Character Keys

In Light in August, when Christmas reaches Mottstown he stops first at "a white barbership" where "they shave him and cut his hair" (349) - the plural pronoun here is confusing; presumably only one barber does the work.

In the "Appendix" these are the unnamed boarders - "juries and horse- and muletraders" - who live in the Compson house after it has been vacated by the Compsons (331) .

In Light in August the bookkeeper in the office at the planing mill who tells Hightower that Byron has quit his job there also calls Byron a "hillbilly," which suggests he himself might be from town (413).

In Go Down, Moses this character is Ike McCaslin, the novel's central figure, but in both "The Old People" and "The Bear," originally published as magazine stories before being revised and incorporated into the novel, he is a lot harder to name. In all three texts, he's a child of white privilege who has been taught how to conduct oneself as a hunter - which is to say, how to be the right kind of man - by Sam Fathers, mixed race son of a Chickasaw chief.

In "Centaur in Brass" an unnamed local butcher gives Tom-Tom one of last year's watermelons that has been in cold storage for a year; he is afraid to eat it himself. In giving it to a black man, he joins other white folks in Faulkner's fiction who give black people castoffs with no regard for what happens next.

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion the "owner of the car" in which Clarence Snopes takes refuge from the dogs is apparently not one of the "they" who drive the Senator home and "fetch [him] a pair of dry britches" (138, 349).

This is the man who drives Mrs. Compson out to the Sartoris place in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished.

Among the Jefferson people Hawkshaw barbers in "Hair" are children, to whom he gives peppermints.

In "Centaur in Brass" and again in The Town, it is the city clerk in Jefferson who bills Flem for the amount of the missing brass.

In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses, this conductor on the logging line train listens to Boon's stories of Lion and Old Ben. He, Boon and the train's brakeman discuss the pair of animals as though they are distinguished rival prize fighters.

This is "the ragged unshaven lieutenant who leads the broken companies" of the Confederate brigade that has to retreat through Jefferson after losing a battle outside the town in 1864 (49). His appearance catches the eye of the jailer's daughter, who marries him "six months later" (49). When Faulkner retells this story from Intruder in the Dust again in Requiem for a Nun, he expands it quite a bit.

According to the narrator of Light in August, at the end of the Civil War most of the men who fought for the Confederacy "returned home with their eyes stubbornly reverted toward what they refused to believe was dead" (474).

"The cook" at the Killegrews in "Shingles for the Lord" won't lend out any of Killegrew's tools (28). While neither the gender nor the race of "the cook" - as the published story refers to her twice (28) - is specified, all but one of the 'cooks' in Yoknapatawpha are women and all of them are black.

"Three or four miles" outside the town that "The Hound" refers to only as "the countyseat" (162), the men in the Sheriff's car meet "wagons and cars . . . going home from market day in town" (163). The text does not actually mention any people in either kind of vehicle, but it does say that the "Sheriff greets them with a single gesture of his fat arm," and that "them" must be human (163), or at least potential voters.

In Sanctuary the clerk is mentioned calling Temple's name and when the judge upholds Horace's only objection during her testimony.

Mink Snopes is defended by a court-appointed lawyer in all three volumes in the Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion. As the third novel puts it, he is "too young and eager" (47), though as the first one says, he "did what he could" to defend Mink: "talked himself frantic and at last voiceless before the grave impassivity of the jury which resembled a conclave of grown men self-delegated with the necessity . . . of listening to prattle of a licensed child" (368).

In "Smoke," this deputy follows up the health officer's report about Old Anse's behavior in the cemetery, and discovers the old man's body. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

This is the Jefferson doctor in "Dry September" whom Minnie Cooper's friends send for when she suffers a nervous breakdown. He is "hard to locate" (181). (In the various fictions there are three named Jefferson doctors who appear more than once - Habersham in the early life of the town; Peabody and Alford in the 20th century - but there are also over a dozen doctors who are never named.

The drummer in "Dry September" is an out-of-towner, described as looking like "a desert rat in the moving pictures," who gets his shave and haircut from Hawkshaw and enthusiastically joins the lynch mob (170).

In "Dry September" one of the men in the barber shop who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes is a veteran. Like McLendon, "he too had been a soldier" in the First World War (172), and the narrator later refers to him as "the other ex-soldier" (176).

In The Hamlet this man owns the farm where Ike Snopes finds food for his cow. He is a "man past middleage" with a "grim and puritanical affinity for abstinence and endurance" (211); angry at the loss of his feed and a feed basket, he angrily pursues Ike through the woods.

In "Miss Zilphia Gant," these farmers from the countryside around Jefferson tether their teams in the lot beside the Gants' shop when they come into town "on market days" (371). While "hitching or unhitching" their horses and mules, they see Zilphia's "small wan face" behind the bars on the window of her room; they have "heard about" what Mrs. Gant did to her husband, and they discuss the sickly child without any sign of compassion (371).

In three differents versions of the story of Lion, Old Ben and the hunt, Faulkner evokes a prehistoric context for the ritual. In "Lion" it is Quentin Compson who, waiting on his assigned stand in the bayou, realizes that the scene before him is no different in appearance from what it was when, long ago, the first human explorer of the wilderness in Yoknpatawpha "crept into it and looked around, arrow poised and ready" (192).

These soldiers in "All the Dead Pilots" include the forces that take Cambrai (520) as well as the pilots of the "E.A." (enemy aircraft) that shoot down Sartoris in July 1918 (530).

In The Sound and the Fury on both Saturday and Sunday (the first and fourth sections of the novel) various groups of golfers are described playing on the course beside the Compson place. Consistent with the severe conceptual limitations of Benjy's mind, his descriptions of them are very confusing: "they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit" (3). When the third person narrator describes the same actions in the fourth section, it becomes easy to see who is there and what they are doing: Benjy and Luster "watched the foursome . . . move to the tee and drive" (315).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun "one of the Holston slaves - the cook's husband, the waiter-groom-hostler" - delivers Holston's demand for the lost lock after the bandits and the imprisoned militia have taken apart the jail and escaped (208, 14).

In Sanctuary the owner of the hotel in Jefferson is described as "a tight, iron-gray man" with "a neat paunch" (180). He is very concerned about propriety: when a committee from the Baptist church complains about Ruby's presence in the hotel, he turns her out.

In "Delta Autumn" Ike refers to the illegitimate child that the unnamed young woman brings into the tent only as "a child" and "that" - as in "Is that his?" (278, 277). Its gender is not specified. Swaddled in a "blanket-and-tarpaulin-wrapped bundle," its physical appearance is never described, but legally it is "black" like its mother. Since Don Boyd is its father, its last name could be his, but the story makes it clear that the white father will play no role whatsoever in any future the infant might have.

A "shabby man" with "intense, visionary eyes" in Flags in the Dust, he thinks he has perfected a new prototype airplane (384). When he complains that none of "you damned yellow-livered pilots" will test it for him, Young Bayard agrees to fly it (387).

The white children of Jefferson don't directly appear anywhere in Intruder in the Dust, but Chick thinks of them three times. He remembers when he and the other "children on [his] street" played a card game with "an old lady" who lived nearby (58). And he notes the absence of the children who should have been on their porches on Sunday morning, "fresh and scrubbed for Sunday school with clutched palm-sweaty nickels" - but "perhaps by mutual consent" Sunday school has been cancelled (38).

in Requiem for a Nun there are several specific references to the "ladies" of a contemporary Jefferson. A hundred years after the town's naming, two ladies clubs argue over whether "to change the name back to Habersham" (7). (This group also appears in "A Name for the City," 202.) And it is only "a few irreconciliable old ladies" - in other words, ladies who have not reconciled themselves to the South's defeat in the Civil War - who refuse to forget the fact that during the war "a United States military force" burned the town Square (37).

The "men, blue or gray," who were Ab Snopes' adversaries during the Civil War (7). Faulkner's fictions usually distinguish Union from Confederate soldiers, but Ab's war-time activities often made that distinction irrelevant - he had to dodge soldiers in both armies on his private, self-serving missions as a horse thief.

The "JUDGE" who pronounces Nancy's death sentence at the start of the play in Requiem for a Nun is not described at all (40). The phrase "his gavel" confirms the assumption that he is male - as are all the many judges in the Yoknapatawpha fictions; those other judges are also all 'white' and 'upper class,' which is the basis for our other assumptions about this judge (41).

When Monk is arraigned, he tries to "make a speech" before this "J.P." - Justice of the Peace (42). (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.

The phrases "the women" (119) and "the ladies" (124) are used on several occasions in "A Rose for Emily" to describe the general opinion of all the women in town. They function as a particularly Southern kind of narrative chorus. Presumably, these phrases do not literally refer to every woman, or even every white woman (though they certainly do not include women of color), but rather the genteel white women whose own reputations are impeccable, and who can function as the self-appointed guardians of the town's good name.

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished, what Bayard first sees as a "thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb" is quickly and chillingly recognized as the body of "an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet" (111, 177). Grumby has apparently lynched him to serve as a graphic warning to the boys: pinned to his corpse is a badly written note telling them to "Turn back" (111, 177).

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished, Bayard sees "six men running in the next field" and then "ten or twelve" or perhaps more who may be chasing the first six or may be part of the same group (25, 57-58). At least some of them are stealing the "stock," i.e. the livestock, of the farmers in the area, and "five men" from the second group attack Granny and her party (25, 58).

Members of the irregular Confederate unit that John Sartoris organizes in Mississippi after his original regiment votes him out of command after a year appear first in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, in the second story about the Civil War that Will Falls rehearses for the Colonel's son Bayard. In that novel Bayard calls them "pretty good men," but adds that they "quit fighting and went home too often" (229); Jenny calls them "a bunch of red-neck brigands" (238).

The first time this lawyer is mentioned in Sanctuary is in an antisemitic rant by Clarence Snopes about "a Memphis jew lawyer" (266). He appears in person on the day Temple testifies in court; he sits "picking his teeth" at the prosecution's table. There Horace refers to him as "a Jew lawyer from Memphis" (282). The narrative's description is less overtly hostile, but phrases like "his skull was capped closely by tight-curled black hair" and "he had a long, pale nose" (281) do emphasize his ethnicity. His connection with Memphis suggests he represents Popeye's interests.

In "Vendee" and again in the chapter with that name in The Unvanquished Bayard says that this minister is "from Memphis or somewhere," and describes him as a "big refugeeing preacher with his book already open" standing in the cemetery with a slave "holding an umbrella over him" (97, 156). Mrs. Compson and other Jefferson townspeople have asked him to officiate at Granny's funeral, presumably because of her status as both an Episcopalian and a member of the local aristocracy.

These are the unnamed men in "An Error in Chemistry" who came to the narrator's grandfather's house to socialize and drink cold toddies.

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun this inhabitant of the settlement is sent to the "post-office-store" to "fetch the old Carolina lock from the latest Nashville mail-pouch" (202, 6).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the moonshiner from whom Rider buys whiskey is described as "an unshaven white man" standing at the door of "a hut, a hovel" in the river swamp (246, 140). He is repeatedly referred to as "the white man" during the exchange with Rider. But he expresses concern about Rider's state of mind, and tries to "give" him a pint if Rider will give back the gallon he just bought for "four silver dollars" (246, 140).

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, various municipal officials stop by Gavin Stevens' office in his absence. The narrator identifies them only as "officials from the city hall and justices of the peace and bailiffs" from various parts of Yoknapatawpha (263, 360).

While "running" away from the Choctaw plantation in "Red Leaves," the servant encounters this "motionless" man, "another Negro" (331). They exchange glances.

This "small negro boy" who delivers Rosa Coldfield's note to Quentin Compson is the first black character mentioned in Absalom, Absalom! (5).

In "Knight's Gambit" the "Negro butler" at the Harriss plantation opens the door to Gavin Stevens and Charles Mallison and "immediately vanishes" (249).

"Red Leaves" refers to the children of the slaves as "pickaninnies" twice: first when the servant sees them in the quarters, "naked in the dust" (328), and at the end, when he imagines the quarters and "the pickaninnies like ebony toys in the dust" (340).

In "Monk" Warden Gambrell has an unnamed Negro cook who works in his house as a trusty; when the warden's pistol goes missing, he has the cook "severely beaten" on the assumption that he stole it (53). Historically, there were female prisoners at Parchman's, but in this story it seems more likely Faulkner is thinking of the cook as male.