Character Keys

In Flags in the Dust Eustace Graham is "a young lawyer" who doesn't realize Young Bayard is drunk when he tries to introduce Sartoris to a fellow veteran named Gratton (125). He plays a much larger role in Sanctuary as the District Attorney who prosecutes Lee Goodwin. According to Horace, he is a "damn little squirt" (185) who probably pressured the hotel into turning Ruby out. According to the narrator, he has "a club foot, which had probably elected him to the office he now held" (261).

Res, the farmer at the head of the Grier family, appears very differently in each of the three stories Faulkner wrote about the family during the early 1940s.

In the short story "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished, Bayard recalls the minister of Jefferson's Episcopal Church in the days before the War. Like many other white Yoknapatawphans, he is probably away in the War.

Doctor Habersham is one of the original three white settlers in Yoknapatawpha, or as it's put in Intruder in the Dust, the first text to mention him, one of the men "who had ridden horseback into the county before its boundaries had ever been surveyed and located and named" (73). According to Requiem for a Nun, in fact, with his "worn black bag of pills and knives" he was so important to the settlement that for a time the place that became Jefferson was known as "Doctor Habersham's" (202).

In both "By the People" and The Mansion Devries is the good man from an (invented) county east of Yoknapatawpha who challenges Clarence Snopes in a political race for Congress; in the story it's the 1952 election, while for the novel Faulkner moves it back to 1946. That change necessitates a revision in his biography. In "By the People" Devries has been a soldier "in that decade between 1942 and 1952" (133), and comes back from fighting in Korea with a chest full of medals, including "the top one" (134) - i.e. the Congressional Medal of Honor - and a "mechanical leg" (136).

Darl is Anse and Addie Bundren's second child in As I Lay Dying. Chronologically this places him between Cash and Jewel. But psychologically he has no place: unlike his older and his younger brother, he was born completely outside the circle of his mother's love. The most prolific narrator in the novel (he narrates 19 chapters), he also seems to be omniscient, as he often narrates events at which he is not present (nor does he narrate them as though he is recounting a story he was told).

The Jefferson doctor who appears twice in Light in August is not named. Some years before the events of the story, he arrives at a cabin where Gail Hightower has just delivered a stillborn Negro baby. In the novel's present he is also the doctor whom Byron Bunch contacts when Lena goes into labor in a different cabin; again he arrives too late, but this time after Hightower has successfully delivered the baby.

The wife of Vernon and the mother of a fluxuating number of daughters, Cora Tull is described by the third-person narrator of The Hamlet as a "strong, full-bosomed though slightly dumpy woman" whose face perpetually wears "an expression of grim and seething outrage . . . directed not at any Snopes or at any other man in particular but at all men, all males" (357). This is a more extreme version of the 'Cora Tull' whom readers meet in the earlier As I Lay Dying, where she narrates three sections herself, and plays a substantial role as Addie's nearest neighbor.

Referred to in Flags in the Dust by Monaghan as "that big Irish devil" (387), Comyn was Royal Air Force flyer (identified in "Ad Astra" as a lieutenant) with whom Young Bayard and Johnny Sartoris flew during World War I. In "Ad Astra" he appears as a proud Irishman who disdains the English nation he has served. He is drinking heavily and looking for women or a fight or both.

Colonel Dick is a Union cavalryman with a "bright beard" and "hard bright eyes" who appears in "Ambuscade" and "Raid" and is mentioned in "The Unvanquished" as a short story. Across these texts as well as The Unvanquished he appears as a chivalrous gentleman who knows how to treat a lady like Rosa Millard even in the midst of the confict between Yankees and rebels.

Though he is mentioned in six fictions, this Frenchman remains a shadowy figure. When he first appears, during Ikkemotubbe's trip to New Orleans in "Red Leaves," the narrator notes that his "social position" is "equivocal" (317). Chevaliers were minor nobles in pre-Revolutionary France. This "Chevalier" has emigrated from Paris to the French colony of Louisiana, though two of the stories also show him back in France as an old man.

This emancipated slave is mentioned in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished. Before the Civil War, Cassius was called "Uncle Cash"; he was enslaved by the Benbow family and worked as their carriage driver (66, 199). He is illiterate. During the War he "run off with the Yankees" (66, 199), but has returned to Jefferson and been appointed "Acting Marshal" by the northerners who are trying to reconstruct the town's government (66, 199). It is his possible election as Marshal that precipitates the story's climax.

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished, Captain Bowen is in charge of the Union cavalry troop which Rosa, Bayard, and Ringo encounter on their way back home. Although he himself doesn't appear, one of his lieutenants says that the Captain mounted them with captured stock.

Two different groups of town leaders visit Emily's house in "A Rose for Emily." This is the group of aldermen who visit the house in the middle of the night around 1881, because the smell emanating from her house has become a public nuisance. Unwilling to accuse a "lady" of "smelling bad," the four men, "three graybeards and one younger man" (122), sneak onto her property in the darkness and sprinkle lime into the cellar and around all the outbuildings.

Faulkner recounts or mentions the auction of the wild horses in Frenchman's Bend in four different texts. The auctioneer is a "Texas man," as the narrator of "Spotted Horses" repeatedly calls him (167), a "broad-hatted stranger" in "Centaur in Brass" (150), "that Texas feller" in The Town (35), and Buck Hipps in The Hamlet. His character is displayed in detail in that novel and "Spotted Horses." In both texts he is armed with an "ivory-handled pistol" - though he also carries "a box of gingersnaps" right next to the gun (167, 300).

Briefly mentioned by name in "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished, Bridger is one the men in Grumby's gang; he assists Matt Bowden in surrendering Grumby to Bayard and Ringo.

In "A Rose for Emily," Homer Barron is the "big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face" who comes to Jefferson to to oversee the workers paving the town's sidewalks (124). When he and Emily Grierson begin appearing in public together in "the yellow-wheeled buggy . . . from the livery stable," the town is soon scandalized that "a Grierson" woman might think "seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer" (124). Homer tells the "younger men in the Elks' Club . . .

Ben Quick is an inhabitant of Frenchman's Bend, though he appears differently in the two texts that mention him. In The Hamlet he is the father of Lon, a "hale burly old man" (92) who raises goats on his farm. In "Tomorrow," he is the father of Isham, and the owner of the sawmill in Frenchman's Bend.

In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet Beasley Kemp is a neighboring farmer with whom Ab Snopes does a horse trade.

In "A Rose for Emily," Mr. Grierson has been dead for some time when he is first referred to in the story. Alive he was an old-fashioned, over-bearing patriarch who did not allow his daughter to mingle with any men, keeping all possible suitors at bay. Nonetheless Emily keeps "a crayon portrait" of him displayed in the parlor "on a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace" (120).

In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet "Old Man Anse Holland" (118, 33) is the landowner from whom "Pap" (in the short story) and Ab Snopes (in the novel) rent the farm they work on as a tenant farmer. In the novel, Ratliff lives on another tenant farm that Holland owns, "about a mile away" (33) - a distance that suggests that Holland is a large landowner, like the Sartorises or the McCaslins.

One of the first white men in Yoknapatawpha, Alexander Holston established a tavern in Jefferson before the town had any name at all. The "Holston House" that survives in the town in the mid-20th century has had several remodelings, but is still run by descendants with the same last name - making them and the business the most definite point of continuity between Yoknapatawpha's past and its present.

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider's "Unc Alec" tells him that his aunt wants him to come home (249, 143). Alec is Rider's "aunt's husband," "an old man as tall as [Rider] was, but lean, almost frail" (245, 138).

Adolph Hitler was the infamous leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945 at the end of World War II. He is first mentioned in "Delta Autumn," where Ike McCaslin calls him an "Austrian paper-hanger" (322) - repeating a term of contempt that was popular in America at the time; Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary, but there's no evidence that he was ever a "paper-hanger." In The Mansion Gavin Stevens calls him "the Nibelung maniac" (258).

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the U.S. who led the nation during the Civil War, is mentioned in 10 Yoknapatawpha fictions, almost as many as Robert E. Lee - and more than twice as many as Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. He never appears in person, and is typically represented from the perspective of one or another former Confederate. In "Wash," Colonel Thomas Sutpen longs to "shoot [Lincoln and General Sherman] down, like the dogs they are" (540).

Although she has two very different names in the four texts in which she appears, the character of this admirable woman - the last in Faulkner's series of redoubtable elderly women - does not change. As Miss Belle Worsham she appears in "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the granddaughter of a man who owned slaves and the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356). She and the black Mollie Beauchamp grew up together, and remain loyal to each other decades later.

When Eustace Grimm first appears in The Hamlet, he and his wife have just had a "baby born two months ago" (387). No other details, not even the baby's gender, are revealed, but since Eustace's mother is "Ab Snopes' youngest sister" (399), this child deserves a place on the Snopes family tree.

The Mansion calls this Snopes "the last" in the sequence of Snopeses who move from Frenchman's Bend to Jefferson, and also "the old one" (136). He is extremely choleric: "fierce eyes under a tangle of eyebrows and a neck that would begin to swell and turn red" as soon as he felt challenged (136). He doesn't actually move into town, but reaches a point "in sight of the town clock" and then refuses to go further (136), settling into a place where he can wage war against the boys who try to raid his "water-melon patch" (137). Some people think he is "Mr Flem's father" (i.e.

Chick Mallison says in The Town that Dink "had married one of Mr Snopes's sisters or nieces or something out at Frenchman's Bend and when Mr Snopes sent I.O. Snopes back to the country the Quistenberrys came into buy or rent or anyway run the Snopes Hotel"; he adds that "Dink was old enough to be Mr Snopes's brother-in-law or whatever it was but he was the kind of man it just didn't occur to you to say Mister to" (378). The "Mr Snopes" in these phrases is of course Flem, but that doesn't help clarify how Flem and Quistenberry are related.

This is one of the two Snopeses in The Town whose place in the family is impossible to determine. He is mentioned in connection with Ab Snopes' moving into Frenchman's Bend: "another Snopes had appeared from somewhere to take over the rented farm" that Ab had been working (6). Most of the Snopeses start out as tenant farmers, but there's no indication that this particular "Snopes" is one of the male Snopeses to whom the narrative gives a first name, though that is possible.

In the short story "By the People," Clarence Snopes' grandmother is identified as Billy Varner's "distant cousin by marriage," which helps explain Varner's interest in Clarence's career (130). (When Faulkner retells the story of Clarence as Varner's protege in The Mansion, his grandmother is not mentioned.)

When Eustace Grimm first appears in the canon, in As I Lay Dying, he is simply someone who "works at Snopes’ place" (192); in that role he brings Anse the team of mules he traded for with Mr. Snopes. He plays a more complex role in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, as the "youngish man" in overalls with a snuff stick in his mouth" from "the adjoining county" who seems to be competing with Suratt and Tull to buy the Old Frenchman place (147).

According to another character in The Hamlet, "Eustace's ma" - that is, the mother of Eustace Grimm - "was Ab Snopes' youngest sister" (399).

The Hamlet provides virtually no details about Eck's first wife, beyond the possibility that she died either in childbirth or soon afterward (295). She and Eck had only one son, Wallstreet Panic, although the boy did not receive any actual name for some years.

Described in The Hamlet as a "thin, eager, plain woman who had never had quite enough to eat," Lump's mother grew up in a large family plagued by "a constant succession of not even successful petty-mercantile bankruptcies" (218). Despite her desire to better herself through education and teaching, she married a "man under indictment" and gave birth to a son that she named after the Arthurian knight Launcelot as an act of "quenchless defiance" against the grim circumstances of her life. She died soon after.

The Hamlet summarily describes Lump Snopes' grandmother as a "whining and sluttish" woman who keeps having children (218).

After referring to the "incoming Snopeses" as a group, the narrator of Flags in the Dust singles out one to individualize: "there was one, an invalid of some sort, who operated a second-hand peanut parcher" (167). A "parcher" is a pushcart for roasting and selling peanuts on the street. (This may be the fictions' first mention of Eck Snopes. In The Town; Eck works as a watchman who wears a neck brace and is liked by "all the boys" in Jefferson because "he kept a meal sack full of raw peanuts" that he would share with them by the "handful" (116).

Another Snopes who appears for the first time in the last novel of the Snopes trilogy, Watkins Products Snopes is the carpenter and kinsman whom Flem hires to renovate the house that was formerly owned by Manfred de Spain; it is Wat's work, along with Flem's ambitions, that create 'the mansion' of the novel's title. He is named for a real company that has sold health products since 1868. His exact relationship to Flem or any of the other Snopeses is never specified.

In The Mansion Mink Snopes describes "the lady that raised me" as "jest" the wife of his father, and "no kin a-tall" to Mink himself (110). "Because she was a Christian" - a phrase that is meant to convey her self-righteousness - she regularly took him to church services and prayer meetings (117). She "always failed" Mink as a surrogate mother, but the novel has some sympathy for her as a battered wife: "a gaunt harried slattern of a woman . . . always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding" (117).

The mother of Eck is mentioned in The Hamlet because when Eck's first wife dies, Eck leaves their son, Wallstreet Panic, with his mother to raise, but she plays that role outside the narrative. She is also mentioned in the other two volumes in the Snopes trilogy, again in terms of something that happens outside the narrative, if it happens at all. Because Eck is such a good and generous person, in The Town Gavin Stevens declares that he 'must' be illegitimate, that his mother was committing adultery with someone not named Snopes when he was conceived.

The slave Thucydides/Thucydus only appears in the novel Go Down, Moses by way of the McCaslin plantation ledgers, but the story outlined there is striking. He is the son of Roskus and Fibby and the husband who marries Eunice in the same year she is made pregnant by Old Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owns all four of these slaves. He was born in North Carolina. In his will Old Carothers bequeaths him land, but like Ike McCaslin, Thucydides renounces this inheritance. Instead, according to the ledgers, he chooses "to stay [on the plantation] and work it out" - i.e.

In The Reivers, Ned McCaslin's grandmother is identified only as "a Negro slave" who belonged to Lucius McCaslin (31). According to McCaslin family lore, and Ned himself, she was impregnated by the white man who owned her, Old Carothers McCaslin.

Like Nat Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses, Roth's mistress - James Beauchamp’s unnamed granddaughter in the revised version of "Delta Autumn" Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses - has an aunt in Vicksburg with whom she stays. This unnamed aunt is a widow who takes in washing to support her family. For someone like Ike McCaslin, raised in the culture of the Jim Crow South, "taking in washing" is enough to identify this woman, and her very light-skinned niece, as black.

Like her mother, the 20-year-old daughter of "Mrs. Harriss" never gets a first name in "Knight's Gambit," the only text in which she has a significant presence. In other respects too she takes after her mother: "looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain" (190–91).

The first husband of the woman whom Gavin Stevens eventually marries is a bootlegger from New Orleans named only Mr. Harriss. Faulkner describes his offstage death memorably in three different texts: in "Knight's Gambit" he dies at his desk, "maybe," "because you can be shot just as discreetly across a desk in an office as anywhere else" (167–68); in The Town, he is brought back to Yoknapatawpha from New Orleans in "a bullet-proof hearse" (187); in The Mansion, he dies in a barber's chair, of "his ordinary thirty-eight calibre occupational disease" (218) - i.e.

In The Sound and the Fury Maury Bascomb is the brother of Caroline Bascomb Compson. For much of the Compson children's early life he lives in their home and regularly partakes of their father's whiskey; by 1928 he has moved away, but continues regularly to ask his sister for money. Benjy was originally named "Maury" in his honor. He also has an affair with the Compsons' next door neighbor, Mrs. Patterson. When the affair is revealed, Mr. Patterson beats Uncle Maury - or as Benjy puts it, "His eye was sick, and his mouth" (43).

According to Mr. Compson in Absalom! Clytemnestra's mother is one of the two women among the twenty slaves that Sutpen brought with him to Yoknapatawpha. The novel does not describe her, nor try to represent the relationship between her and Sutpen, the white man who claims to own her.

In both "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun the "half orphan" son of Doctor Habersham is eight years old when he first arrives at the Mississippi settlement with his widowed father (202, 6). As a grown man, he becomes the government's local Indian agent and marries a Chickasaw woman who is the granddaughter of either Issetibbeha (202; 7) or (in Requiem's second mention of the event, of Mohataha, 170).

Based on the phrase "one of the sisters" in Absalom!, we can say that Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters (185). This entry is not the sister who gets pregnant, twice, during the family's trip from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia.