The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Vardaman imagines that he can jump from the porch to the barn "like the pink lady in the circus" (54) - an acrobat he has presumably seen at a show in town in the past.

Addie tells Anse Bundren before they marry that "I have people. In Jefferson" - adding when he worries about what such "town folks" will think of him, that "They're in the cemetery" (171). This is all the novel says about her family, but it is one of the reasons for the Bundrens' trek to that same cemetery. Neither Addie nor her family appear elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

Like MacGowan, Jody works as a clerk in the drugstore in Jefferson. He serves as a lookout for MacGowan when he is seducing Dewey Dell.

The drugstore in Jefferson appears in many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but it is not identified with an owner with any consistency. So the pharmacist who is at lunch when Dewey Dell walks into the drugstore in this novel, whom MacGowan refers to as "the old man" and "the old bastard" has to remain unnamed (242, 247). He clearly does not know about MacGowan's unethical behavior.

MacGowan is a clerk in the Jefferson drugstore. When Dewey Dell comes in hoping to buy something to abort her pregnancy, he coerces her into having sex with him. He narrates a chapter.

MacGowan tells Jody to send Dewey Dell "upstairs to Alford's office" when she asks "to see the doctor that works" there (241). Alford is one of the two Jefferson doctors who appear in this novel and in the earlier Flags in the Dust. In that novel Alford and Peabody have offices next to each other, and share a receptionist though as doctors from different generations they share nothing else, but that does not seem to be the case in As I Lay Dying.

Very little can be said definitively about the two men, presumably state officers, who apprehend Darl (which help from Jewel and Dewey Dell) and then, the next morning, take him in custody on the train to the state mental hospital in Jackson. They never speak. They both carry guns, and have new, crisp haircuts. It is not even clear how they managed to be waiting outside the cemetery to "come on" Darl, though when Cash mentions Gillespie in his account of Darl's apprehension it seems likely that it was the man whose barn Darl burned who arranged to have them there (237).