This is Faulkner's only novel set during the Civil War or, as it was referred to in the South as the "late unpleasantness". We see the childhood of the grandfather of the Sartoris of the novel by that name though, as is often true in Faulkner, he has characters in two books who cannot be the age they appear in one of the two. The inherent idea of the character is the same regardless of Faulkner's confusion of the specific people.