General Compson

The Compson family is one of the most important in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. They are already in the county by the 1830s, and still a presence there, though a very diminished one, in the 1940s. "General Compson" is best known to Faulkner's readers as the grandfather of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Sutpen's only friend in Absalom! (1936). His first name is not given in this novel, but the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946 identifies his full name as "Jason Lycurgus Compson." The Appendix also identifies him as the son a Compson who was a Governor of Mississippi before the Civil War. For most of this novel he is away from Yoknapatawpha, fighting in the Civil War, but he makes a very brief appearance in the volume's final chapter, "An Odor of Verbena."