40 pages • 1 hour read
William FaulknerIntruder In The Dust
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
In a small town in the American South, Charles Mallison hears that an African American man named Lucas Beauchamp has allegedly murdered a white man. More than any other white person in the small town, Charles feels as though he knows Lucas. As he watches the sheriff lead Lucas into the jail, he recalls the first time he met Lucas, when he was 12.
On that day, Charles went out hunting on the suggestion of his father’s friend, Edmonds. Charles was accompanied by an African American boy named Aleck Sander and another unnamed African American boy. As they crossed a creek, Charles slipped and fell. As he dealt with the “shock of the water” (5), Charles fumbled around for his dropped gun and saw “a Negro man with an axe on his shoulder” (6), Lucas Beauchamp. Lucas directed the other boys on how to help Charles from the water and, when Charles emerged dripping wet, the “intractable and composed” Lucas told the three boys to come eat at his house (7). Charles could not imagine contradicting Lucas, so the trio followed the man.
Lucas lived in a small house that, according to legend, had been “deeded” to him by Edmonds’ father. Inside the unfamiliar house, Charles dried his wet clothes. He met Lucas’s wife, “an old almost doll-sized woman” (10). Charles noted the strange but interesting smells of the house. He observed Lucas’s “gold toothpick,” like one his own grandfather owned. In spite of the boys’ attempts to leave, Lucas insisted that they stay for dinner. After, Charles tried to pay for the meal. Lucas refused to take his money. The money dropped on the floor and Lucas ordered the other boys to pick it up and return it to Charles. When they left, Lucas warned them to “stay out of that creek” (16).
Chapter 2 Summary
After leaving Lucas’s home, Charles resumed his hunt. At the creek, he threw the rejected coins into the water. Charles struggled to vocalize his “impotent fury” that an African American man would refuse his money. To repair his pride, he purchased Christmas presents for Lucas’s family. In return, however, Lucas sent a gift of his own. They were “right back where they had started” (23).
Four years later, Lucas’s wife, Molly, was dead and his daughter had married and moved out. Lucas was living alone in the small house. When he passed Charles in the street, they made conversation. Charles realized, however, that Lucas had “forgotten” him. In retrospect Charles believes that Lucas may have been grieving his wife’s death at the time but, the next time they passed, Lucas looked right through him. This lack of recognition signaled to Charles that it was “over” between them. He felt free of any obligation to or resentment of Lucas.
However, when Charles hears that Lucas has shot a man named Gowrie, he feels that he still owes Lucas something. Lucas is being held in the local jailhouse, where he is being guarded by a police officer with a shotgun. According to rumor, Lucas shot a man in Beat Four, “the wrong place” for a Black person to shoot a white person (27). Everyone presumes that the Gowrie family and others from Beat Four will come to kill Lucas. Charles resolves to visit his uncle Gavin, a lawyer. When he finally speaks to Gavin, however, Gavin seems certain that “[Charles’s] friend Beauchamp seems to have done it this time” (31). Nevertheless, he believes that he can have the sentence reduced to manslaughter if Lucas pleads guilty. Charles thinks about the long journey needed to fetch the local authorities; he knows that he will not have the time to make the journey before Lucas is attacked by the white mob. He remembers seeing Lucas being led into the jailhouse, when Lucas spotted him in the crowd and told him to fetch Gavin. The crowd joked that Lucas would be dead before he needed a lawyer.
Chapter 3 Summary
Charles and Gavin travel to the jailhouse. The streets are unusually deserted, Charles notes, though a white store owner recommends that they should turn Lucas over to the mob to save on food and board. At the jailhouse, they see a car full of young men speed by, circle around the building, and then drive away. A police officer named Will Legate is sitting outside the building with a shotgun. The men in the car, he says, have passed by several times. He does not “expect to stop them” if they try to enter the jail to attack Lucas (53). Gavin and Charles are led to Lucas’s cell. His hat and coat are “hanging neatly from a nail in the wall” (57). Lucas is lying on the bunk, on top of a pile of spread out papers. Gavin and Lucas talk, with Lucas hinting that he knows more about the murder than is publicly known. He wants to hire Gavin as his lawyer, though they have an acrimonious exchange. More importantly, however, Lucas wants to hire someone for an unspecified task. He describes how Vinson Gowrie and another, unnamed man were buying and selling lumber together. Gowrie, Lucas says, may have been “stealing a load of lumber every night or so” (63). Gavin outlines his plan to reduce Lucas’s sentence to manslaughter, which will likely result in spending the rest of his life in prison. He will not live long enough to be paroled but he will be safe from the Gowries’ revenge. Finally, Lucas asks for some tobacco.
After they leave, Charles offers to return to the jail to take tobacco to Lucas. He enters the jail, passing Will Legate, and talks to Lucas again. Lucas reveals his request: He wants Charles to go to the freshly dug grave where Vinson Gowrie is supposedly buried. He wants Charles to dig up the body to prove that the bullet that killed Vinson does not match the caliber of Lucas’s gun. Charles leaves, thinking about the absurdity and the danger of the request. Even as he exits, however, he knows that he will inevitably dig up the body and show it to “an expert that can tell about bullets” (73). Lucas, in the meantime, will try to wait.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Stream of consciousness is a literary technique that aims to capture the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that pass through the mind of the characters. William Faulkner employed this technique through many of his novels, including Intruder in the Dust. The opening chapters of the novel repeatedly employ this technique, as the narration charts the progress of Charles’s thoughts. He watches Lucas being dragged into the jail and then slips into a reverie, remembering the first time he met the man. As he seeks out his uncle and then leaves the meeting, however, Charles’s thoughts become almost overwhelming and unstoppable, reflecting his realization that nothing will stop him from helping Lucas, not even his own mental reasoning.
Charles’s decision to help Lucas is motivated by their complicated past and their Debt and Pride. Four years before the events of the novel, Charles fell in a creek. Lucas helped him to safety, then took the young white boy to his house to dry out and eat something. Charles offered Lucas money, which was bluntly rejected. Lucas is a proud man who did not want the young boy’s money. This memory is a formative moment in Charles’s life, the first instant when the racial hierarchy in which he was raised was challenged. He expected the African American man to subjugate himself to a white person and this did not happen. The memory is so formative that it dislodges the narrative, creating a linear time skip as the narration jumps back four years. Lucas’s generosity created a debt, and his subsequent refusal to accept symbolic or monetary repayment has left Charles with a lingering sense of indebtedness, even four years later. In the narrative present, he resolves to pay his outstanding debt to Lucas.
This section introduces the theme of Race and Justice, raising the question of whether justice is possible for a wrongfully accused Black man in a racist society. With Lucas in the jail, a crowd gathers outside the building, threatening to kill Lucas for his supposed crime. Throughout the novel, the crowd exists as a singular entity, an expression of white supremacy and a craving for blood driven by groupthink rather than individual reasoning. This makes it a seemingly unstoppable force, in contrast with the apparent inefficacy of legal minds like Gavin. While Charles wants to help Lucas achieve justice, Gavin can only offer bureaucratic solutions. He can reduce Lucas’s sentence, he says, though he believes that mob “justice” is inevitable at this point. Gavin, as the representative of the legal system, has an innate pessimism for Lucas’s survival. Innocence and guilt do not matter in the face of the mob.
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