Many readers imagine Gavin Stevens as the character most similar to William Faulkner in all of
his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha and while Stevens was once considered the most reliable
Faulknerian spokesperson ample scholarship has demonstrated that he functions as far more than
merely the author's mouthpiece. In William Faulkner Gavin Stevens and the Cavalier Tradition
Lorie Watkins Fulton defines Stevens's role and examines the scope of his influence. Fulton
proposes that Faulkner uses similarities between himself and Stevens to voice at a fictional
remove concerns about people of his own class and even of his own ancestry. Ultimately she
suggests that Stevens's manipulations of the law his misunderstanding of human beings and his
rhetorically high-minded pursuit of «not so much truth as of justice or of justice as he sees
it» remove him ideologically only a degree or two away from the most terrifying dictators of
the twentieth century.
