Character Keys

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).

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).

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 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).

Herbert Head mentions "a little widow over in town" when he is trying to ingratiate himself with Caddy's brother Quentin (110). The "town" is presumably Boston, "over" the river from Harvard. Although it has been suggested that Head is talking about a prostitute, the idea of 'the college widow' as an unmarried woman who dates a succession of students over the years was proverbial in both 1910 (when the conversation takes place) and 1929 (when The Sound and the Fury was published).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin associates "Washington not telling lies" with "Jesus walking on Galilee" (80). Jesus walks on water in the New Testament. The mythic claim that even as a boy George Washington, the first President of the U.S., 'could not tell a lie' was created by an early biographer and educator named Parson Weems, who thought that the story of young Washington and the cherry tree he chopped down would be edifying for the young men of the early American republic. Weems himself could tell a lie.

These are the people who live "in houses [and] cabins ten and fifteen miles away" from Lonnie Grinnup's shack (71). According to "Hand Upon the Waters," Lonnie Grinnup and Joe periodically visit them, sometimes "for weeks" - the story simply refers to them as "his hosts" (71). They mostly seem to be farmers, since Lonnie and Joe sometimes sleep in "the hay of lofts," but some of them at least are prosperous enough to have "company rooms" with "beds" to sleep in (71).

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 Sanctuary Horace Benbow tells Ruby Lamar that she can "always get me by telephone, at ------," and gives her "the name of a neighbor" that the narrative withholds from us (201). This is that neighbor. (In Flags in the Dust the Benbows' neighbors are named Wyatt; there's no obvious reason for Faulkner's coyness about the neighbor in this novel.)

The narrator of "Smoke" refers briefly to "the presiding judge during court term" when describing how one can gain entry into Judge Dukinfield's office (14). It's not clear if this is a rotating or a permanent position.

When Bayard remembers church services before the Civil War in "The Unvanquished" and again in The Unvanquished, he recalls that "the bishop" visited the church in Yoknapatawpha at least once; the bishop's official ring "looked big as a pistol target" (86, 137). "Episcopal" as a word derives from the idea of bishops; in the hierarchy of the Episcopal religion, a Bishop would preside over churches spread across a large area.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. "Centaur in Brass" takes place after Flem Snopes comes to town, and doesn't provide a name for the place he comes from, though the references to the "country store" (149) and the auction of "a herd of half-wild mustang ponies" (150) identifies the place as the Bend.

According to Gavin in The Mansion, "the rest of the world, at least that part of it in the United States, rates us folks in Mississippi at the lowest rung of culture" (167). This entry represents those people outside Mississippi - especially in the North.

In The Mansion V.K. Ratliff refers to "some foreigner from four or six miles away" from Frenchman's Bend who tried to court Eula Varner, but was "bushwhacked" by the local young men who put aside their rivalry long enough to drive away this outsider (131-32). Ratliff may be citing a specific case, or something that has happened more than once before McCarron - another outsider - comes courting.

In a confused passage in The Mansion that evokes a number of stereotypes, mostly involving national types (like "German," 146), Gavin Stevens asserts the idea of "the modern virile northern Aryan" to explain why he decided to participate in the First World War by serving on the allied side (146). According to Gavin's idea, it was "the old Aryan stock" as embodied in the English that "established America" (146).

The real Herbert Hoover was the 31st President of the U.S. (1929-1933). The "Herbert Hoover" who appears in The Mansion, however, is the creation of Gavin Stevens, who is trying to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation. away from Linda Snopes Kohl by writing an anonymous letter to "Herbert Hoover/F B & I Depment" accusing Flem Snopes of having a "commonist party Card" (269). The real head of the F.B.I. at the time, of course, was J.

These men appear in absentia in The Mansion as part of the explanation of how Otis Meadowfill ended up "choosing [Gavin] Stevens from among the other Jefferson lawyers" (367). As a county seat and the site of a federal courthouse, Jefferson presumably had quite a number of lawyers throughout its history.

Gavin Stevens mentions "the Swiss" in passing during his lengthy monologue about race in Chapter 7 of Intruder in the Dust: after telling his nephew that the white South, "alone in the United States," is "a homogeneous people," he compares them to the "the Swiss" - they too are homogeneous, but there are not "enough" of them to matter, adding that they "are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business" (150).

During his lengthy monologue about race in Chapter 7 of Intruder in the Dust, Gavin Stevens refers with clear contempt to what he calls "the coastal spew of Europe" that lives in the urban, industrial North, an undefined group that he juxtaposes to "the New Englander" who lives "back inland" away from the cities on the coast (150). The distinction is a hierarchical and even moral one: the traditional (i.e.

These "heiresses to European thrones" appear only inside a quasi-Homeric or mock-heroic simile when the narrator of Intruder in the Dust compares Willy Ingrum, who moves to Jefferson from Beat Four, marries "a town girl," and becomes the "town marshal" to the "petty Germanic princelings [who] come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones" (133). It's not clear if Faulkner is thinking of specific members of European royalty.

Ratliff brings this "fellow" into The Hamlet in his account of how Ab Snopes burned De Spain's barn: according to this account, he bases his description of the rapid "gait" at which De Spain rode his horse from the barn to the cabin where Ab was living on this "fellow who heard him passing in the road" (19). Throughout his account of Ab and De Spain (essentially a re-telling of the short story "Barn Burning"), Ratliff describes events he did not witness firsthand, but this is the only point at which he explains how he 'knew' what happened.

In the middle of describing Sutpen and Ellen's wedding in Absalom, Absalom! Mr. Compson interrupts his reconstruction to generalize about women who never had formal weddings: "women who were married by tobacco-chewing j[ustices of the] p[eace]s in country courthouses or by ministers waked after midnight" (37). According to his misogynistic assertion, it is the longing of these women for a more ceremonial wedding that is the cause of "most divorces" (37).

The "clientele" of the "little crossroads store" that Thomas Sutpen opens after the Civil War includes, according to Shreve McCannon, "freed niggers" who live in the area (147). Shreve uses the adjective "freed" because the historical context is the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and Emancipation. He uses that derogatory noun to describe these former slaves because Negroes are considered inferior - though it's interesting to note that in this same passage Shreve reveals how, as a Canadian, he is with the equally derogatory term "white trash" (147).