"Room to breathe": Narrative Anacrhony and Suffocation in William Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black"

While an integral element of the story arc of "Pantaloon in Black," Riders suffocation also functions structurally. Because it anticipates the central act of unrepresented violence, Riders experience can be conceived of in terms of Genette's "prolepsis" (67) as ordering the chapter towards the hanging, suggesting that Riders life and death contain the same potential choked out by post-Emancipation white supremacy. [...]the circumstances surrounding Rider's death in "Pantaloon" can be taken as indicating a transformative but often overlooked point in Faulkner's representations of lynching and racism in general. Despite his mouthing of racist discourse, the deputy cannot seem to fully believe the white supremacist script that justifies Rider's murder. [...]although the text indicates that the lynching has taken place in the central textual gap, that event seeps into the surface of the text first in the explored bodily event, and subsequently through the presence of analepsis in the paragraph beginning the deputy's second section: For Clough, the text's second section offers a "negative framing of white domesticity" (397) against which the symbiotic relationships of Mannie and Rider are presented as warm and nurturing. [...]for Clough, the deputy "finds Rider's actions irrational and meaningless" (402) because "he himself lives in a home with a warmthless hearth and a warmthless wife of choleric' disposition, and this domestic distance translates accordingly into interpretive distance" (402).