Character Keys

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.

"Brother" Fortinbride is a character in two of The Unvanquished stories. A private in Sartoris' regiment, he was seriously wounded in battle at the start of the war. Invalided back to Yoknapatawpha, in "The Unvanquished" he helps Rosa distribute money and mules to the county's poor: although he is a farmer, and a Methodist, he officiates as a vernacular preacher in the services that Rosa Millard organizes in the Episcopal Church in the absence of the regular minister; his title "Brother" is an unofficial religious one.

"Brother Miller" leads the adult men's Bible study class at the Protestant church that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" attends (227). In his case, "Brother" is a ceremonial title, reflecting his place in the church fellowship. Willy reluctantly leaves the boys' class in Sunday school to sit in with the "men" (227).

In "An Error in Chemistry" Bryan Ewell is a deputy sheriff whom the sheriff orders to guard Wesley Pritchel's house after Pritchel has locked himself in his room (122). (Bryan may be related to Walter Ewell, who appears in six other fictions, but there is no mention of any relationship.)

A Jefferson town marshal who appears in several of the fictions, though as "Buck" in Flags in the Dust, as "Buck Conner" in "Centaur in Brass" and Light in August, and as "Buck Conners" in The Town. In the first novel he follows Miss Jenny's orders to get care of Young Bayard, giving up his own bed in the jail building to allow Sartoris to sleep off the effects of his fall and his drinking. Flem Snopes pays him a compliment of sorts in "Centaur": "Buck Conner'll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his corn-crib" (159).

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).

The young man whom Bookwright shoots for seducing his seventeen-year-old daughter in "Tomorrow" was named "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" for the first three years of his life (100). Born to a homeless poor-white woman given shelter by Jackson Fentry, he is raised by Fentry until age three, when he is reclaimed by his mother's family, the Thorpes. He grows up to be the ne'er do well Buck who appears in Frenchman's Bend "from nowhere," and is described as "a brawler, a gambler," a moonshiner and a cattle thief (90).

In Requiem for a Nun, Temple and Gowan Stevens' son is "about four" (60). The older brother of the murdered infant, the perceptive Bucky asks his mother, "How long will we stay in California, mamma?" and "Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?" (61).

In Light in August, Deputy Buford discovers "traces of recent occupation" in the cabin beyond Joanna's house (290) and "reckons" that if there is anyone living in that place, they would be Negroes.

In "Hair" the Burchett's have "two or three more children" of their own, in addition to Susan Reed, the one they adopted (131).

In Light in August it is this cousin of Nathaniel Burden who finds a bride in New Hampshire for him. Since the other New England relatives of the Burdens are named Burrington, we presume that's also this cousin's last name.

In "Dry September" Butch is "hulking youth in a sweat-stained silk shirt" who abrasively advocates vigilante action against Will Mayes (169). He ends up joining the lynch mob.

Beroth Egglestone is a real man who served in the Civil War as a Union General. Afterwards he settled in Mississippi as a planter, and in 1868 was elected Governor of the state as a Republican by the constitutional convention held in Jackson. But since Mississippi had not yet been re-admitted to the Union, he never served in that office. To unreconstructed Mississippians, he was a carpetbagger, which explains how he acquired the unflattering sobriquet that Requiem for a Nun uses to refer to him: "Buzzard" (87).

Although Flem, Montgomery Ward, I.O. and Clarence are mentioned in Flags in the Dust, in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction Byron is the first Snopes whom Faulkner develops into a character. Many Snopeses are named for famous men or products in American culture (vide "Montgomery Ward"). 'Byron Societies' were bourgeois reading groups in the U.S. about the time Byron Snopes would have been born - there is even a "Byron Club" in Jefferson in The Town (325) - but it's hard to imagine Byron's parents (revealed in the Snopes trilogy to be I.O.

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).

In Go Down, Moses, Callina, or Carolina, Beauchamp is the daughter of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She dies as an infant.

Colonel Sartoris' killing of two Northerners during Reconstruction is told four times in the fictions. The first time, in Flags in the Dust, Will Falls refers to them as "them two cyarpet-baggers" (23). They are given names in Light in August, where the same event is retold from Joanna Burden's perspective. The oldest of these men is her grandfather, Calvin Burden I; he lost one of his arms fighting against slavery as "a member of a troop of partisan guerilla horse" in 1861 (244).

Calvin Coolidge was the thirtieth President of the United States. He is mentioned peripherally in Sanctuary and The Town, but becomes a peripheral character in "Death Drag" when Ginsfarb bitterly describes the role Coolidge played in his own life, as the antagonist who "ruined" his former business and making him a barnstorming dare-devil to survive (192).

The guard at Parchman Penitentiary who shoots Jake Barron in The Mansion is called "Cap'm Jabbo" by Mink (108).

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.

A patron at Reba's brothel in Memphis in The Mansion. Montgomery Ward Snopes says Strutterbuck "even got his name out a book" (86), but it's not clear what book Mink might be thinking of, and the money order he gives Miss Reba proves Strutterbuck's last name is real. Most of the rest of his story, however, rings false, including the military rank he claims and the stories he tells about his service in World War I. He is described as "about fifty," "tall, pretty big, with a kind of rousterbout's face" (83). He tries to cheat a prostitute named Thelma out of her money.

In the 1932 short story "Death Drag" Captain Warren is a well-to-do war veteran who has established himself comfortably in his home town; adults and children alike know him as "an ex-army flyer" who "was in the war" (185, 188). There is actually no clear evidence in the story that Warren's home town is Jefferson, and its likely that if he did live in Yoknapatawpha he would have been mentioned in Flags in the Dust (1929), with its focus on aviators and returning wounded veterans.

In The Sound and the Fury Caroline Compson is the sister of Maury Bascomb (Uncle Maury), the wife of Jason Compson III, and the mother of Quentin, Candace, Jason and Maury|Benjamin. She is probably also the daughter of the woman called "Damuddy" whose death is the earliest event (and loss) in Benjy and Quentin's memories. A bed-ridden neurotic and a hypochondriac, Caroline seems hopelessly preoccupied with herself. She is obsessed with the social standing of the Bascomb family and largely oblivious to the misery of her own.

McCaslin Edmonds (also called "Cass") is the great-grandson of "Old Carothers" McCaslin, the slave-owner who built the large plantation in northeast Yoknapatawpha. Cass is descended from Old Carothers by the "distaff" (5) or female side of the family (his grandmother was Carothers McCaslin's daughter), and would not ordinarily inherit the McCaslin property. But when Ike McCaslin renounces that inheritance, his cousin Cass comes into possession of it, and in turn he bequeaths it to his son, Zachary Edmonds.

This is one of the characters in Go Down, Moses who only appear in the ledgers of the McCaslin plantation. There the entry for "Roskus" and "Fibby," written by Ike's father Buck McCaslin, mentions that Roskus was "rased by Granfather in Callina," and that Fibby was "bought by granfather in Callina" (252). This Carolina ancestor, the father of "Old Carothers" McCaslin and so the great-grandfather of Ike, is not mentioned any where else in the novel.

Cash is the first-born of Addie and Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying. He is a good carpenter, who shows his devotion to his mother through his handiwork. He narrates five chapters which become increasingly more developed, beginning with a list of the reasons he made his mothers coffin on the bevel and ending with the final chapter of the novel in which he conveys the denouement of the story in a straightforward, matter of fact way. He is compulsive about his tools, and his narration shows him to be single–minded as he tends to frame everything in the terms of his craft.

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.

Faulkner tells the story about the young girl in Jefferson during the Civil War who writes her name on a window pane with a diamond ring three different times, each time changing the details. In The Unvanquished the girl is named Celia Cook; in Intruder in the Dust she is unnamed; in Requiem for a Nun - which develops her action into a poignant symbol of persistence and temporality - her name is Cecilia Farmer. The story is apparently based on a real event in the history of Oxford, Faulkner's home town.

Although he is mentioned in three short stories and actually appears in three novels, the father of Charles Mallison, Jr., remains an elusive character. He is dead in the first story that mentions him ("An Error in Chemistry") and almost irrelevant even in the texts where he appears: Intruder in the Dust, The Town and The Mansion. His wife, Maggie Stevens by birth and Gavin's twin sister, sometimes calls him Charley, and according to The Town he owns the livery stable in Jefferson (at a time when cars are displacing horses).

According to the early genealogy that Faulkner's 1946 "Appendix" creates for the Compson family, Charles Stuart Compson is the first member to be born in the new world. Named after Charles Stuart the Young Pretender, for whom his father fought in Scotland, Charles Stuart Compson served under the British commander Banastre Tarleton in the American Revolutionary War; Charles Stuart was thus part of the military serving the monarchy his father had formerly opposed.

The character named "Charley" in Light in August is "a young interne from the county hospital" who is a doctor's assistant (124) at the Memphis orphanage where an infant is left "on the doorstep" (133). This young man is the person who decides they should name the child "Joe Christmas." He is still working there as an intern five years later, when Joe overhears him having sex with the "dietitian" (120). ("Interne" and "dietitian" are the novel's spellings.)

Charley Longfeather is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but is one of the three hypothetical men that Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of World War I: Gavin says, “I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also . . . Charley Longfeather of Shoshone, Idaho” (243).

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.

Chlory cooks and keeps house for Judge Allison in "Beyond"; the keening she does when he dies is described as "slow billows of soprano sound as mellow as high-register organ tones and wall-shattering as a steamer siren" (782).

On the Snopes family tree, Clarence - according to The Mansion, it's "pronounced 'Cla'nce'" (325) - is the son of I.O. and the half-brother of Montgomery Ward Snopes. He is one of the four Snopes named in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, but appears only as the boy whose "hulking but catlike presence" makes Bryon Snopes nervous (235). It is in Sanctuary that his character as one of the most venal Snopeses emerges.

Gavin Stevens' janitor in The Town is named Clefus. Charles Mallison speculates about how pleasantly surprised he was when he came in "to sweep the office" and found the whiskey toddy Gavin had left untouched on his desk (376).

In Absalom! Clytemnestra (Clytie) is the daughter of Thomas Sutpen and one of the two enslaved women he brings with him to Yoknapatawpha. She is first mentioned by Rosa, as the "negro girl" with a "Sutpen face" beside Judith Sutpen, Clytie's half-sister (22); later Rosa refers to her "Sutpen coffee-colored face" (109). Sutpen "named [Clytemnestra] himself," after a legendary Greek queen, though Mr. Compson "likes to believe" that Sutpen "intended to name her Cassandra," after another figure from Greek tragedy (48).

Goodhue Coldfield's grandfather never appears in Absalom!, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen by noting that her father knew "who his grandfather had been in Virginia" (11).

Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, explicitly mentions the two daughters of Colonel John Sartoris. This is the younger one, who is two years younger than Bayard; with her older sister she was sent to Memphis during the Civil War, but is back at the Sartoris plantation at Christmas time, 1869, to hear Aunt Jenny tell the story of "Carolina" Bayard's death. Other than that, like her sister she remains very elusive as a character.

The mother of John and (the first) Bayard Sartoris and Virginia Du Pre is never named, and only mentioned in three texts, each time briefly. "There Was a Queen" notes that the "Cal-lina" (Carolina, probably South) mansion she lived in was burned down by the Yankees during the Civil War (732).

At the McKellogg residence in "Two Soldiers," the Grier boy meets Colonel McKellogg: "a old feller, with a britching strop, too, and a silver-colored bird on each shoulder" (98). The 'birds' are in fact actually made of silver, the insignia of his rank.

Colonel G. W. Newberry is the Union commander of the "--th Illinois Infantry" (77, 124). Rosa Millard tricks him into handing over mules.

In Absalom! Colonel Willow is the commander of the University Grays in 1865, when he allows his fellow officer, Colonel Sutpen, to use his headquarters tent to meet with Henry.

A physician by training, William Lattimore was politically active during the years in which the Mississippi Territory became the State of Mississippi. In 1821, along with James Patton and Thomas Hinds, he was one of the "three Commissioners" referred to in Requiem for a Nun who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

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.

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.

The young woman whom Bayard calls "Cousin Melisandre" in the short story with the long title "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek" is a upper class refugee: she leaves Memphis after it is captured by the Union forces to spend the War at the Sartoris plantation in northern Mississippi. She seems related to Bayard on his mother's (Millard) side, but the only information the story provides about her family is General Forrest's reference to "that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian" (694).

Crawford Gowrie, the intruder behind the title of Intruder in the Dust, never directly appears in the narrative, but the details of his biography are memorable. Second of Hub Gowrie's six sons, he deserted from the U.S. Army on the day before World War I ended, hid for eighteen months "in a series of caves and tunnels in the hills" of Yoknapatawpha, was captured after a gunfight with authorities, served a year in prison, worked out of Memphis either as a rum-runner or a strike-breaker, then returned to Beat Four, reportedly to "more or less settle down" (161).

Daisy is mentioned in Go Down, Moses by Major de Spain when he tells Ike that Ash would be glad to go into the woods, "where he won't have to eat Daisy's cooking" (301). It seems clear that like Ash, Daisy works for the Major as a cook, and it becomes likely that she is Ash's wife when De Spain adds "complain about it" - her cooking - "anyway" (301).