Inexorably, the characters move to enact their fates. As representatives of the time and place of the story, they act less as individuals, and more as abstractions. Critic Irving Howe has stated: "Faulkner"s discovery of the power of abstraction as it corrupts the dealings mean have with one another, can lead him to portray Negroes in abstract terms.In an early story "Dry September," this tendency toward the abstraction of character is still cleaner; like a paradigm of all lynching stories, it is populated not with men but with Murderer and Victim." (Howe, p. 127).

             Even the weather is made abstract, as the sinister mood of the story is enhanced over and over by continued references to the heat, the drought, the stale air.

             ".none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breadth and odors, knew exactly what happened.".

             "The barber went swiftly up the street where the sparse lights, insect-swirled, glazed in rigid and violent suspension in the lifeless air. The day had died in a ball of dust.".

             "Below the east the wan hemorrhage of the moon increased. It heaved above the ridge, silvering the air, the dust, so that they seemed to breathe, live, in a bowl of molten lead. There was no sound of nightbird nor insect, no sound save their breathing.".

             The last two sentences paint the world these characters inhabit, still, silent, "stricken": "There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.".

             This repetition, repeated references to heat, dust, no sweat, establishes the foundation on which the action roars forward, ruthless, persistent, everywhere at once. Robert Penn Warren felt that "all book-reading Southerners.