Character Keys

In Absalom!, this is the "driver" of the "ambulance" that Rosa takes out to the Sutpen place at the end of 1909, to bring Henry into town "where the doctors could save him" (299).

The "fellow recruit" in Flags in the Dust who calls Buddy MacCallum "Virge" during their training at a camp in Arkansas; in response Buddy fights him "without anger" for "seven minutes" (355).

In Light in August, when Grimm asks the "commander of the local Post" about organizing a group to preserve the peace in Jefferson after Christmas is arrested, this man says no. "I couldn't use the Post like that. After all, we are not soldiers now" (452).

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). This man asks what the sheriff will say about them carrying pistols.

In Light in August Percy Grimm recruits members of the local American Legion from "the stores and offices where the legion members worked" and organizes them into a "platoon" to preserve the peace after Christmas is jailed in Jefferson (453). Because he holds "the equivalent of a commissioned rank," this young man is appointed by Grimm as the "second in command" of the platoon he forms (456). He is the one who, on Grimm's orders, turns on the "fire alarm" after Christmas escapes (458).

As an American military policeman (A.M.P.), this unnamed character in "Ad Astra" competes with Monaghan for control over the German prisoner. Mystified by the company of headstrong and independent aviators in which he finds himself, he insultingly asserts his authority over the French officer at the Cloche-Clos in Amiens, thus helping to bring on the riot. The French officer calls him a "devil-dog" - a World War I era slang term for a U.S. Marine (422).

This man appears in Sanctuary in the story Ruby tells at two different times, to Temple and and then later to Horace, about how when Lee was stationed in the Philippines he "killed another soldier" in a brawl over a local woman (59).

These soldiers in Sanctuary - presumably cavalrymen like Lee Goodwin - are returning to San Francisco from their deployment in the Philippines when Ruby asks them about what has happened to Lee. When she lets one of them pick her up, he paws her drunkenly while telling her about Lee killing another soldier in a fight over "that nigger woman" (277). American forces were first sent to the Philippines in 1898 to fight the Spanish, but soon were fighting against Philippine nationalists. The Philippines were an American territory from 1898 to 1946.

In "Shall Not Perish," after Pete died, Res Grier would bring home the Memphis newspaper each time he returned from Jefferson. The Grier family would see the "pictures and names of soldiers and sailors from other counties and towns in Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee" who died in spring and summer of 1942 (102). While African American soldiers fought and died during World War II, it is unlikely that during this time of segregation in the South the Memphis paper would have published their pictures.

What Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" somewhat facetiously calls the "second" "American Expeditionary Force in France" that "began to land in Europe in 1919" are the many Americans who toured or moved to Europe in the years after the First World War (256). The "first" A.E.F., of course, were the one million soldiers in the U.S. Army who landed in France to join the British and French forces fighting Germany; they had returned home by 1919.

At the conclusion of "Shall Not Perish," the narrator identifies the group he calls "America": "the men and women who did the deeds . . . who lasted and endured. . . . I knew them too: the men and women . . . still powerful and still dangerous and still coming, North and South and East and West" (115).

In Intruder in the Dust the hills in the Beat Four section of the county remind Chick Mallison that his ancestors came to Yoknapatawpha from Scotland by way of Carolina. If Chick is thinking specifically of his maternal ancestors, these people would belong on the Stevens family tree. But he could instead (or also) be thinking of his Mallison ancestors.

The history of Mississippi as recounted in Requiem for a Nun includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), part of the group referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180).

In "All the Dead Pilots" this "Anzac major" sends the drunk ambulance driver back to his unit (527). (Anzac, sometimes written ANZAC, stands for 'Australian and New Zealand Army," to which many of the Allied troops fighting around Amiens belonged.)

The archaeologists mentioned in Go Down, Moses are "a group of white men, including two women," who descend on the Indian mound to study the ways of the "old people." Most of them are bespectacled and all are dressed in "khaki clothes which had patently lain folded on a store shelf twenty-four hours ago" (37).

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.

In Requiem for a Nun the "architect who designed" the Confederate monument that sits at the center of Jefferson is referred to but not described (189).

In Light in August, after Hines threatens the congregants in a Negro church with a pistol during a prayer meeting, "the law" comes and arrests him (378). 'Officers' is our way to translate "the law" into the terms of a Character database; presumably Faulkner is thinking of a few policemen or deputy sheriffs.

In "By the People" and again in The Mansion this officer pins a medal on Devries; in the story it's for his heroism during the Korean War; in the novel, during World War II.

In The Mansion this army nurse, "kin" to a Jefferson family, comes to Jefferson after the end of World War I as the town's "first female hero," having served as a lieutenant on a base hospital in France "within sound of the guns behind Montdidier" (199).

This army officer - referred to as the "exec" in Devries' unit in Korea in "By the People" (134) and as the "second" in Devries' unit on a World War II battlefield in The Mansion (339) - is the executive officer who is second in command of the Negro combat unit that Devries commands. It's likely Faulkner imagined him as 'white': historically, as an officer, he would definitely have been white during World War II, and probably white in the Korean War.

In Flags in the Dust, these are the "white officers" in charge of the African American "labor battalion" that Caspey Strother serves in during World War I (57).

During Manfred de Spain's campaign for Mayor in The Mansion, his opponents start a rumor that he got the scar on his face from "a Missouri sergeant with a axe in a crap game" instead of from an enemy soldier while in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (142).

This unnamed lawyer, appointed by the District Attorney to prosecute the case against Bookwright in "Tomorrow," is content merely to go through the required motions, presenting the evidence in less than an hour and only "bowing to the court" rather than presenting a closing argument (92). Like (almost) everyone else in the courtroom, he believes Bookwright should be acquitted.

Judge Gowan's assistant in Go Down, Moses is described as a “young, brisk, slightly harried white man in glasses” (70).

In "Elly," Elly's aunt is the wife of Ailanthia's son. She lives with her husband and daughter in Mills City.

In "Dry September" Minnie Cooper's "thin, sallow, unflagging aunt" lives with Minnie and her mother in a "small frame house" (173). After Mrs. Cooper starts "keeping to her room," this "gaunt aunt runs the house" (175).

This "aunt" (68) in Vicksburg whom Nat visits in Go Down, Moses is only mentioned once, when Nat tells Roth Edmonds about her trip. Based on the rest of the novel, it's hard to know how this aunt is related to either of Nat's parents, Molly or Lucas.

In Absalom!, Rosa's "spinster aunt" (46) lives with the Coldfields in Jefferson and, after Rosa's mother dies, raises the girl. According to Mr. Compson, this aunt is "that strong vindictive consistent woman who seems to have been twice the man that Mr. Coldfield was and who in very truth was not only Miss Rosa's mother but her father too" (49). "A virgin at thirty-five," when Rosa is born, she brings Rosa up in a "closed masonry of females," defined by rage against "the entire male principle" in general and Thomas Sutpen in particular - at least according to Mr.

In "Beyond" these two women live with Howard Allison and his mother during Howard's boyhood; they run the house, rigidly control Howard's life, and patronize his mother.

In Flags in the Dust Young Bayard mentions this major during his talk with Rafe MacCallum "about the war"; the memory features a fight in "the Leicester lounge" in which "the Anzac lost two teeth" and Bayard himself "got a black eye" (124). The fight may have been over "two ladies," and may have been between Bayard and the Major, but none of that is made clear. Faulkner may have meant this character to be the same as the Australian captain whose teeth Bayard knocks out in a bar in London (cf.

These are the people referred to in The Town as "somebody with an automobile" (71), a small but growing group of Yoknapatawpha residents during the period in which the novel is set. They bail Jabbo out of jail whenever one of them has a car that needs fixing.

This is the "youngish quite decent-looking" (464) car agent who brings Linda's new Jaguar down to Jefferson at the end of The Mansion.

In Flags in the Dust this is the fellow aviator at the Dayton airfield who, after trying to talk Bayard out of flying the experimental plane, loans him a helmet and goggles, and offers him a woman's garter for luck.

During the chess game with Uncle Gavin, the narrator in "Knight's Gambit" compares his thinking to that of "airmen," who measure duration "by contiguous and not elapsed time" (184).

The child (neither name nor gender is mentioned) who is born into the "family of country people" who are living in Jefferson and being looked after by the Red Cross and Narcissa Benbow in Flags in the Dust (72).

According to Ratliff's account in The Town, "there's a thousand extry young fellers all new and strange and interesting and male" at the University of Mississippi (271). Ratliff believes that among these young men might be Linda's future husband. Flem later thinks about this group as "a thousand young men, all bachelors and all male" - and a threat to his financial interest in Linda (304). (The University of Mississippi began admitting women in 1882.)

In Sanctuary, the bailiff in Lee Goodwin's trial calls the court into session and swears in Temple Drake before she testifies.

The bailiff who appears in the trial scene in "Tomorrow" is not described, except by the actions he performs in the courtroom.

In Requiem for a Nun, the "Bailiff" who commands "Order in the court!" in the play's brief first scene is not described at all (41). Our assumptions about his gender, race and class are based on the bailiffs who appear in courtrooms in other Yoknapatawpha fictions. We also assume that the "MAN'S VOICE" that opens the play, telling "the prisoner" from behind the theatrical curtain to "stand," also belongs to this Bailiff (38).

In The Hamlet, these "three bailiffs" who work in the courthouse have to help the two officers restrain Mink Snopes after his conviction (369).

Readers of The Sound and the Fury never see the band that plays in the traveling show visiting Jefferson, but several of the novel's black characters talk about it, and in Jason's section both he and Uncle Job hear the music they are making. "That's a good band," Job says (248); "Dem folks sho do play dem horns" (230). Jason refers to the show's performers as "a bunch of Yankees" (230), but there's no clear evidence that they come from the North.

This is the "band" that plays in The Unvanquished when Colonel Sartoris drives the first train on the newly finished track into Jefferson (226).

The bandits in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are "a gang - three or four - of Natchez Trace bandits" captured in the woods and confined in the settlement jail just long enough to stage an escape that adds a kind of shine to their image (201, 4-5). Local rumor suggests they may be associated with such historically famous bandits as the Harpes or Mason or Murrell, but the narrator seems to believe they were simply part of the "fraternity of rapine" that was a common element on the frontier (201).

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 "Mule in the Yard" and again in The Town, this cashier tries to convince Mannie Hait to invest her settlement from the insurance company in bonds.

The "teller" at the Bank of Jefferson assists Ike McCaslin and Lucas Beauchamp when Lucas collects his inheritance from Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin in Go Down, Moses (106).

In Requiem for a Nun, Temple Drake's account of the confrontation between Nancy and the cashier mentions that "fifty people" were waiting to get into the bank when it happened (96).

In Flags in the Dust he is an undescribed man who has a Coca-Cola with Res and Byron inside the bank.