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.
Character Analysis
Charles Mallison
Charles Mallison is the young protagonist of Intruder in the Dust. His youth is an important part of his character, distinguishing him from the generations who have come before. While Charles is a part of this new generation of men from the American South, however, he unknowingly remains beholden to the views of the previous generations. Charles’s relationship with Lucas is evidence of this. Lucas helps Charles to escape from a creek then offers to dry and feed Charles in his house nearby. Charles, a young man who has grown up with African American servants in his house, who has slowly absorbed the racial politics of the previous generation, finds himself offended when Lucas refuses to take money for helping him. Charles cannot express why Lucas’s pride offends him so much. He does not consider himself a racist, nor particularly aggrieved by African American people, yet he has internalized an understanding of the racial order of the world that situates him (a white man) at the top of the hierarchy. Lucas’s pride, therefore, offends this sense of hierarchy, even if Charles lacks the understanding of his world needed to vocalize this. Some years later, when he sees Lucas being dragged into jail to answer for a murder charge, Charles is shocked. The false accusation against Lucas drags the racial politics of the American South into sharp focus for Charles. He can no longer ignore reality; the threat to an innocent man like Lucas—a man whom Charles knows to be proud and decent—forces Charles to confront difficult truths about race in his hometown.
Charles does not deliberate as to whether he should help Lucas. The novel explores his thoughts through the stream of consciousness prose, yet there is an inevitability to Charles’s actions as his thoughts and deeds hurtle inevitably forward. He turns over the possibilities of failure or injustice in his mind, but he always knows that he will do whatever he can to help Lucas. Charles does not know what he will do, but he is utterly certain that he will do something. In this sense, the stream of consciousness style propels Charles forward through the narrative, removing his feeling of agency over his life. Charles rarely has a plan, but he is committed to action. He cannot abide this sense of injustice, so he will act, even if he does not know how exactly he will act. Charles’s story is imbued with a fierce certainty that he simply must do something, rather than allow the mindless, violent mob to win.
At the end of the novel, after Lucas is freed and Crawford is caught with Charles’s help, Charles feels no satisfaction. In spite of his success, there is no sense that he has won. The tragedy, he realizes, is that Lucas could well have hanged for a crime he did not commit, simply because he was a convenient person to blame. The mob, the Gowries, and everyone in the town (other than the few people who rushed to Lucas’s aid) are complicit in this moral failure. The racial politics of the town are made clear to Charles in undeniable terms. Strikingly, the undeniable reality of racism disgusts him. Charles may have achieved his goal of saving Lucas’s life but, in doing so, he has become disillusioned with his community. He can never see his hometown in the same way again, he can never look his neighbors in the eye again, and he can never again walk through the center of his town without being haunted by the speed with which these people were ready to murder an innocent man because of the color of his skin.
Lucas Beauchamp
While Charles might be the protagonist of Intruder in the Dust, Lucas Beauchamp is the key figure in the narrative. His arrest motivates the plot, as he is charged with a murder that he did not commit. Lucas, certain of his innocence, recruits Charles to help him prove that he is not guilty. Though the novel begins with his arrest, the sight of Lucas being led into the jailhouse prompts a reverie from Charles. In this memory, Charles recalls the day when Lucas saved him from a creek and then took the young white boy back to his house to recover. At this time, Charles did not understand Lucas’s pride. He tried to pay Lucas for services rendered, but Lucas refused the payment. When Charles tried other means by which to pay back Lucas, Lucas again refused until the matter was seemingly forgotten. This memory elucidates Lucas’s defiant, proud attitude. He is keenly aware of the prevailing beliefs in the racially segregated town, in which the law might insist that Black and white people are the same, though reality begs to differ. Charles cannot comprehend why Lucas is so insistently proud, nor why he insists on obliging himself of every legal right that is due to him, even if doing so might cause trouble with the racist members of the community. Lucas is a proud man who refuses to adhere to the expectations of a racist society. For a young white man like Charles, someone who benefits from being part of the empowered racial group, this pride is absurd. For Lucas, it is everything.
Lucas is a proud man and an inimitable personality. To many members of the community, however, he is reduced solely to his race. In the racist atmosphere of the American South during this era, Lucas is defined by the color of his skin. Since he is Black, these people value his life less than that of a white person. This is evident in the way in which the Gowries are seemingly content to allow Lucas to be lynched by a racist mob rather than allow for justice to be done. Mr. Gowrie, Charles believes, is aware that Crawford killed Vinson. To Mr. Gowrie, however, a Black man like Lucas means so little that he becomes an expendable asset for the benefit of the Gowrie family. Lucas would never be killed as Lucas, but as a stand-in for all white racial resentment. He would be killed because he is not white, rather than because he is Lucas Beauchamp or because he did anything specific. His murder would be unjust not only because he did not commit the crime, but because it inherently dehumanizes him. Lucas’s fight for freedom is not just a fight for his life, but an assertation of his humanity.
In this fight, Lucas demonstrates an attitude of quiet confidence. Once the grave has been dug up and, as he believed, the murder proved to be beyond him, he joins in the prosecution of the real killer. Lucas agrees to help the sheriff catch Crawford, putting himself in danger by acting as bait for the killer. At this point, Lucas is flaunting his victory. He is celebrating in the assertion of his humanity and his life over the racist desires of the mob, siding himself with the authorities as a further vindication of his actions and character. As an innocent man and falsely accused man, Lucas has every right to do this. He is the real winner of the book: a man who overcomes systemic racism and brutal violence through sheer force of will. Ultimately, however, it is his goodness that triumphs. Lucas’s innate goodness saved Charles from the creek and made an impression on a young white man, even if his pride offended Charles. This fundamental goodness has a lasting impression on Charles and motivated him to help Lucas, creating a virtuous cycle that saved Lucas’s life. This system of quiet, personal change becomes the model for racial egalitarianism as advocated by men like Gavin.
Miss Habersham
To Charles, Miss Habersham represents a previous generation, one that lived before his parents and uncle. She is closer in time, Charles feels, to the Civil War and the earlier, more explicit systems of racial hierarchy. In spite of this, Miss Habersham is notable in her rejection of racial hierarchies. She grew up, Charles remembers, in close proximity to relatives of Lucas. She is not only able to empathize with Lucas the man, but with Black people and their plight in the white-dominated society. Miss Habersham may be from a previous generation, but she is imbued with a sense of racial justice that is thoroughly modern.
A telling aspect of Miss Habersham’s character is not only her age, but her experience. Since she grew up in a time where racial injustice was codified into the legal system, she has been forced to devise intricate and clever ways in which to achieve her goals. She knows the rules that govern society and she knows exactly how to bend these rules to her advantage without ever actually breaking them, meaning that she is acutely aware of the limitations of her position but also acutely aware of how to turn these in her favor. She stands guard at the prison, for example, because she knows that the same mob that wants to hang or burn an innocent man would not dare impose themselves on a white, southern lady. She wagers her own status as a respectable older white woman in defense of an unfairly targeted Black man, turning the mob’s own biases to her advantage.
Miss Habersham represents the idea that racism is not endemic to the area or the past, that people from this place and from that time can fight back against injustice just as much—or even more so—than the next generations. While she may lack the tools and techniques of the contemporary campaigners for civil rights, she has been forced to develop a thorough understanding of social injustice so as to better counter it. As such, she provides the impetus that Charles and his cohorts need to continue with their mission to save Lucas. Her sense of righteousness, her comprehension of a larger battle at play, helps to motivate them to do what must be done in spite of the practical reality of the obstacles that lay in their way.
Gavin Stevens
Charles’s uncle Gavin is a lawyer. Far more than simply being his profession, the law is an intrinsic element of his character. Gavin Stevens embodies the idea of law in an academic sense. His life is a continued expression of how rules function in society, far more than those that are just written down in the law books. Gavin is concerned with the enforcement of these rules far more than any moral ruling on certain cases. When Charles first asks for his help, for example, his most ambitious plans are to reduce Lucas’s sentence from the death penalty to life in prison. Whether Lucas killed Vinson is irrelevant; all that matters is the legal mechanisms that can be enforced. Even social rules, such as those governing when a teenager like Charles should go to bed, are enforced by Gavin. He embodies the idea of the laws and rules, rather than their practicalities, their morals, or their efficacy. To Gavin, all that matters is that the rules are followed, even if those rules are bad.
Outside of the law, however, Gavin voices many opinions on how the system of racial apartheid came to exist in his society. More than any other character, he deals in the abstract of race relations. While the African American characters feel the violent injustice of the system personally, and the white characters seek to employ the system for their own benefit, Gavin theorizes on why such a system exists in the first place and how it might be dismantled. To Gavin, racial injustice exists in the South because people like him view equality as an imposition from the North, the victorious side in the Civil War. A desire for equality has not emerged organically in a society in which many of the same economic practices and structures are still in place, only now devoid of the enslavement that made them profitable. For Gavin, the only solution is to cultivate an organic, localized desire for equality. This desire for equality must come from within, based on personal experiences, rather than be imposed from without. This is why he encourages Charles so much. Charles’s experience with Lucas is humanizing, developing a sense of empathy between races that is absent from so many others in the town. For Gavin, Charles’s experience functions as a template for change, a model to be replicated in the battle for equality.
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