Faulkner's First Fictional Car--Borrowed from Scott Fitzgerald?

Abstract

XXW~ILLIAM Faulkner's earliest published fictions were newspaper and magazine pieces written during his brief but formative residence in Orleans in 1925. Commentary on these New Orleans Sketches, as they have come to be known, focuses largely on two points: first, what the sketches reveal about the authors and books that were influencing, and sometimes being quite directly echoed by, the young writer not yet certain of his own subject matter or his own voice; second, what they foreshadow in the way of themes, characters, narrative techniques and stylistic features that were to become familiar in the mature work that followed.1 A heretofore virtually unnoticed instance in which both of these factors come into play is the sketch Country Mice. Its early paragraphs constitute what appears to be not only an echo of but a take-off on the work of another author. More particularly, in the description of an automobile with which the sketch begins (Faulkner's first treatment of an auto in any detail), the take-off is coupled with anticipation of a theme he would return to and expand upon many times later. Joseph Blotner has noted that this sketch, like The Great Gatsby, was narrated in the first person by a man of some cultivation who had become the confidant of a bootlegger who drove an ostentatious motorcar.2 Fitzgerald's novel had been published in April 1925, just four or five months prior to the