Character Keys

In The Sound and the Fury Julio is the older brother of the unnamed Italian girl whom Quentin tries to escort safely home from the bakery. Julio attacks Quentin, thinking that Quentin has tried to kidnap his sister, or as Julio himself puts it: "I killa heem . . . [he] steala my seester" (139). At the Squire's office Julio wants to press kidnapping charges, but instead accepts money from Quentin as compensation for the time he lost at work while chasing after him.

In The Sound and the Fury Kenny is one of the "three boys with fishing poles" Quentin first encounters on the bridge where he hides the flat irons (122). This may be the one that the narrative consistently refers to as "the first boy" (122). He wears a "broken hat" (123) and seems to hold himself a bit apart from the other two boys. Quentin tries talking with him after they leave him, but "he paid me no attention" (123). He seems to have rejoined his friends by the time Quentin sees them again, swimming in the river.

In The Sound and the Fury Mac is a baseball fan who is at the drugstore in Jefferson when Jason goes there to buy cigars. He has his money on the New York Yankees.

In The Sound and the Fury Mink works at the livery stable in Jefferson. Based on characters with similar jobs in the other fictions, he is most likely black, but that is not specified. He drives the hack, the rented carriage, that the Compsons rent for Mr. Compson's funeral, and then, in exchange for a couple of cigars, drives it again so that Jason can show Caddy's child to her.

In The Sound and the Fury Natalie is a girl about Quentin and Caddy's age who lives near their house. Caddy calls her "a dirty girl" (134) after catching her and Quentin naively exploring their sexualities together in the barn, but their behavior would probably seem natural enough to anyone but Quentin. Natalie does, however, take the lead in this exploration, and given the contemptuous way Caddy treats her (calling her "Cowface," for example, 136), the novel might be suggesting she is lower class.

In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons' house is adjacent to the Compsons'. Quentin remembers that when Jason was younger, he and "the Patterson boy . . . made kites on the back porch and sold them for a nickel a piece" (94). Jason parted ways with him, apparently when the boy complained about not getting his share of the profits.

In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons live next door to the Compsons. Maury Bascomb has an affair with Mrs. Patterson when the Compson children are young. At least once Caddy takes her a letter from "Uncle Maury," and sometime later Benjy tries to deliver another. On that occasion we hear Mrs. Patterson call Benjy "you idiot" as she tries to grab the letter before her husband can reach him (13).

In The Sound and the Fury Shegog is the visiting clergyman from St. Louis who gives the Easter sermon at the Negro church in Jefferson. Physically he is unimpressive: "The visitor was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat. He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey" (293). But he possesses a powerful voice: the congregation soon forgets "his insignificant appearance in the virtuosity" of his voice (293).

In The Sound and the Fury Spoade is the last name of a senior at Harvard College with Quentin in 1910. He jokingly calls Shreve Quentin's "husband" (78). Quentin says Spoade has "five names, including that of a present English ducal house" (91-92), but he never thinks of him except as "Spoade" - his first name is never given. He is from South Carolina, and lives up to the image of a southern aristocrat in a number of ways besides his name, including the fact that he goes to chapel every day in dishabille.

The minister of the Methodist Church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury is named Parson Walthall; he protests the slaughter of the town's pigeons to prevent them from fouling the town clock.

In The Sound and the Fury the invisible "caddie" who is called by the golfers while Luster looks for the quarter never specifically appears. In a sense he exists in Benjy's section in name only, whenever the golfers on the course beside the Compson yard call "caddie" (3). The fact that whenever this name is called Benjy instead hears "Caddy" makes this and the book's other "caddies" major characters in his mind.

In The Sound and the Fury this woman waits on Quentin in the bakery shop. According to Quentin, she looks "like a librarian" (125). She is very hostile to "them foreigners" in her neighborhood, and suspects that the little girl in her store may be shoplifting: "She'll hide it under her dress and a body'd never know it" (126).

In The Sound and the Fury the bridge over the Charles where Quentin decides to commit suicide is also a place, he learns from the boys he meets there, where "Boston folks" come to fish for the renowned trout who swims under it (119).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin thinks of the three boys carrying fishing poles whom he meets at the bridge as "the first," "the second" and "the third" (117 etc.), but they can also be distinguished from each other by their actions (and the fact that one is called "Kenny" by another, 122). This is the "third" boy, who seems the most agreeable and least interesting of the three, although like his friends, he is upset when Quentin comes along later with the unnamed little girl and watches them swimming - because they are swimming naked.

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin gets in a fight with this boy when he threatened to put a frog in a girl's desk - or possibly the teacher's desk; she is female too. Quentin tells Mr. Compson, though, that "He was as big as me" (67).

In The Sound and the Fury these two men operate the schooner Quentin watches going under the drawbridge over the Charles: one is "naked to the waist . . . coiling down a line on the fo'c's'le head" and the other is "in a straw hat without any crown . . . at the wheel" (89).

In his Easter sermon in The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog mentions the two men who were crucified on either side of Jesus. He refers to "de thief and de murderer" (296). The "thief" is presumably the man mentioned in the Gospels who rebukes the other criminal for mocking Jesus and asks Jesus to remember him when he reaches heaven.

This is the "she" in The Sound and the Fury whose innocence or honor Quentin tries to protect by fighting the male classmate who is threatening to "put a frog in her desk" (68). She is probably another student, but may be the teacher - in any case, Mr. Compson, who knows his son Quentin, says "Oh. . . . She" when Quentin tells him about the fight (68).

At the gas station where Jason stops after leaving the Sheriff's house in The Sound and the Fury, this Negro employee fills Jason's tank with gas and his tires with air.

The man Mrs. Bland refers to as "Gerald's grandfather" in The Sound and the Fury is almost certainly her father, so we don't know his last name (148). In her account, he is a very traditional southern aristocrat, and very fussy about the ingredients in his mint julep.

Jason describes the customer to whom he sells a "twenty-cent hame string" in The Sound and the Fury as a "dam redneck" (194-95).

In The Sound and the Fury the annual Harvard-Yale crew race is scheduled to take place a few days after June 2, 1910. Perhaps because Quentin is about use a river to drown himself, he thinks about the race, and the team - "them down at New London" - several times in his section of the novel (77, 105, etc.).

Harvard's "proctor" appears in Quentin's section of The Sound and the Fury when he remembers the way Mrs. Bland tried to have Shreve moved out of the suite he and Quentin share - because he didn't strike her as a suitable roommate for a Mississippi Compson. "The proctor reveals enough low stubbornness to insist on consulting Shreve first," and the change is never made (106). (This is an unusual use of 'proctor' - who is usually someone monitoring students taking an exam; perhaps Faulkner meant 'dean' or 'registrar.')

While chasing his niece and his money in the last section of The Sound and the Fury, Jason imagines a scene in which he commandeers someone's team of mules to pull his car from the imagined mud that is trying to stop his pursuit. The team's "owner" whom he strikes down is, of course, like the whole episode, his own invention (306).

This unnamed Italian immigrant in The Sound and the Fury does not speak English. When Quentin knocks at her door hoping to find the home of the little girl who has been accompanying him since he left the bakery, the woman seems to understand his question, but her answer is undecipherable: "'Si, si,' she said, holding back, showing me whatever it was" (132).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin recalls a story that Mrs. Bland tells about Gerald, involving "a sawmill husband" - the lower-class husband of a woman with whom Gerald has had sexual relations - who confronts him with a shotgun (107). According to Quentin's remembered version, Gerald is supposed to have bitten the gun in two. It's not clear how much of the exaggeration here is Mrs. Bland's and how much Quentin's.

In The Sound and the Fury this man seems more a product of Mrs. Bland's imagination than a real person. One of the stories she tells about her son Gerald focuses on the loyalty of "his nigger," who pleads to be allowed to accompany his "marster" to Harvard (107).

This man in The Sound and the Fury tells Quentin that the marshal is not there, and that he doesn't recognize the little girl with Quentin: "Them furriners. I cant tell one from another" (130). But he does point Quentin toward the district where those 'foreigners' live.

In The Sound and the Fury Shreve's account of Quentin's fight with Bland includes the "wench that he made a date with to meet at a dance hall in Atlantic city" (166); Bland boasts about standing her up, so she doesn't appear even in his story, and Shreve's account seems skeptical about Bland's whole story - but in his own mind Quentin's attack on Bland seems to be an attempt to defend this young woman's honor

In The Sound and the Fury, when this man "comes along" the sidewalk outside the closed Mottson drugstore, Jason asks him if there's a "drugstore open anywhere" and when "the northbound train" runs (312).

When Quentin boards the first of the Boston streetcars he rides during the day in The Sound and the Fury, he notes that it full of "mostly prosperous looking people reading newspapers" (86). Specific passengers in the car include a Negro who is wearing "a derby and shined shoes" and holding "a dead cigar stub" - having to sit next to him prompts Quentin to reflect on the relationship between blacks and whites (86). Other passengers are "women with market baskets" and a man in "a stained hat with a pipe stuck in the band" (89).

In The Sound and the Fury this woman is mentioned by Jason when he remembers the last time he saw Lorraine in Memphis. He gives "the maid" five dollars (194). It is likely that Lorraine herself is a prostitute, and that the maid works for the brothel, not Lorraine personally. And while Jason does not specifically say the maid is black, based on the other maids in and out of brothels in Faulkner's world it is safe to assume she is.

In The Sound and the Fury these two men sitting in front of a store talk to Quentin during his attempt to find the home of the little girl he met in the bakery.

In The Sound and the Fury Jason mentions this "Chinese missionary" whom the rich Jefferson merchant "bought" for "five thousand dollars a year," in order to ease his conscience (194). The reference is ambiguous enough to possibly mean the missionary himself is 'Chinese' or perhaps Chinese-American, but it is far more likely that he is a white American on a religious mission to China.

In The Sound and the Fury, at "a filling station" in Mottson, "they" tell Jason where the traveling show can be found (308). The novel provides no evidence about who "they" are - whether customers or attendants at the gas station, or both.

While never seen nor (unlike the band the traveling show brings to Jefferson) even heard, the performer who "can play a tune on a saw" (15) is mentioned or (when Luster spends so much of Easter trying to imitate him) alluded to in all four sections of The Sound and the Fury. He is perhaps the novel's figure of the artist.

Many different people from Yoknapatawpha appear in The Sound and the Fury. This is a group that exists only in Jason Compson's head, the "you" he is arguing with as he sits alone in his car while chasing his niece through the county: he compares his family to this hypothetical "you," as in "you all were running little shirt tail country stores" and farming poor soil while his "people" owned slaves (239).

In The Sound and the Fury the choir at the black church in Jefferson begins the Easter service with song.

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin sees this man in Virginia, from the window of the train carrying him back to Yoknapatawpha from Harvard for the holidays. He is sitting patiently on a mule without a saddle, "waiting for the train to move" (86). When Quentin calls out "Christmas gift!" to him, he replies, "Sho comin, boss. You done caught me, aint you" (87). To Quentin, he seems "like a sign put there saying You are home again" in the South (87).

In The Sound and the Fury these women are washing clothes in the creek that runs besides the golf course and the Compson place; "one of them is singing" (14).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin and Deacon discuss the time the black man marched in the parade "on Decoration Day" (82). Decoration Day was the southern name for Memorial Day, originally created to honor the veterans of the Civil War and in 1910 it would have been celebrated on the last Monday of May. Deacon mentions both "the old vet'runs" and the "ladies" who organize the celebration (98). Deacon was was wearing a "G.A.R. uniform," i.e. the uniform of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union army (82).

These are the people in The Sound and the Fury who pass along the streets in Cambridge outside the window of Quentin's streetcar - he sees, for example, "the crowns of people's heads passing beneath new straw hats not yet unbleached" (89).

In The Sound and the Fury the "possum hunters" who find the bones of the "bluegum" man who had been eaten by "them bluegum chillen" are not explicitly identified as black in the story Versh tells Benjy (69), but given the African American folk context of the tale and the stereotypical association of possums and blacks, that seems likely. When Quentin hunts possum in his section of the novel, it is with Versh Gibson and Louis Hatcher, both black.

In the story that Versh tells in The Sound and the Fury about the "old time," this is the slave he calls "family woman" - i.e. she is pregnant; when she looks the "bluegum" man "in the eye in the full of the moon," all the "chillen" she gives birth to are "born bluegum" (69).

In his sermon in The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog refers to the Romans who hunt for the newborn Jesus as both the "po-lice" and as "sojers" (296).

In The Sound and the Fury Miss Quentin, like her mother Caddy, is sexually active as a teenager (and also seems to be pregnant, as Caddy was with her, out of wedlock). Jason is sure that his niece makes herself available not only to all the "slick-headed jellybeans" (184) and "dam squirts" (188) in Jefferson but to "every dam drummer and cheap show [man] that comes to town" (239).

In The Sound and the Fury the old "man in a dirty apron" Jason spots at the train carrying the traveling show in Mottson is probably a cook. Though smaller than Jason, he becomes a "puny fury" when he feels Jason has insulted him, driving to get to his "butcher knife" and then attacking Jason with a "rusty hatchet" (309-10). As the owner of the show later tells Jason, warning him to stay away from the show, "That damn little wasp'll kill you" (312).

In The Sound and the Fury to refute his niece's accusation that he has been following her, Jason invents a story about the "showman" who borrows his car to chase after his "sister's husband" (258).

In The Sound and the Fury, as part of his fictional alibi, Jason invents this "sister" of the fictional "showman" who borrows his car; her equally invented husband is supposedly involved with "some town woman" (258).