That Evening Sun - Variation

Variation

This story appears as "That Evening Sun Go Down" in The Best American Short Stories of the Century by John Updike, Katrina Kenison. In this version of the story, Nancy's husband is called "Jubal", not Jesus, although a frightened Nancy whispers the word "Jesus" three times in Part II when Caddy is interrogating her.

The substitution of Jubal for Jesus likely was made for censorship reasons.

J.D. Salinger, in his 1964 essay "A Salute to Whit Burnett" (the editor of Story Magazine, Burnett was Salinger's mentor whose class in short story writing at Columbia University he attended in 1939 and who was the first professional to publish one of his stories), said that it was Burnett's use of "That Evening Son Gone Done" in the class that taught him the importance of the author's relationship with his "silent reader".

Faulkner answered a question about the story and the novel in Charlottesville by saying Nancy was “the same person, actually” in both texts, though he qualified his comment by adding, “These people I figure belong to me and I have the right to move them about in time when I need them” (FU79). To what extent and in what ways we ought to read Nancy, Quentin, and the others as “the same” from appearance to appearance thus remain issues open for debate.