Character Keys

Only one member of Clarence Snopes' gang is mentioned separately in either "By the People" or The Mansion: his "lieutenant," the "second-in-command in the old gang" (89, 330). He is not described in more detail, but when he "tries to take advantage of their old relationship" after Snopes becomes a constable, Snopes' treatment of him is described as "ruthless and savage" (130, 330).

In Light in August Yoknapatawpha is served by a volunteer fire department, made up of "men and youths" who "desert counters and desks" in town to drive the "fire truck" out to Joanna Burden's (288).

In The Hamlet this farmer buys the new blacksmith shop for a cowshed.

In "Dry September" the man who owns the "abandoned brick-kiln" once used the land around it as a pasture, but he stopped doing that after "one of his mules" went missing in one of the property's "vine-choked vats without bottom" (179). He is presumably a farmer, though he might be a mule-trader instead.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin imagines these Europeans while lying on his cot in one of the few remaining pieces of American wilderness: "the frantic old-world peoples" who buy the cotton that is grown on the Delta, and use it for "shells to shoot at one another" (275, 337). Although at the time of the story the U.S. had not entered the war that became known as World War II , major fighting was underway between the Allies and the Axis armies.

In Flags in the Dust the "youthful clerk" in the drug store who re-wraps the package that Joan dropped in the street also "stares at her boldly" (319).

Lizzie is the sister of Lennie Snopes, Abner's wife, who lives with the Snopes family in "Barn Burning." She and Lennie have a close relationship: on the night Ab sets out to burn down De Spain's barn, they "sit side by side on the bed, the aunt's arms around [Sarty's] mother's shoulders" (22). When Ab commands his wife to restrain Sarty to prevent him from warning De Spain, Lizzie sides against Ab, telling Lennie: "Let him go! . . . If he don't go, before God, I am going up there [to De Spain's] myself" (22).

In The Reivers this unnamed deputy holds Ludus after Boon shoots at him, and then escorts Ludus to Judge Stevens' office. (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.)

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished Bayard spots the corpse of this Union soldier in the river, hanging over the rump of his dead and floating horse after the bridge was blown up. Because he has a horse, he is either an officer or attached to a cavalry unit, but there is no way to tell which is more likely.

In both "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun this courier rides to Natchez to inform authorities of the capture of the bandits and to negotiate for the presumed reward for their capture.

In "Hand upon the Waters," the coroner who contacts Stevens about Lonnie Grinnup’s death and presides over the inquest is described as "an old country doctor" (70). He signs the death certificate without ever suspecting the death might not have been an accident.

In The Mansion, when Watkins Snopes enlarges the de Spain house into "the mansion" for Flem, his construction crew consists of "kinfolks and in-laws" (171).

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. The "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury refers briefly to the "brave and gallant men" who served under General Jason Compson II during the Civil War (330).

In "Retreat," the Confederate officer in command of the unit that is camped on the outskirts of Jefferson talks with Buck McCaslin about Colonel Sartoris. He recurs in "The Unvanquished," when Bayard remembers this earlier scene, and then repeats these two appearances in The Unvanquished.

This slave appears in the only scene in The Sound and the Fury from the time that the Compsons owned slaves - what Versh calls the "old time" (69). He appears in the story about Grandfather Compson and one of his slaves that Dilsey told Versh, as Versh repeats it to Benjy (who of course cannot understand it at all). According to the story, because Benjy's Grandfather changed the man's name (a common practice during slavery), the man became both a preacher and a "bluegum" (69).

In The Sound and the Fury, Dilsey, Frony, Luster, and Benjy pass "white people in bright clumps" on their way to church (290). Jason also notes the people going to church as he drives out of town chasing after his niece.

The Chickasaw were the tribe living in northern Mississippi when the white settlers began arriving. In "A Name for the City" their interactions with the story's white characters they are depicted as friendly. After "ceding" their lands to the newcomers (200), however, they will be 'removed' from the region by the Indian policy of President Jackson's administration - or, as the narrator puts it at the outset of the tale, these "dispossessed people" "emigrated to Oklahoma in the thirties" (202).

The "carpet-bagger followers of victorious armies" (265) and their descendants, the men who did not fight in the Civil War but merely profited from it, are mentioned several times in Go Down, Moses, by the narrator and by McCaslin Edmonds. They are defined by “a single fierce will for rapine and pillage” (276).

"Bystanders" is the term the narrator of Light in August uses for the people who watch Percy Grimm lose a fist fight with an "exsoldier" and, despite the veteran's request, refuse to break it up (450). These same people later remember the fight when they see Grimm wearing "his captain's uniform" as a member of the National Guard (451).

These are the British officers mentioned in "Ad Astra" who were placed in charge of the Indian soldiers serving in World War I. According to the subadar, when they ordered their troops to "'Go there and do this,' they would not stir" (415). A particularly dreadful consequence of their lack of responsible procedure is the death of almost an entire Indian battalion which advances on the enemy without loaded rifles.

In "Death Drag," this boy is afraid to return Mr. Harris' car to him after Ginsfarb skips town without paying for its use in the air show. He seems enterprising enough to take a quarter for returning the car and smart enough to know that Mr. Harris "might get mad" at being cheated (205).

The bondsmen to whom Jason Compson IV refers in the "Appendix" appear to monitor Jason's role as "guardian and trustee" (342). Jason is, presumably, guardian of Caddy's daughter, Quentin Compson, and entrusted with the finances of the Compson estate.

The men who stay at the Beard boarding house are mentioned in both Flags in the Dust and Light in August. The first novel describes them as traveling salesmen, jurors from out of town, weather-stranded countrymen, even two "town young bloods" who keep a room as a place for gambling. Besides Byron Snopes, some - bachelors identified as "clerks, mechanics and such" - live there more permanently (104).

In "Hair" this is the unnamed barber who takes Hawkshaw's place at the barber shop after Hawkshaw marries Susan Reed and leaves Jefferson.

Although Emily herself is an Episcopalian, this Baptist minister is "forced" by the "ladies" of Jefferson to pay her a pastoral visit rebuking her and Homer's public behavior; he "never divulges" what happened in when he confronted Emily, but he "refuses to go back" to her house again (126).

In "Dry September" this cashier is a "widower of about forty - a high-colored man, smelling always of the barber shop or of whisky" - who takes up with Minnie Cooper in "Dry September" (174). He owns "the first automobile" in Jefferson, in which he and Minnie take drives, scandalizing the town (174). About four years after their relationship begins, he moves to Memphis, where he works in another bank and, according to Jefferson gossip, is "prospering" (175).

In "A Rose for Emily," the wife of the Baptist minister takes it upon herself to write to summon Emily's Alabama kin.

In the three texts that tell the story of Flem Snopes' attempted embezzlement - "Centaur in Brass," The Town and The Mansion - these are the accountants employed by the state, or perhaps the company that bonds local officials, to audit the books at the Jefferson power plant. The third text revises the account to add that their figures are incorrect.

In the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote in 1945, this architect lays out both the Compson grounds and the Compson home. He shares the predilections of Faulkner's other architect characters for French furnishings, but there is no direct evidence that (like the architect at Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom!) he is from France.

Popeye's lawyer at his trial for murder in Sanctuary is "a young man just out of law school," with "an ugly, eager, earnest face" (311). He tries to defend his client, who is himself indifferent to the trial, with "a gaunt mixture of uncouth enthusiasm and earnest ill-judgment" (311-12).

In both Flags in the Dust and "Retreat" as a short story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union cavalry rides up to the Sartoris plantation hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris. In all three texts he is able to fool them long enough to escape, but in the last two the Yankees then dig up the family's buried silver and set fire to the mansion.

Called "Uncle Job" in "Smoke" and "Old Man Job" in The Town, he is the elderly Negro janitor and factotum to Judge Dukinfield.

Ash, or Uncle Ash, is an old Negro who works for Major de Spain. In the five fictions in which he appears, he is most often seen in the woods, as the cook and chief servant on the Major's annual hunting trips, "a-helping around camp," as Ratliff puts it in "A Bear Hunt," where Ash first appears (67) - though in the last section of "The Bear" in the novel Go Down, Moses he sits in the corner of De Spain's office in Jefferson, pulling the cord on the "bamboo-and-paper punkah" that provides the Major with a breeze in the heat of Mississippi (301).

In Flags in the Dust Turpin is the Frenchman's Bend farmer (or tenant farmer) at whose "low, broken backed log house" Byron Snopes stops on his flight from Jefferson after robbing the bank (279). Two Frenchman's Bend 'Turpins' appear in The Mansion at the other end of Faulkner's career, but how they are related to this one is never explained.

Trumbull first appears in The Hamlet as the man who has been the blacksmith of Frenchman's Bend for "almost twenty years" (69). An elderly man who is "hale, morose and efficient," his character "invites no curiosity" until he is displaced by two of Flem Snopes' cousins, I.O. and Eck (73). Immediately afterward he disappears from Frenchman's Bend, driving "through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods," and is never seen again (72).

Both "The Hound" and Book 3, Chapter Two, Section 2 of The Hamlet - where the story of "The Hound" is re-told as part of the Snopes saga - briefly describe the townspeople whom Cotton|Mink Snopes sees while being driven through Jefferson to jail as "children" at play who are wearing "small bright garments," and "men and women" heading home at suppertime "to plates of food and cups of coffee" (163, 285).

The narrator of "A Rose for Emily" describes Tobe as "an old man-servant - a combined gardener and cook" (119), and never refers to him except as "the Negro" or "the Negro man" (120, 122, etc.). The only time we hear his name is when Emily uses it to summon him (121). He appears to have been in her employ since he was "young man" (122), and at least since the time her father died. Earlier drafts of "A Rose for Emily" include an extended conversation between him and Emily. His role in the published version of the story is entirely silent and elusive.

The narrator of "A Courtship" uses the phrase "the People" to describe the tribe to which he and the other Indian characters in the story belong, as in this sentence: "The People all lived in the Plantation now" (361). He does not explicitly say they are Chickasaws, the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in most of Faulkner's references to the indigenous population, but that they are part of the Chickasaw nation can be inferred from his reference to David Colbert as "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. "A Rose for Emily" brings the townspeople as a collection onstage in the story's very first sentence, where the narrator refers to "our whole town" (119).

He is Skeet MacGowan in his first appearance, in As I Lay Dying. He is Skeets McGowan in Intruder in the Dust and The Town. He is Skeets Magowan in The Mansion. But in all four he is a the kind of drugstore clerk that used to be called a 'soda jerk' or, as Faulkner writes it in the last two novels, a "soda-jerker" (42, 208) - the clerk who served sodas and ice cream at the lunch counters that used to be found in most drugstores. Defined another way, 'jerk' seems to describe his character too, especially in As I Lay Dying.

This unnamed deputy recounts the second and last section of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, although much of the language used to characterize him serves to undermine his authority as a narrator. He is "spent" and "a little hysterical too" after both the manhunt for Rider and the lynching (252), and his wife shows no sympathy at all for him or for the story he's trying to tell her. Instead, she offers the narrative’s only portrait of the deputy sheriff: "You sheriffs! Sitting around that courthouse all day long talking.

In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, the top sergeant in the Union troop that arrives at Sartoris is named Harrison. He may be the Yankee who is first spotted by Ringo and Bayard looking at the plantation through field glasses; if so, it is his horse that they kill attempting to shoot him. He was clearly angered by that shooting, which cost the regiment "the best horse in the whole army" (29). Much more hostile to Rosa Millard than his commanding officer, he orders other soldiers to search the house in search of the "little devils" who did the shooting (29).

The first set of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are on the road, trying to catch up with the Union Army as it moves across Mississippi. During the day these groups are 'seen' only as "a big dust cloud" on the road (39); at night they can be heard passing by, "the feet hurrying and a kind of panting murmur" (40).

There is a Frenchman's Bend character named "Samson" in both As I Lay Dying, where he narrates a section of the narrative, and Light in August, where only his name appears. In the first novel, he lets the Bundren family spend a night in his barn on their trek to Jefferson. The barn suggests he is farmer, but when his section begins he is sitting with a group of men at "the store" (112), which may mean he also owns a country store.

Readers meet Granny's sister Louisa Hawk, who lives in Alabama, but both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished refer to another sister, who is neither named nor described but only mentioned: Granny explains the trip she's taking by saying that "My sister lives in Memphis, we are going there" (24, 56). Since "Millard" is Granny's married name, we have no way of knowing the name of her sister; however, she may be the mother of Cousin Melisandre who appears in "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek."

Rider, the protagonist of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, is one of Faulkner's most memorable black characters. We never learn his real name; "Rider" is a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken" before he became the devoted husband of Mannie (249, 144). He is depicted from two different perspectives in both texts.

This man is the character in "A Rose for Emily" who protests, "in diffident deprecation" (122), that the town must do something about the smell coming from the Grierson house.

"Miss Reba" Rivers - whom Temple in Requiem for a Nun calls "the madam of [a] cat house" in Memphis (111) - appears by name in Sanctuary, The Mansion and The Reivers. She is a colorful character: fat, asthmatic, church-going and hard-drinking, with some pretensions to gentility but no illusions about life. When readers first meet her she is carrying a "rosary" in one hand and a "tankard" of beer in the other (144). In Sanctuary the great love of her life, someone named Mr.

This man, the grandson of a Russian immigrant, is the first Yoknapatawphan member of the family that culminates in the V.K. Ratliff who appears in ten fictions. He arrives early enough in the county's history to be one of the men who "started Jefferson," as The Town puts it (338). He appears fairly late in the Faulkner's career, first appearing in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun as the nascent settlement's "post trader" - i.e. the person in charge of the Indian agency's trading post (206).