The good and the evil surrounding the boy battle for his attention.
The boy's awareness is all that the reader sees, and that awareness
develops in the course of the story. The boy is introduced in the opening
lines, and Faulkner also create a strong picture of the scene in a few
words: "The store in which the Justice of the peace's court was sitting
smelled of cheese" (2023). The smell of the cheese is more fascinating to
the boy than the proceedings until he is called as a witness, and at that
point it is apparent that he has knowledge of the crime and that he will
lie because to do otherwise would bring down the wrath of his father on the
boy. This happens anyway because the father later says he knows the boy
would have told, but at the time the boy says to himself that he will lie
just as his father wants. At this stage, his better nature is held in
check, while the father's influence is strong. The father has never been
any good, and the Civil War era helped shape him, as is noted when the
wound he received from the military police is noted. The father commits a
crime that is considered especially low and cowardly--he commits arson on
the barns of people he believes have slighted him. He does this in the
dead of night, and he thinks he has the upper hand whenever the court finds
no evidence by which he can be tried and convicted for his crime. The boy
is expected always to support the father, as the father himself tells him:
"You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any
The father is the evil influence on the boy, an influence he is
finallly able to escape. The inner reaction of the boy shows that he has a
moral sense his father does not, as we hear what he would say 20 years
later to his father's claim that "they," the enemy, want only to get at the
father because they know he had beaten them: "If I had said they wanted
...