The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In Flags in the Dust the Benbows are identified as one of the oldest and most prominent Yoknapatawpha families, though they do not figure among the county's large plantation owners. In this novel, Judge Benbow dissolves the business partnership between Ben Redmond and John Sartoris.

Charles Bon is one of the central characters in Absalom, Absalom!, where his murder by his fiancee's brother provides one of the narrative's central focal points. In this novel he appears only anonymously, and in this one sentence: Sutpen's "son killed his daughter's fiancé on the eve of the wedding and vanished" (222). There's no suggestion in this reference that Sutpen's daughter's fiance is also Sutpen's biracial son, so we identify the character here as "White."

When Bayard writes about Sutpen that "his son killed his daughter's fiance on the eve of the wedding and vanished" (222), he is summing up the mystery that creates much of the narrative of Faulkner's previous novel, Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Though never given a name in this novel, that daughter is Judith.

When Bayard writes about Sutpen that "his son killed his daughter's fiance on the eve of the wedding and vanished" (222), he is summing up the mystery that creates much of the narrative of Faulkner's previous novel, Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Though never given a name in this novel, that son is Henry.

Like John Sartoris, Thomas Sutpen is a large land- and slave-owner and a Confederate Colonel. Sutpen, in fact, replaced Sartoris in command of the Yoknapatawpha regiment after the battle of Second Bull Run. He is the central character in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner started to work on The Unvanquished short stories in 1934 in part because he needed a break from working on Absalom!; he had finished that novel by the time he wrote "An Odor of Verbena," where Sutpen's character appears in The Unvanquished.

These are the children of the "hill man" whom Colonel Sartoris shoots after the War; they live with their mother in "a dirt-floored cabin in the hills" (221).

Even though she is dirt poor (literally, as she lives in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills"), she maintains her pride by throwing back the money John Sartoris offers her after he shot her husband (221).

This man lives with his family in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills" outside Jefferson (221). He served under John Sartoris in his first regiment. After the war Sartoris shoots and kills him, because he thinks (perhaps wrongly) that the man plans to rob him. (He may be the same character as the "other feller" - to quote Will Falls - Sartoris kills after the War in Flags in the Dust [23], but that is not clear.)

The men work for Colonel Sartoris, building the railroad line to Jefferson. He pays these "workmen" (225) on "Saturdays" (220).

In The Unvanquished Bayard notes that Mrs. Habersham "took Father and Drusilla to the minister herself and saw that they were married" (220), but says nothing more about the minister himself.