Character Keys

The narrator of "Smoke" notes, as part of his thumbnail description of Gavin Stevens, that he "could discuss Einstein with college professors" (17). (In Light in August readers meet one of the college professors Gavin knows; see "Unnamed College Professor.")

In Sanctuary, Minnie notes that, although "he aint no John Gilbert," Popeye is a "right pretty little man" (227). Gilbert was one of the stars of the silent era in American movies. His nickname was "The Great Lover."

In the "Appendix, Compson:1699-1945" that Faulkner wrote in 1946, seventeen years after The Sound and the Fury was first published, he traces the Compson patrimony all the way back to Scotland in the 18th century. The 1929 novel, however, contains only a few much vaguer references to the family history; Jason thinks, for example, about the "governors and generals" in the family past (230), and Quentin thinks that "one of our forefathers was a governor and three were generals" (101). It's likely that the Compson that Mr. Compson mentions as his father's "father" (76) was the governor.

In The Unvanquished, when Buck and Buddy McCaslin allow their slaves to live in the plantation big house and leave the place at night by the back door, the white inhabitants of the area share stories or rumors of "McCaslin slaves dodging the moonlit roads and the Patrol-riders to visit other plantations" (249). "Patrol-riders" - more frequently referred to as "paterollers' or 'paterrollers' (see The Unvanquished, for an example from Faulkner) - were armed white men whose job was to apprehend slaves found off their plantation after dark and to pursue fugitive slaves.

In Absalom!, after moving to Virginia Sutpen's father works for this planter, whom the "thirteen or fourteen"-year-old Thomas (185) thinks of as "the man who owned all the land and the niggers and apparently the white men who superintended the work" on the plantation (184). Thomas spies on him as he spends his afternoons lying in a hammock being waiting on by a slave. Later Thomas will re-enact this scene in the arbor in Yoknapatawpha with Wash Jones as his servant.

"Saint Francis" - known as Francis of Assisi, the Catholic friar who founded the Franciscan Order in the early 13th century - wrote the words that Quentin Compson remembers on the first page of his section in The Sound and the Fury in the song "The Canticle of the Sun": "All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, From whose embrace no mortal can escape."

In Intruder in the Dust both Chick Mallison and Gavin Stevens at different points imagine a group they identify as "outlanders" (149, 199). In the second instance Gavin describes them to Chick as the people of "the North and East and West" who are currently seeking to "force on us [the South] laws based on the idea that man's injustice to man can be abolished overnight" (199).

These two "ladies," "neighbors, still in their boudoir caps," are part of the group in The Reivers that gathers in front of the shed to see Boon drive Grandfather's car (35). Presumably they are also among the people who go for rides in it later.

In The Reivers Lucius notes that "two other men" are standing with Sam and "the conductor" of the train that is taking them to Parsham (161). One of them, he says, "must have been the engineer" (161). This is the other one. As part of "a functioning train crew," he could be a fireman or a brakeman (161).

This is the "man on the streetcar" in The Reivers who gives Mr. Binford the (bad) tip about "which horse and buggy" to bet on at the race track (108).

The noise of the car arriving at the Edmonds place in The Reivers brings "Cousin Louisa and everybody else on the place" to see it (61). This entry assumes that "everybody else" is black, and belongs to one of the families of tenant farmers who work an allotted piece of the Edmonds property. We assume that because Lucius adds that the group does not include "the ones Cousin Zack could actually see from his horse" (61). Here "the ones" clearly refers to the people whom the white land owner Zack expects to see working in the fields instead of taking time off to stare at a car.

In The Reivers the "street car" conductor the travelers see as they enter Memphis is turning the "front trolley" around at the end of the line with the help of the motorman (93).

The other residents of the boarding house where Boon lives in The Reivers are described as "juries" who were in town "during court terms," "country litigants" also in town for court, and "horse- and mule-traders" (25).

In The Reivers Lucius notes that "two other men" are waiting with Sam and the conductor beside the train that is going to carry the horse to Parsham; this is the one that, according to him, "must have been the engineer" (161).

On the morning of the first horse race in The Reivers, Lucius sees "seven or eight people, all men," in the hotel dining room (209). Lucius refers to them as "people like us except that they lived" in and around Parsham; "some were in overalls; all but one were tieless" (209-10). Later he calls them "aficionados," in reference to their passion for horse racing (220). The one wearing a tie is one of the two men who talk with Boon about the upcoming race.

One of the two "ladies, girls" whom Lucius sees at supper in Miss Reba's in The Reivers (106). Lucius distinguishes them by their clothes - one wears "a red dress," and the other is "in pink" - and their age: one is a "girl" and the other is "no longer a girl" (106-07). This is "the older one," whom Lucius feels a kind of pity for: "There was something wrong about her . . . She was alone. . . . she shouldn't have had to be here, alone, to have to go through this" (107). Exactly what the 11-year-old Lucius means by "this" is not specified, but Mr.

When they cross the Tallahatchie River in The Reivers, the adventurers are in what Lucius calls "foreign country, another county," the county that adjoins Yoknapatawpha to the north (78). Between Ballenbaugh's and Hell Creek bottom the countryside seems rural: along the road are "sprouting fields" (78). Lucius describes the residents they pass as "the people already in their Sunday clothes idle on the front galleries, the children and dogs . . . running toward the fence" to watch an automobile go by (78).

After Ballenbaugh takes over Wyott's store in The Reivers, it becomes a stop-over place for the "hard-mouthed hard-souled" men who carry merchandise to and from Memphis (72). But until the 1870s the people at Ballenbaugh's were "just tough men," i.e. no women (72). When the railroad took over the freight traffic in the 1880s, however, Ballenbaugh's becomes a destination point.

When Lucius and Lycurgus enter Linscomb's stable in The Reivers they see "a Negro stableman cleaning a stall at the rear" (220).

According to Ned in The Reivers, the "hollow" where they "stable" Lightning before and between races is on land "that belongs to one of Possum's [Parsham's] church members" (217).

In The Reivers Lucius compares the "females" of his childhood to the ones alive "now" (191). According to what he has heard, modern women not only "run in and out of gentlemen's rooms in hotels" - they do so wearing "the shorts or scanties" that seem to be the uniform of "their fight for freedom" (191).

These are the "street- and assessment commissioners" with whom Mr. Binford negotiates and the policemen he pays off as part of his responsibilities as the man of Miss Reba's house in The Reivers (111).

These are the "liquor dealers," "grocers and coal merchants," "plumbers," "newspaper boy" and other tradesman and laborers with whom Mr. Binford negotiates in The Reivers as part of his responsibilities as the man of Miss Reba's house (111).

The Reivers does not describe the unscrupulous man who cultivates a patch of mud in order to sell his services to mired automobile travelers in much detail. He is "a gaunt man, older than we - I anyway - had assumed" (86).

In The Reivers Otis mentions the "I-talian wop" who has a "fruit and peanut stand" in Memphis' Court Square (139).

In The Reivers the typical patrons at Ballenbaugh's in its modern iteration are described as "fox- and coon-hunters and fishermen" who return "not for the hunting and fishing but for the table that Miss Ballenbaugh set" (74).

In The Reivers the Sheriff says that Boon's white friends can "settle" the problem caused by his accidental shooting of a "Negro girl" by "giving her father ten dollars" (15). The father himself does not appear in the text.

In The Reivers the driver of the Stanley Steamer that arrives in Parsham to carry Boon and the others back to jail in Hardwick is driven by "another deputy," or at least someone "in a badge" (253).

In The Reivers the people who live in the vicinity of Ballenbaugh's and seek to close it down include "sheriffs" (who campaign on the promise to run Ballenbaugh and his crew out of Yoknapatawpha), "angry farmers" (who know their livestock is being stolen by that crew), and "ministers and old ladies" (who object to the place on moral grounds, 73). On the other hand, Lucius tells his grandson that "sensible people" from further away were willing to allow the place to exist (74).

This entry represents the people in The Reivers who are in a "carriage or wagon" when the automobile being driven by Boon moves through the Square (39). Some of these horse- and mule-drawn vehicles have "women and children" in them, and some are being driven by women (39). Grandfather Priest's behavior changes, depending on the gender of the driver, but in either case, both the animals and the people are often startled by the presence of the car.

According to Boon, the Memphis man who sold Grandfather the car in The Reivers said to run the engine every day.

At the time The Reivers begins, Ludus is romancing "a new girl, daughter (or wife: we didn't know which) of a tenant" farmer who lives six miles from town (10). Apparently she likes "peppermint candy" (11).

When he describes his situation on the verge of launching the forbidden trip to Memphis in The Reivers, Lucius says "I was in the position of the old Negro who said, 'Here I is, Lord. . . ." (62). He (or Faulkner) may have a specific person in mind, but this tempted black man seems more like the product of Lucius' imagination, and a suggestive one at that.

This is the group that Lucius contemptuously refers in The Reivers as the "brutal and shameless men" (155) who pay Otis a dime to watch his aunt, Miss Corrie, "pugnuckling," having sex, with paying customers (154).

This Union soldier in The Reivers is the "picket of Fitz-John Porter's" - i.e. a man on look-out duty as part of Porter's Union division at Gaines's Mill, Virginia - who shot and killed Grandfather Priest's father during the CIvil War (278).

In The Reivers Lucius notes in passing that Delphine is the wife Ned has in 1904, and that during his lifetime he "ran through four wives" (31). This entry represents the other three, none of whom are given names, or individualized in any way. The narrative doesn't even indicate Delphine's place in the sequence of four.

This "Mr Wylie" in The Reivers is a "family friend" of the Priests in 1905 (69). He lives on the place "eight miles from Jefferson" that his ancestor, "the first Wylie" in Yoknapatawpha, moved to sometime before the Civil War (69, 73). (In earlier editions of the novel his and his ancestor's name was Wyott.)

Mr. Wordwin, a cashier at the Bank of Jefferson, plays his small part in The Reivers when he accompanies Boon to Memphis to fetch Grandfather's new car, but the narrative adds that he is "a bachelor, one of our most prominent clubmen or men about town" who has been "a groomsman in thirteen weddings" (30).

Birdie Watts runs the brothel "across the street" from Miss Reba's in The Reivers (107).

In The Reivers Vera works as one of the prostitutes at Miss Reba's. Because she is away, "visiting her folks up in Paducah," Boon and Lucius stay in her room (99).

In The Reivers the man who owns Coppermine (i.e. Lightning) is named van Tosch. He is originally from Chicago, but on a trip to Memphis decided he liked it so much that he moved to Tennessee and became a breeder of race horses. It is because he is "a foreigner" (281) - i.e. from the North - that he does not behave correctly when his black employee, Bobo, asks for money to help him out of trouble. But the narrative treats him favorably as a friend of both Colonel Linscomb and Grandfather.

In The Reivers Mr. Rouncewell is an agent for a company that "supplies all the stores in Yoknapatawpha County" with oil (48). Either he or the oil company is also far-sighted enough recently to have added "a special tank of gasoline" to the tanks holding oil (48). His name suggests a connection to "Mrs. Rouncewell's boarding house" (26), where Boon lives, and there are men named Rouncewell in both The Town and The Mansion he could be, or be related to, but the novel does not make any of those connections explicit.

The "Paul Rainey" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers was a real Northern millionaire famous for his love of hunting (163). As Lucius notes, he "liked our country enough to use some of [his] Wall Street money" to purchase 11,000 acres of Mississippi land as a hunting preserve (163). Faulkner's father Murry knew him personally.

John Powell's wife is not named in The Reivers, but she is mentioned as having "stitched a neat strong pocket" inside his overalls for the pistol he chooses to carry (7).

The wife of Parsham's Constable in The Reivers had a stroke "last year," and "cant even move her hand now" (257).

Among the well-known sportsmen who come to Parsham every winter for the "National Trials" of pedigree bird dogs, Lucius mentions four names. Two are identifiable as real men (Horace Lytle and Paul Rainey). Lucius, the narrator of The Reivers, compares "George Peyton" to Lytle: the two are "as magical among bird dog people" as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb are to baseball fans (189). Although we haven't been able to confirm it, this pairing suggests that like Lytle, Peyton is a real person.

The young black who rides Acheron against Lucius and Lightning in The Reivers is named McWillie. According to Lucius, "for size and age and color [he] might have been Lycurgus' twin" (220).

The "Horace Lytle" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers in connection with Parsham's annual hunting dog show is almost certainly the real Horace Lytle who in 1927 became the gun dog editor of the magazine Field & Stream. The bird dog he refuses to sell for $5000 - Mary Montrose - was real too: she won the New York Dog Show in 1917.

Butch, the deputy sheriff who bullies Boon and Corrie in Parsham in The Reivers, says his last name is "Lovemaiden" (187). This could be true, though it's not impossible that he gives himself that name as another way to annoy Boon. He is described as being "almost as big as Boon and almost as ugly, with a red face and a badge" (168) and "a bachelor" (190). Lucius says he smells of "sweat and whiskey" (170).