Character Keys

The "overseer" Sutpen hires in Absalom! is credited with helping the plantation "run smoothly" (57). He is identified only as the son of the county sheriff.

In Chapter 5 of Absalom! Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin about the time immediately following the South's defeat in the Civil War.

In Mr. Compson's account of the city in Absalom!, Bon's initiation of Henry into the sophisticated world of New Orleans begins with his exposure to the elegant people riding in the city streets: "women, enthroned . . . like painted portraits" and "men in linen a little finer and diamonds a little brighter" than anything Henry had seen before (88).

In "the justice's court" in Absalom!, General Compson sees Charles E. S-V. Bon "handcuffed to an officer" (163); this officer may be "the sheriff" (164), or one of his deputies.

In the immediate aftermath of the South's surrender, according to Rosa's account in Absalom!, "men with pistols in their pockets gathered daily at secret meeting places in the towns"; a deputation from this group unsuccessfully demands that Sutpen join them (130). Rosa never gives the group a name, but when she later describes their "sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses" it seems obvious that the Ku Klux Klan is being evoked (134). (There are entries for Klansmen in other texts in this index.)

A "consul" was the highest elected official in the Roman Republic. In Absalom! the "youthful Roman consul" traveling among "barbarian hordes which his grandfather conquered" is the symbolic figure with whom Mr. Compson compares Charles Bon, the urban sophisticate visiting the "isolated Puritan country household" of Thomas Sutpen (74).

The teacher at the Tidewater school Sutpen attends in Absalom! is described, tautologically, as "the kind of teacher that would be teaching a one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations" (195). Sutpen tells General Compson that the man "always looked dusty, as if he had been born and lived all his life in attics and store rooms" (195).

When Absalom! says that Coldfield's two women servants are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66), it indirectly refers to the other enslaved men and women in Jefferson who, like almost all the slaves at Sutpen's Hundred, emancipate themselves as soon as the Union army arrives.

As the proprietor of the largest plantation in Yoknapatawpha, Sutpen owned a much larger group of slaves than his original twenty slaves from the Caribbean and the additional several slaves whom the narrator specifically refers to. Absalom! notes, for example, that over the years the "wild" Negroes whom Sutpen "had brought into the country" mix with other enslaved Negroes - "the tame which was already there" (67).

In Absalom! Henry and Bon enlist and serve in the Confederate company organized at the start of the Civil War by "their classmates at the University" (69). According to Mr. Compson, its men come from across the entire class spectrum: "rich and poor, aristocrat and redneck" (97), and the flag they carry toward the fighting was sewn a few stitches at a time by "the sweetheart of each man in the company" (98).

"The justice's court" in which Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned in Absalom! is described as "crowded" (163); "every face in the room" looks at the prisoner at the moment when the justice himself asks him "What are you?" (165).

During the last winter of the Civil War, Rosa says in Absalom!, "stragglers" frequently passed by the Sutpen plantation where she, Judith and Clytemnestra lived. Some she says were "tramps, ruffians," but others were "soldiers beginning to come back" from the war, "men who had risked and lost everything" (126). Right after the passage mentions the "wife or mistress" of such men "who in [their] absence has been raped," Rosa adds: "We were afraid," but "we fed them" (126).

In her account in Absalom! of the men who begin returning home from the Civil War during its final winter, Rosa refers to the men's "beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped" (126). She does not say by whom.

According to Absalom!, when Bon and Henry enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1859, the entire student body "numbered in two figures" (81). Included in that number are the "five or six" students, all like Henry "planters' sons," with whom Bon associates (76). It is also this small clique, presumably, who follow Bon's example and switch to the Law School.

In Absalom! these are the twenty "wild blacks" whom Sutpen brings as slaves to Yoknaptawpha in 1833 (4), from a French colony in the Caribbean; the "civilized language" which they speak (44) is "a sort of French" (27). Sutpen has a child - Clytemnestra - with one of the two slaves in this group who are women (48). The narrative repeatedly calls them "wild" (13, 16, etc.), and distinguishes them as a group from the "tame" slaves that Sutpen later acquires, through birth or purchase (17). Rosa characterizes them as being "like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men" (4).

These "town officers" in Absalom! take Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon away if he is drunk and violent in Jefferson (170).

In "Monk," C.L. Gambrell is the warden at the penitentiary. He seems to be a fair, kind man in many respects. He makes Monk a "trusty" (trustee, 49), and Monk follows him with "doglike devotion" (49). However, he also displays a cruel streak when he goads Bill Terrel concerning his pardon. He shows his judgment to be even more questionable when he has an unnamed Negro cook "severely beaten" in an effort to extract information about his missing pistol. Monk later finds the pistol where the warden then "recalls having hid it himself" (53).

The man who is Mrs. Odlethrop's son in "Monk" and also, presumably, the title character's biological father, is described as "too much even for that country and people" (43). He returns to his mother's home with a woman, presumably Monk's mother, after a ten year absence. He initially left (or was driven out of Yoknapatawpha) after killing someone, and after his return his own mother is said to have "driven" him out of town again at gunpoint (43).

Presumably Monk's grandmother, Mrs. Odlethrop lives like a hermit with Monk and seems fiercely protective of him. People tell of how she chased her son and Monk's mother "out of the house and out of the country" with a shotgun because that son was "too much even for that country and people" (43).

At Bill Terrel's murder trial in "Monk," in a small but telling moment, his daughter denies her father's story that the man he killed had seduced her.

This "woman with hard, bright, metallic city hair and a hard, blonde, city face" comes to Yoknapatawpha in "Monk" when Mrs. Odlethrop's son returns home after a long absence (43). The word "city" in that description suggests she is from Memphis, or someplace similar, but that is not made clear in the story. Nor can we say for sure that she is Monk's mother, though the fact that the infant Monk is seen at the Odlethrops' shortly after she and the son leave - for unknown reasons, though perhaps because Mrs.

Although the only examples in "Monk" of the political hacks whom the state's new Governor is elevating to positions of power are the men on the Parole Board, Stevens sees that group as representative of the "battalions and battalions of factory-made colonels" now running the government (63).

The young district attorney who prosecutes Monk at his murder trial in "Monk" cares more about his conviction rate than justice. The narrator calls attention to his ambitiousness, stating that he "had his eye on Congress" (41).

In "Tomorrow," the District Attorney of Yoknapatawpha apparently feels so certain that Bookwright will be found not guilty that he "conducts the case through an assistant" (91), and does not otherwise appear in the story.

In both the short story "Go Down, Moses" and the novel of the same name, this driver is hired by Gavin Stevens to carry Belle Worsham and Molly Beauchamp in Stevens' car from the train station to the McCaslin plantation.

In The Mansion the member of Goodyhay's sect who gives Mink a ride into Memphis (and whom the narrative only refers to as "the driver," and does not describe at all, 312) knows his way around the city.

The grandfather of the man who is the Governor of the state in "Monk" seems to have been a man of the lower classes with a chip on his shoulder similar to the one Bill Terrel carries. As the Governor says of him to Gavin Stevens, "Mr. Stevens, you are what my grandpap would have called a gentleman. He would have snarled it at you, hating you and your kind; he might very probably have shot your horse from under you someday from behind a fence - for a principle" (57).

Referred to only as "the Court" in "Monk," the Jefferson judge who presides over Monk's murder trial plays a significant role in determining its outcome (41): he appoints the lawyer who does such a perfunctory job defending Monk; he may even have directed the lawyer to plead Monk "guilty" (42).

In "Monk" there are two unnamed men present when Monk is found holding a pistol beside a man who has been shot. This is the man who did not do the killing - though of course he becomes an accomplice when he refuses to tell the truth about who did do the killing.

According to the narrator of "Monk," the murder victim at the gas station where Monk works and lives is "no loss to anyone" (46). And that is all the story says about him.

After Mrs. Odlethrop dies in "Monk," these neighbors try and fail to catch the young Monk. The story describes the people of this part of the county as violent towards strangers, but in this instance it shows that they can treat their own with kindness: they bury Mrs. Odlethrop and leave food for Monk at the "deserted house" even though they don't see him (44).

"Monk" includes two separate visits to the state penitentiary, but the only specific reference it makes to the inmate population is when, during an "abortive jailbreak," Monk shoots the warden. "Fifty men" see him do that, and "some of the other convicts" overpower him afterwards (50). One of these men is later identified as Bill Terrel, and some of them, like Bill Terrel, are considered by the Governor's Pardon Board for release.

Many of the many Snopeses who appear in the fictions are "descendants" of Ab Snopes (6), but the specific group referred to in "Barn Burning" is made up of the unnamed Snopeses who are alive in "later years," later, that is to say, than the first introduction of automobiles into Yoknapatawpha - i.e. sometime after about 1920 (6). The narrative notes that the "same quality" that makes Ab handle his mules badly will characterize the way these future Snopeses try to "put a motor car into motion" (6).

Tyler Ballenbaugh's "family" is mentioned when he first appears in "Hand upon the Waters," but no other details about them are given (75). The fact that Tyler is "married," however, means the family includes a wife (75).

In "Hand upon the Waters," Blake is one of the four men - the others are Ike, Pose, and Matthew - who load Lonnie Grinnup’s body onto a wagon for transfer to Tyler Ballenbaugh’s truck.

The eldest of the four men - the others are Pose, Matthew, and Jim Blake - who load Lonnie Grinnup’s body onto a wagon for transfer to Tyler Ballenbaugh’s truck in "Hand upon the Waters." There's no sign of a connection between him and the two more significant 'Ike's in the fiction: McCaslin and Snopes.

One of the four men - the others are Ike, Matthew, and Jim Blake - who load Lonnie Grinnup’s body onto a wagon for transfer to Tyler Ballenbaugh’s truck in "Hand upon the Waters."

For several years before "Hand upon the Waters" begins, Boyd Ballenbaugh has been hiding at his brother’s place in Yoknapatawpha, though he is hiding "not from the police but from some of his Memphis friends or later business associates" (76). Both the mention of the police and the fact that Boyd is in hiding seems to suggest that, like many of the characters whom Faulkner's fictions locate in Memphis, these men in "Hand upon the Waters" are members of the underworld, and their "business" some kind of criminal activity - but that is not made explicit.

These are the local Yoknapatawpha men in "Hand upon the Waters" who own the "topless and battered cars, the saddled horses and mules and the wagons, the riders and drivers of which" Gavin Stevens knows by name (72). The men show up to Lonnie Grinnup's inquest in their "clean Saturday overalls and shirts and the bared heads and the sunburned necks striped with the white razor lines of Saturday neck shaves" (72). Among these men are the "folks" who go out to view Grinnup's camp and trotline later and see Joe hanging about (77).

In "Hand upon the Waters" someone informs Stevens about both Lonnie's funeral and Joe's whereabouts on the day he was buried. There is good reason to think this person is someone from Frenchman's Bend, and it may even be the coroner whose telephone call first brought Stevens into the story, but all the text provides is a voice which speaks in correct (i.e. not vernacular) English and with unmistakable if unsentimental sympathy for Joe's loss.

The older of the two men who discover Lonnie's body in "Hand upon the Waters" is described as "a man of about forty" (72); his dialect - "Him and Joe" (67), "Yonder's his boat" (69) - indicates that, like most of the story's characters, he's a "country-bred man" (78).

In The Hamlet the store owner from whom Ab buys the milk separator is named Cain . (In the original version of this event, "Fool about a Horse" [1936], the man who owns the store is Ike McCaslin.)

Hoake - only his last name is given in The Hamlet - is "a well-to-do landowner" (152). After his daughter Alison elopes with McCarron, "Old Hoake had sat for ten days now with a loaded shotgun across his lap" (153) before the newlyweds returned. McCarron, however, learned his father-in-law's business quickly and Hoake eventually bequeathed the flourishing property to his grandson, Hoake McCarron.

In The Hamlet Labove is the child of a poor family in "the next county" (114). After working his way through the University of Mississippi doing menial jobs and playing football, he is hired to be the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend. Faulkner initially describes him as "gaunt, with straight black hair coarse as a horse's tail and high Indian cheekbones and quiet pale hard eyes and the long nose of thought but with the slightly curved nostrils of pride and the thin lips of secret and ruthless ambition" (117).

In The Hamlet Labove's father is small time farmer in "the next county" to Yoknapatawpha (114) who sees no point in his son going to a university to become a teacher. He is "annoyed, concerned, even a little outraged that he should have deserted them with the remaining work on the crop - the picking and ginning of the cotton, the gathering and cribbing of the corn - to be done" (117).

In The Hamlet this Mitchell is one of the men hanging out on the gallery in front of the Whiteleaf store.

In The Hamlet the Old Frenchman's son has disappeared from the scene along with the rest of his family, except for a single detail: this heir to the Old Frenchman plantation - possibly accompanied by his father - rode into Jefferson in the early days of the Civil War to recruit men to the Confederate army (373).

The "Prince of Darkness" that Faulkner describes trying to deal with Flem Snopes in Hell is apparently the son of the original Satan, "the Prince's pa" (168). Flem gets the better of him - or maybe we mean the worse.

At the end of The Hamlet among the men watching Flem's wagon heading out from Varner's store toward Jefferson and speculating on what Flem's next move will be is a man who is identified only as Aaron Rideout's brother and also V.K. Ratliff's cousin (403).