Character Keys

Harvard's "proctor" appears in Quentin's section of The Sound and the Fury when he remembers the way Mrs. Bland tried to have Shreve moved out of the suite he and Quentin share - because he didn't strike her as a suitable roommate for a Mississippi Compson. "The proctor reveals enough low stubbornness to insist on consulting Shreve first," and the change is never made (106). (This is an unusual use of 'proctor' - who is usually someone monitoring students taking an exam; perhaps Faulkner meant 'dean' or 'registrar.')

In The Sound and the Fury the annual Harvard-Yale crew race is scheduled to take place a few days after June 2, 1910. Perhaps because Quentin is about use a river to drown himself, he thinks about the race, and the team - "them down at New London" - several times in his section of the novel (77, 105, etc.).

Jason describes the customer to whom he sells a "twenty-cent hame string" in The Sound and the Fury as a "dam redneck" (194-95).

The man Mrs. Bland refers to as "Gerald's grandfather" in The Sound and the Fury is almost certainly her father, so we don't know his last name (148). In her account, he is a very traditional southern aristocrat, and very fussy about the ingredients in his mint julep.

At the gas station where Jason stops after leaving the Sheriff's house in The Sound and the Fury, this Negro employee fills Jason's tank with gas and his tires with air.

This is the "she" in The Sound and the Fury whose innocence or honor Quentin tries to protect by fighting the male classmate who is threatening to "put a frog in her desk" (68). She is probably another student, but may be the teacher - in any case, Mr. Compson, who knows his son Quentin, says "Oh. . . . She" when Quentin tells him about the fight (68).

In his Easter sermon in The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog mentions the two men who were crucified on either side of Jesus. He refers to "de thief and de murderer" (296). The "thief" is presumably the man mentioned in the Gospels who rebukes the other criminal for mocking Jesus and asks Jesus to remember him when he reaches heaven.

In The Sound and the Fury these two men operate the schooner Quentin watches going under the drawbridge over the Charles: one is "naked to the waist . . . coiling down a line on the fo'c's'le head" and the other is "in a straw hat without any crown . . . at the wheel" (89).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin gets in a fight with this boy when he threatened to put a frog in a girl's desk - or possibly the teacher's desk; she is female too. Quentin tells Mr. Compson, though, that "He was as big as me" (67).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin thinks of the three boys carrying fishing poles whom he meets at the bridge as "the first," "the second" and "the third" (117 etc.), but they can also be distinguished from each other by their actions (and the fact that one is called "Kenny" by another, 122). This is the "third" boy, who seems the most agreeable and least interesting of the three, although like his friends, he is upset when Quentin comes along later with the unnamed little girl and watches them swimming - because they are swimming naked.

In The Sound and the Fury the bridge over the Charles where Quentin decides to commit suicide is also a place, he learns from the boys he meets there, where "Boston folks" come to fish for the renowned trout who swims under it (119).

In The Sound and the Fury this woman waits on Quentin in the bakery shop. According to Quentin, she looks "like a librarian" (125). She is very hostile to "them foreigners" in her neighborhood, and suspects that the little girl in her store may be shoplifting: "She'll hide it under her dress and a body'd never know it" (126).

In The Sound and the Fury the invisible "caddie" who is called by the golfers while Luster looks for the quarter never specifically appears. In a sense he exists in Benjy's section in name only, whenever the golfers on the course beside the Compson yard call "caddie" (3). The fact that whenever this name is called Benjy instead hears "Caddy" makes this and the book's other "caddies" major characters in his mind.

The minister of the Methodist Church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury is named Parson Walthall; he protests the slaughter of the town's pigeons to prevent them from fouling the town clock.

In The Sound and the Fury Spoade is the last name of a senior at Harvard College with Quentin in 1910. He jokingly calls Shreve Quentin's "husband" (78). Quentin says Spoade has "five names, including that of a present English ducal house" (91-92), but he never thinks of him except as "Spoade" - his first name is never given. He is from South Carolina, and lives up to the image of a southern aristocrat in a number of ways besides his name, including the fact that he goes to chapel every day in dishabille.

In The Sound and the Fury Shegog is the visiting clergyman from St. Louis who gives the Easter sermon at the Negro church in Jefferson. Physically he is unimpressive: "The visitor was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat. He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey" (293). But he possesses a powerful voice: the congregation soon forgets "his insignificant appearance in the virtuosity" of his voice (293).

In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons live next door to the Compsons. Maury Bascomb has an affair with Mrs. Patterson when the Compson children are young. At least once Caddy takes her a letter from "Uncle Maury," and sometime later Benjy tries to deliver another. On that occasion we hear Mrs. Patterson call Benjy "you idiot" as she tries to grab the letter before her husband can reach him (13).

In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons' house is adjacent to the Compsons'. Quentin remembers that when Jason was younger, he and "the Patterson boy . . . made kites on the back porch and sold them for a nickel a piece" (94). Jason parted ways with him, apparently when the boy complained about not getting his share of the profits.

In The Sound and the Fury Natalie is a girl about Quentin and Caddy's age who lives near their house. Caddy calls her "a dirty girl" (134) after catching her and Quentin naively exploring their sexualities together in the barn, but their behavior would probably seem natural enough to anyone but Quentin. Natalie does, however, take the lead in this exploration, and given the contemptuous way Caddy treats her (calling her "Cowface," for example, 136), the novel might be suggesting she is lower class.

In The Sound and the Fury Mink works at the livery stable in Jefferson. Based on characters with similar jobs in the other fictions, he is most likely black, but that is not specified. He drives the hack, the rented carriage, that the Compsons rent for Mr. Compson's funeral, and then, in exchange for a couple of cigars, drives it again so that Jason can show Caddy's child to her.

In The Sound and the Fury Mac is a baseball fan who is at the drugstore in Jefferson when Jason goes there to buy cigars. He has his money on the New York Yankees.

In The Sound and the Fury Kenny is one of the "three boys with fishing poles" Quentin first encounters on the bridge where he hides the flat irons (122). This may be the one that the narrative consistently refers to as "the first boy" (122). He wears a "broken hat" (123) and seems to hold himself a bit apart from the other two boys. Quentin tries talking with him after they leave him, but "he paid me no attention" (123). He seems to have rejoined his friends by the time Quentin sees them again, swimming in the river.

In The Sound and the Fury Julio is the older brother of the unnamed Italian girl whom Quentin tries to escort safely home from the bakery. Julio attacks Quentin, thinking that Quentin has tried to kidnap his sister, or as Julio himself puts it: "I killa heem . . . [he] steala my seester" (139). At the Squire's office Julio wants to press kidnapping charges, but instead accepts money from Quentin as compensation for the time he lost at work while chasing after him.

In The Sound and the Fury Miss Holmes is one of two young women on a pleasure outing with Mrs. Bland, Gerald, Spoade and Shreve when Quentin is arrested for kidnapping the unnamed Italian girl. Quentin notes that she and Miss Daingerfield, the other young woman, have "little white noses" (145) and look at him "through veils, with a kind of delicate horror" (141).

In The Sound and the Fury Louis Hatcher is an elderly black man who goes possum hunting with Quentin and Versh on a windless October night. Thinking of him, Quentin notes that he "never even used his [hunting] horn carrying it" (114). He does use the lantern he carries, but the last time he cleaned it, he tells Quentin, was during the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; he and his wife Martha were afraid the flood waters would reach Yoknapatawpha. It is possible but very unlikely that he is the "Louis" who teaches Caddy how to drive a car (93).

In The Sound and the Fury Deacon is a fixture among the students at Harvard in 1910, especially the ones who come from the south. Black and, according to Quentin, a "natural psychologist" (97), he meets these southerners when they first arrive in Cambridge, "in a sort of Uncle Tom's cabin outfit, patches and all" (97) and proceeds to manipulate their prejudices to his own benefit. He tells Quentin that "you and me's the same folks, come long and short," and that Southerners are "fine folks. But you can't live with them" (99).

Frony mentions "Sis Beulah Clay" to Caddy and her brothers in The Sound and the Fury when she tries to explain what a "funeral" is (33). When Sis Beulah Clay died, "they moaned two days" (33). "Sis" implies this woman belonged to the same church as Dilsey's family.

In The Sound and the Fury Mr. Burgess is the neighbor of the Compsons who sees Benjy grabbing at his daughter and rushes to "knock him out with a fence picket" (263).

In The Sound and the Fury Dalton Ames - a new arrival in Jefferson in the summer of 1909 - is the first man Caddy Compson has sex with, and may be the father of Caddy's daughter. Caddy tells Quentin that Ames has "been in the army had killed men" (148) and "crossed all the oceans all around the world" (150). Quentin discovers for himself how good Ames is with a pistol when he tries ordering him to leave town. For more than one reason Quentin feels that Ames is not a proper suitor for Caddy, including the issue of class; his name, Quentin thinks, "just missed gentility" (92).

This "young woman" is only mentioned once in Flags in the Dust, as the person with whom Lee MacCallum is "keeping company" (i.e. courting, 350).

This "youth in a battered ford" drives by the Mitchell house to pick up "the girl Frankie" (193) in Flags in the Dust. He is probably part of the young set that congregates around Belle Mitchell, and that her husband Harry describes as "a bunch of young girls and jelly-beans" (193). They seem to be just a few years younger than Horace or Bayard. (In the 1920s "jellybean" was a slang term for a young man who wore stylish clothes.)

In Flags in the Dust this young woman wears an expression of "harried desperation" as she sits with Harry Mitchell at the Chicago nightclub. It seems that after getting Harry drunk, she steals his diamond tiepin; when the waiter apparently tries to stop her, her voice rises "with a burst of filthy rage into a shrill hysterical scream" (388).

These are the young women in Flags in the Dust who are in college in the neighboring town (obviously Oxford) whom Young Bayard (along with Mitch and Suratt and three Negro musicians) serenades. They are only seen as shapes leaning out of the windows of the co-ed dorm, "aureoled against the lighted rooms behind," "feminine and delicately and divinely young" (143).

Lying in the dark at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary, Temple remembers being in her dorm in college, talking with other women students as they all dressed for a dance. One of them is accused by the others of knowing too much about sex and another, "the youngest one," is made sick by the conversation (152).

This entry represents the various unnamed white soldiers whom Caspey mentions in Flags in the Dust in his highly fictionalized account of his experiences in France during World War I. Many of them are "M.P"s, but he also refers to "white officers" and the "white boys" with whom he shares a trench about four miles behind the front lines (60).

Horace Benbow's description in Flags in the Dust of the glass-making craftsmen he saw in the caves of Venice is suitably picturesque: "At first they're just shapeless things . . . shadows on the bloody walls . . . And then a face comes out, blowing . . ." (165).

In Flags in the Dust this cook is hiding inside General Pope's "wrecked commissary tent" when Carolina Bayard returns for the anchovies (18); the derringer shot he fires into Sartoris' back from his hiding place into Sartoris' back is fatal.

Jefferson's telegraph operator in The Sound and the Fury not only dispenses telegrams but provides updates on the cotton market. Jason Compson berates him several times for not providing him with information quickly enough - though of course it is Jason's fault.

In Flags in the Dust, he greets Horace Benbow warmly upon his return to Jefferson from World War I.

This man appears in Flags in the Dust only when the novel identifies the "youth" who is Belle Mitchell's protege as the "son of a carpenter" (181).

Described by the narrator of Flags in the Dust as "the General's body servant," this unnamed slave provides a kind of sound track to Aunt Jenny's story of Stuart and Carolina Bayard as "two angels valiantly fallen": he strums a "guitar in lingering random chords" at the Confederate unit's camp (12).

According to the narrator of Flags in the Dust, "each spring" a "certain few young girls" are allowed to pick flowers from the lawn at the Benbow house (164). Since they "ask permission" we can infer that they are polite (164). Their class status can be inferred from the first two adjectives that the narrator uses to describe them.

In Flags in the Dust this man and Colonel Sartoris met while they were both servng in the Mexican War. After the Civil War, Sartoris brings him to Yoknapatawpha to help with the building of the railroad. He seems bemused by Jenny Du Pre's story about "Carolina" Bayard in the one scene in which he appears.

In Flags in the Dust Will Falls distributes the "pint of whisky" that is always part of the Thanksgiving and Christmas gift baskets given him by the Sartorises "among his ancient and homeless cronies" (301) in the county poorhouse.

This represents four different groups of children in Flags in the Dust: (1) The children playing in the street whom Bayard, riding the wild stallion, swerves to avoid running into; only one is individualized: "a small figure in a white shirt and diminutive pale blue pants" (130). (2) The "neighbors' children" who play "quietly" among the flowers and trees on the lawn at the Benbow house (164). (3) The children playing "quietly and a little stiffly" in the cemetery that Jenny and Isom visit at the end of the novel (399). All these groups appear in Jefferson.

These are the various inhabitants of the town in Flags in the Dust from which Young Bayard catches the train that takes him into exile. When he looks at them at the end of Christmas day, he sees various "cheerful groups," including children playing with new presents, youths exploding fireworks, and travelers waiting with friends in the racially segregated "waiting rooms" at the station (369).

As part of the description of Doctor Peabody in Flags in the Dust, the narrative mentions his willingness to travel any distance "to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him" (95). Later in the description a few of his patients are particularized when a "countryman" - that is, someone from outside the town of Jefferson - visits Peabody in his office to pay the doctor's bill "incurred by his father or grandfather" (95).

The child (neither name nor gender is mentioned) who is born into the "family of country people" who are living in Jefferson and being looked after by the Red Cross and Narcissa Benbow in Flags in the Dust (72).

At several different points in Flags in the Dust Young Bayard is described frightening these men, women and children - country Negroes whose slow-moving, mule-drawn wagons he threatens and sometimes overturns by rushing up to them in the powerful car he speeds around the county in. The people in the wagons are never named or individualized, except by their alarmed faces and rolling eyes.