from his role as narrator. As such, he is the one in control of the narrative. If, as a character, Charles seems to be the sidekick of his uncle, who is the protagonist of all these stories, Charles the narrator can be considered as the creator of his uncle’s character, or in other words, the father of his uncle. If the uncle is presented as superior to others and specifically to Charles, it is because the young man himself wants to portray him that way. The reader should thus not see it as a sort of inferiority on the nephew’s part but, on the contrary, the superiority of the storyteller wishing to feature his main character as a hero, to put him in the spotlight. His decision to represent himself as a secondary character should thus be seen as a sign of his narrative authority, and not of submission to an overbearing uncle.
17Although Faulkner wrote these short stories decades before Ricoeur published his theories, the writer had sensed the importance of storytelling to bring meaning and a sense of coherence to one’s life. The metafictional comments in the short stories express a link between literature and life, or, more precisely, they draw attention to the way the events experienced in life can be assimilated to the episodes of a plot: “the county had been watching it unfold as the subscribers read and wait and watch for the serial’s next installment” (Knight’s 149) or “that whole broad generation of spinster aunts . . . watched it as you watch the unfolding story in the magazine installments” (155). Narrative temporality is important here because there are two different times of storytelling and reading in these quotations: there is the diegetic present when events are happening and no one knows what is going to happen next, as in installments, and there is the present of the extradiegetic narrator. There is no mention of this date in the story, but the many references to memory (“I can remember the surprise” [90]; “I remember” [91, 92]; “But I would have remembered his name anyway” [93]; “I remember” [twice on page 132]…) show that the narration takes place sometime after the end of the events. The difference between the two is that in the first instance—the comparison with the installments—there is no configuration of the story. The absence of temporal distance prevents the county and the spinsters from knowing which event is important and which is not, and so from ordering episodes into a whole story, what Ricoeur calls “concordance” and that he defines in the following way:
The key opposition is here: one thing after another and one thing because of another (“in a causal sequence” [di’allèla]). . . . One after the other is merely episodic and therefore improbable, one because of the other is a causal sequence and therefore probable. No doubt is allowed. The kind of universality that a plot calls for derives from its ordering, which brings about its completeness and its wholeness. (Time and Narrative 1, 41)
18Telling the story from a temporal distance allows Charles to order it as a causal sequence, thus creating a complete and whole story, granting him further narrative authority. Ricoeur adds that it can be said that a plot equivalently “draws a meaningful story from a diversity of events or incidents (Aristotle’s pragmata) or that it transforms the events or incidents into a story” (65). It is striking to see how close Charles’s metafictional comment at the beginning of “Monk” is to this explanation: “Because it is only in literature that the paradoxical and even mutually negativing anecdotes in the history of a human heart can be juxtaposed and annealed by art into verisimilitude and credibility” (Knight’s 41). This observation, written in the narrator’s present, so probably with enough hindsight to gain critical distance, shows that the adult Charles understands how telling the story of someone, here Monk, or of oneself, can bring about a form of understanding of the other and of the self.
19After writing Time and Narrative, Ricoeur understood that he had overlooked a key aspect in his work—that of personal identity. In his book Oneself as Another, he thus analyzes the question of selfhood that he defines as being composed of two models of “permanence in time” (117): idem and ipse. Idem, or sameness, corresponds to “character” (119), that the philosopher defines as “the set of distinctive marks which permit the reidentification of a human individual as being the same” (119) while ipse, or selfhood, is associated with “self-constancy” (123), illustrated by “keeping one’s words in faithfulness to the word that has been given” (123). According to Ricoeur, the polarity between these two forms of permanence in time creates an “interval of sense” (124), and it is that interval that narrative identity occupies to serve as a mediator between idem and ipse, enabling the constitution of personal identity, through a hermeneutics of the self. In “Knight’s Gambit,” Charles goes through a similar experience when he sees a horse-van in town, understands the implications of such a presence, and runs to his uncle’s house to tell him, only to find him working and remembering he is not allowed to interrupt:
And he, Charles, thought how if he had been eight instead of almost eighteen, he wouldn’t have paid any attention even to that student lamp and that shut door; or how if he had been twenty-four instead of eighteen, he wouldn’t have been here at all just because another boy nineteen years old bought a horse. Then he thought how maybe that was backward; that he would have been hurrying faster than ever at twenty-four and at eight he wouldn’t have come at all since at eighteen all he knew to do was just the hurrying, the haste, the astonishment, since, his uncle to the contrary or not, his was one eighteen anyway which couldn’t begin to anticipate how Max Harriss’s nineteen hoped to circumvent or retaliate on anybody with even that horse. (217)
20Charles ponders his reaction to the situation depending on his age. In so doing, he realizes that he could have had similar or opposite reactions at the ages of eight or twenty-four because these two responses—rushing into the house despite his uncle’s interdiction or not caring enough to even be there—are the those that constitute him, which corresponds to Ricoeur’s idem. Despite this permanence in time, Charles is confronted with the choice he has to make at the time of the story, when he is eighteen and overwhelmed with the circumstances. The decision he makes epitomizes what Ricoeur later theorized as ipse. By imagining himself and what he would have done at different ages in his own thoughts, Charles gains some form of critical distance with himself. However, he is here in the middle of his own story, and he does not know what the end will be as he does not yet comprehend what Max Harris is planning to do with the horse. In other words, at the time of Charles’s reflection, he does not yet know how important his discovery is for the case: he does know if it is simply a coincidence, or if it is the element that will crack the case, or if his uncle will rebuke him or will welcome the intrusion. According to Ricoeur, “[b]ecause of the concordant-discordant synthesis, the contingency of the event contributes to the necessity, retroactive so to speak, of the history of a life, to which is equated the identity of the character. Thus chance is transmuted into fate” (Oneself as Another 147). In the previous quotation from Faulkner’s story, there is no synthesis of the heterogeneous as there is none of the temporal distance required to be able to configure the event within a narrative. However, narrative identity that, according to the French philosopher, can be assimilated, to “the identity of the character” (Oneself as Another 141) is threatened until the discordances are emplotted within the story and been given meaning. So until Charles is able to make sense of what he saw through its configuration within the mysterious plot, his narrative identity, and thus his personal identity, cannot be fully achieved.
21A temporal and geographical distance is achieved when Charles leaves for the army. At the end of “Knight’s Gambit,” he has been gone for a few months when his train passes through Jefferson, and he sees his mother and Gavin Stevens. He then tells his uncle about the visit he had from Captain Gualdres, who had enlisted in the American Army:
[R]emembering, still recapitulant, not amazed or if amazed, the tireless timeless amazement of the child watching tireless and timeless the repetitive Punch and Judy booth: that afternoon and no warning whatever until the summons to the orderly room, and there Captain Gualdres was ‘—in a private’s uniform, looking more like a horse than ever, maybe because of the fact that he had got himself into the one situation or condition above earth—a 1942 United States Army cavalry regiment—where as long as the war lasted he would have no contact whatever with horses—’ himself (Charles) repetitive too. . . . (254)
22The reference to theatricality through the Punch and Judy puppet show is significant as, by drawing a parallel between the child watching the show and Charles revisioning the scene in his memory, it places the young man in the position of spectator of his own configuration. He is thus both a spectator and an actor in the staging of this event in his life, enabling him to create a form of doubling of himself which grants him the distance with himself he needs to achieve a hermeneutics of himself. This gap between himself as actor and himself as spectator is further emphasized through the repetition of words related to amazement, which convey the impression that Charles is rediscovering his memory as if it were the first time he was seeing it, even though the repetitions of “tireless and timeless” and “repetitive” show that this is not by far his first reminiscence of the event. By watching himself act through his memory, he is trying to understand his role in the story, all the more so since, as he confesses during the conversation with his uncle, he still does not know why Captain Gualdres wanted him to tell Stevens “‘Perhaps you are satisfied now’” (255). Yet, in so doing, he is staging himself keeping the promise he made to Gualdres that day. The notion of keeping one’s word is the image Ricoeur uses to illustrate the pole of ipse, which means that by configuring his story to tell his uncle that he is true to the word he gave Gualdres, he is constituting his selfhood through narration.
23The motif of the puppet show is also significant as it recalls the quotation with which the narrator begins the second chapter of the short story: “Yet these were the people—the puppets, the paper dolls; the situation, impasse, morality play, medicine show, whichever you liked best—dropped out of a clear sky into his uncle’s lap . . .” (181). In this extract, Charles establishes Gavin Stevens as the puppet master, namely the person who has control and authority over the protagonists of the story, but in fact, as narrator, he is the one manipulating the story by configurating it. Charles’s role as puppet master is highlighted at the end of the story when at the conclusion of his conversation with his uncle, he tells him he does not believe Gavin Stevens’s account of the mistake in the letters he had sent to the two women he loved twenty years before. His uncle then gives him a new version of the story, in which he had met Mrs Harriss in Paris to ask her why she hadn’t waited for him and she had answered that he had been the one who had rejected her because “[she] wasn’t smart enough for [him]” (257) and Charles answers:
“Yes,” he said. “That’s better. I might even buy that one. And that was twenty years ago. And it was true then or at least enough then or at least enough for you then. And now it’s twenty years later and it’s not true now or at least not enough now or at least not enough for you now. How did just years do all that?”
“They made me older,” his uncle said. “I have improved.” (257-58)
24What is interesting here is that by having his uncle change the ending of his narrative as he did not find it credible enough, Charles is both the audience and the orchestrator of the story. He does not want the ending to be based on “coincidence” (255), but wants it to reflect his uncle’s growth. The alternate denouement enables him to draw a comparison between Gavin twenty years before and Gavin at the time of the diegesis through an antithesis with a completely parallel, but negative structure. The uncle’s answer, which constitutes the final words of the short story and of the collection, reflects the balance he has achieved between idem and ipse: he is the same, but better, meaning he has completed a form of improved permanence in time. In his article “Faulkner’s ‘Knight’s Gambit’: Sentimentality and the Creative Imagination,” Edmond L. Volpe writes: “The double ending of Knight’s Gambit is an acknowledgement by Faulkner that though the Southern writer’s sentiment for the past is real, it is engendered by imagination, not reality, and must therefore be expressed as fiction” (239). I would argue that the double ending is also a way for Charles to configure the character of the uncle and stage his achievement of personal identity.
25The hermeneutics of his uncle’s story leads Charles to reflect on his own identity. As Ricoeur explains in the third volume of Time and Narrative, refiguration entails a transformation of the self:
The function of standing-for or of taking-the-place-of is paralleled in fiction by the function it possesses, with respect to everyday practice, of being undividedly revealing and transforming. Revealing, in the sense that it brings features to light that were concealed and yet already sketched out at the heart of our experience, our praxis. Transforming, in the sense that a life examined in this way is a changed life, another life. (158)
26Although Charles’s story focusses on his uncle’s life, he is in fact examining his own through the mediation of the characters of his uncle and of himself. Indeed, his insistence on making his uncle admit that the reason why he has not married Mrs Harriss is not a coincidence shows that his narrative has been revealing enough of his uncle for him to know that the incident with the letters could not be true. Being able to see Stevens in this new light is essential as it allows the young man to have new critical distance on this father figure, enabling him to achieve a new form of maturity. It also brings to light, more importantly, his own personal identity. As Ricoeur explains, “Oneself as Another suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other,” or, in other words, that oneself should not be considered as “similar to another” but “as being other” (Oneself as Another 3). Seeing himself as another through the mediation of his story makes him become aware of his own permanence in time, through the two models that are character and keeping one’s word. This new vision of himself is transformative as it grants him access to his personal identity.
27In her article “William Faulkner’s ‘Knight’s Gambit’ and Gavin Stevens,” Mary Montgomery Dunlap writes: “At the end of ‘Knight’s Gambit’ not only is Stevens older, but also Charles Mallison has grown in understanding. In many ways, the title story can be viewed as the nephew’s awakening to a knowledge of the man who is his uncle, as his (and our) coming to awareness of Gavin Stevens as a human who is fallible . . . and in this work a human who grows” (239). Charles Mallison has grown in understanding, not only of his uncle’s identity, but more importantly of his own. This story as well as the others he narrates figure his access to a better self-knowledge through the temporal unity of the story giving coherence to the life that is being told. The hermeneutics of the self thus achieved grants Charles a form of permanence in time that engenders personal identity. The enigma the young man manages to solve at the end is thus not only that of the plot against Captain Gualdres, but also the mystery of his own self.