Tennessee’s partner is the rough and unkempt titular protagonist whose character development and changing reputation in the eyes of the townsfolk serve as the story’s emotional center. There are several layers of narrative distance between the reader and Tennessee’s partner. The narrator mediates all that the reader knows of him, and even within the narrator’s observations, he is largely defined by his relationship to Tennessee and tidbits of town hearsay. He speaks in a rural dialect, using pronunciations like “fun’rel” and “pardner” that further separate him in class and disposition from the narrator’s more precise and literary voice. The narrator describes the partner as “a grave man” (Paragraph 3), a strong juxtaposition to Tennessee’s more mischievous character. The potential for even greater conflict emerges in the partner’s backstory, as Tennessee supposedly ran off with his partner’s wife. That the partner remained loyal to his friend despite this elopement communicates The Transcendent Nature of Friendship, which supersedes even matrimony.

After the inciting incident, where Tennessee robs a stranger, the partner steps into public life to honor his partner, first by testifying on his behalf, and then by collecting his body and burying it with a proper funeral.