During a career as a writer spanning five decades, 1949 Nobel laureate William Faulkner wrote nineteen novels and more than seventy short stories. As one of his most anthologized stories, “That Evening Sun” demonstrates the best elements of Faulkner’s fictional technique and augments his achievements as a modern American writer. The original manuscript was titled “Never Done No Weeping When You Wanted to Laugh” and told from Nancy’s point of view.

The story was reworked to be told from a child’s perspective and retitled “That Evening Sun Go Down” for its initial 1931 publication in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine. The story again was retitled with the omission of the last two words and was revised and reprinted in subsequent collections of the author’s short stories, including These Thirteen (1931), Collected Stories (1950), and Selected Short Stories (1962).

Nancy’s story is filtered through the perceptions of children. The young Compsons observe the story’s events as they unfold, but they understand very little of what is happening to Nancy or its significance. Nevertheless, in the process of recreating conversations between his parents and Nancy, Nancy and Jesus, Nancy and Dilsey, and Nancy and the children, Quentin captures his family’s ineffectual attempts to calm and protect her. Lacking closure and resolution, Nancy’s fate is not disclosed at the story’s end, but there are signs, including a bloody hog bone left by Jesus on the kitchen table, that she will be killed.

The story’s title is a phrase taken from “St. Louis Blues,” a popular blues song written in 1914 by composer, singer, and bandleader W. C. Handy, with whom Faulkner would have been familiar. “That Evening Sun” is one of four stories written by Faulkner in which he incorporates elements from blues music into his fiction for literary purposes. The other three are two novels, Soldier’s Pay (1926) and Sartoris (1929), and “Pantaloon in Black,” part of the short story sequence Go Down, Moses (1942).

Set in Mississippi’s northern hill country in Faulkner’s imagined Yoknapatawpha County, “That Evening Sun” vividly depicts social relations in the Jim Crow South. The story’s narrator, the twenty-four-year-old Quentin Compson, has grown up as a member of a privileged white family; he has been directly exposed to and absorbed a way of life that assumes people of color will fulfill subservient roles without protest. The experiences recounted in this story also relate to what Quentin’s experiences as a main character in the novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), written before “That Evening Sun,” when Quentin is a student at Harvard University. The outcome of Nancy’s plight anticipates Quentin’s suicide in the novel (a suicide that inexplicably takes place five years before Quentin turns twenty-four). Common to both the story and the novel as well are the characters Caddy and Nancy. Each is the victim of sexist behavior. What happens to Nancy in the story and Caddy in the novel shows how gender issues parallel those of race and class.

“That Evening Sun” is primarily Nancy’s story, but it is a story readers enter and understand only indirectly because Nancy does not tell her story in her own words. Instead, by having Quentin tell her story, Faulkner keeps his readers distanced from the world Nancy inhabits. By not giving her voice directly, Faulkner has Quentin objectify her situation. This strategy also parallels his strategy in The Sound and the Fury, in which Faulkner tells Caddy’s story through her three brothers and an omniscient narrator, rather than giving her a voice of her own.

Quentin’s narration is as an observer more than as a participant,...