The novella employs a third-person narrator who mixes colloquial speech and a high literary style, as Warren's firstperson narrator, Jack Burden, had done in All the King's Men (1946; see separate entry). In general, Warren follows the tradition of realistic short fiction, which had been developed to high art by Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Katherine Anne Porter. Although Warren's main focus is on the life of Bolton Lovehart, his narration employs a very novelistic approach to the description of Bardsville, blending local legend, historical anecdote, historical fact, and impersonal narration, as in its antiheroic treatment of the story of the slain Confederate "heroes," Cassius Perkins and Seth Sykes, who are commemorated in Bardsville's belated monument—erected in 1917, during the war fever at the American entrance.....
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