The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A farmer and landowner in Grenier County who took Ab Snopes to court for burning his barn, as described in more detail in the short story "Barn Burning."

While a minor character in the novel, Vernon Tull is an important artery in the network of gossip, storytelling and information in the county. He is a "gaunt" and "gentle" farmer, whose "adolescent freshness" is probably "the result of a lifelong abstinence from tobacco - the face of the breathing archetype and protagonist of all men who marry young and father only daughters and are themselves but the eldest daughter of their own wives" (10).

There is always a group of men hanging around Varner's various businesses. Aside from the characters we can classify by name, some members appear somewhat individualized, such as with the "man with the peach spray" (343) who discusses the horse auction and its consequences with a "second" and a "third" among the group, although each remains virtually indistinct, members of a communal group who partake in conversations with well-defined characters like Varner, Ratliff, Quick, Bookwright, Freeman and the various Snopeses who either work there or happen by.

Abner Snopes is the oldest named of the Snopes clan, a horse trader turned sharecropper and a man who has acquired a reputation as a barn burner. He possesses "a pair of eyes of a cold opaque gray between shaggy graying irascible brows and a short scrabble of iron-gray beard as tight and knotted as a sheep's coat" (8). Anger shows in his "harsh knotted violent face" and in his eyes "fierce and intractable and cold” (54). He walks on a "club foot" which, according to Buck McCaslin, was due to Colonel John Sartoris shooting him for trying to steal Sartoris' horse during the Civil War (18).

"About thirty" at the opening of the novel, Jody Varner is a "prime bulging man, slightly thyriodic" who "emanates a quality of invincible and inviolable bachelordom" (7); "looking at him you saw, beyond the flabbiness and the obscuring bulk, the perennial and immortal Best Man, the apotheosis of the masculine Singular" (8). Jody dresses formally, in only one suit which he wears throughout the week: a "glazed collarless white shirt fastened at the neck with a heavy gold collar-button beneath a suit of good black broadcloth" (7).

Ratliff is a good-natured "itinerant sewing-machine agent," but is essentially a traveling barterer whose storytelling interconnects the various peoples of four counties. He trades "in land and livestock and second hand farming tools and musical instruments or anything" – and serves as a retailer of news with "the ubiquity of a newspaper and carrying personal messages . . . with the reliability of a postal service" (14). Although the novel has a third-person omniscient narrator, it often shifts and focalizes the narrative from Ratliff's point of view.

Throughout the novel, Faulkner focalizes the narrative through the collective third-person "the people" in much the same way he uses "we" in "A Rose for Emily." While the narrative certainly portrays the dramas of self-interested schemers like Flem Snopes and Pat Stamper as well as the interior lives of various characters, he simultaneously develops the people of Yoknapatawpha or the "countryside" as a self-organizing social body, troping and naturalizing this body in at least two sections with the imagery of a "swarm of bees" (128), a "hive" or "a cloud of pink-and-white bees, ascending, m

As the blacksmith of Frenchman's Bend for "almost twenty years" (69), Trumbull is also a kind of handyman to Will Varner. He fabricates Varner's makeshift rocking chair "by sawing an empty flour barrel half through the middle and trimming out the sides and nailing a seat into it" (6). The blacksmith is an elderly man who is "hale, morose and efficient" and "invite[s] no curiosity" until he is displaced by the Snopes. Flem Snopes replaces the experienced blacksmith with his cousins I.O. Snopes and Eck Snopes, two novices who cannot even fire the forge or shoe Houston's horse.

Judge Benbow is part of the Benbow family, an old legal family in Jefferson best known in Faulkner's narratives by the characters Horace and Narcissa. It is unclear what exact relation the Judge has to these two, or to their father Will Benbow, but he certainly belongs to an earlier generation, and is probably the same as the "Judge Benbow" who appears in other Yoknapatawpha fictions. The Judge says of Will Varner that "a milder mannered man never bled a mule or stuffed a ballot box" (6).

This icon represents the "strange negroes" whom the narrative defines by their absence. As a group, Negroes who are not already known in Frenchman's Bend stay out of the area, where the white population is known to be violent and hostile to them (5).