Character Keys

In an odd aside, Sanctuary notes that the "suit of gray" worn by the "old man" in Kinston who drives the taxi was "made by Jews in the New York tenement district" (298). Many different ethnicities worked in the city's garment industry and belonged to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (founded in 1900), but the stereotype of the Jewish garment worker was widespread in the 1920s.

The narrator of Sanctuary calls the man who fills Popeye's car up in Dumfries a "mechanic"; he indicates which way Temple went when she got out of the car (140).

This group is more like a casualty statistic than a character. The World War I aviators in "Ad Astra" keep track of their successes by counting each enemy plane they shoot down as a "Hun": thus Sartoris shoots down "three Huns" in his quest to avenge his brother's death (414), and Monaghan refers to the "thirteen Huns" he "got" (416). ("Hun" was the derogatory term the Allies used for their German opponents.)

The father of the captured German aviator in "Ad Astra" is a nobleman - as the aviator puts it, "my people are of Prussia little barons" - who does not approve when his eldest son renounces the title of "baron" (417). The father dies during the War of natural causes.

Among the first settlers in Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun is a man referred to as "the German blacksmith"; all that is known about him, however, is that he is one of the few white men in the original settlement who owns a slave (24).

The "handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral" who is seen in a photograph in "Appendix Compson" is presumably Caddy's lover during World War II (334). He and that relationship are further characterized by the photo's luxurious background: "a Cannebiere backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromiumtrimmed sports car," all of which are featured in "a slick magazine - a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight" (334).

The "kaiser" whom the German aviator refers to without naming in "Ad Astra" is Kaiser Wilhelm II (Friedrich Wilhelm Victor Albert von Hohenzollern); he ruled Germany as emperor from June 1888 to November 9, 1918. On that date, having lost the support of the army, he abdicated, and fled the country a day later. The German prisoner says he does not serve "baron and kaiser" (418), but he is proud when his brother Franz is declared "ace iron cross by the kaiser's own hand" (419).

The gun with which Vinson Gowrie was shot in Intruder in the Dust was "an automatic pistol" taken from a German officer captured by Buddy McCallum during World War I (161).

According to the captured German pilot in "Ad Astra," this unnamed soldier assassinates his brother Franz, a General serving on the army's general staff, in the revolutionary fighting that breaks out in Berlin at the end of World War I.

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 a kind of mock-Homeric simile, the narrator of Intruder in the Dust compares the "apostate sons of Beat Four" in Yoknapatawpha who move into Jefferson and marry "a town girl" to the "petty Germanic princelings [who] would come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones" (133). It's not clear if Faulkner is thinking of any specific German noblemen. (Brandenburg was a province of Prussia until Prussia was abolished after World War II, when Brandenburg became a separate German state.)

In Requiem for a Nun Temple compares her own experience overcoming trauma to this fictional character. Although Faulkner blurs the details, saying that the book in which this woman appears was written by "somebody - Hemingway, wasn't it?" (121), it's very likely that Temple is thinking of Maria, a character in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. According to Temple's account, this character freed herself from the past by "refusing to accept it" (121).

In The Sound and the Fury Shreve's account of Quentin's fight with Bland includes the "wench that he made a date with to meet at a dance hall in Atlantic city" (166); Bland boasts about standing her up, so she doesn't appear even in his story, and Shreve's account seems skeptical about Bland's whole story - but in his own mind Quentin's attack on Bland seems to be an attempt to defend this young woman's honor

In The Hamlet Eula associates with a small group of Frenchman's Bend girls who act as foils for her.

In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" all we are told about the man who is "establishing a ranch to breed native goats" in Yoknapatawpha is that he is "a Northerner" (139). The Hamlet is a little more specific: there Ratliff identifies him as a man from "Massachusetts or Boston or Ohio" (87). The novel is also a little more judgmental: as Ratliff explains to his friends that "You got to keep in mind he is a northerner. They does things different from us" (88).

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).

"Them" - this is one of the more ambiguous elements in As I Lay Dying. "Them," "they" - these are the only terms that that Anse uses to describe the people who come to his house and use "the law" to "talk me out of" Darl (37, 36). The most likely explanation of this event is the Selective Service Act of 1917, which required men between the ages of 21 and 31 to register for the draft (in 1918, it was expanded to include men between 18 and 21). That would mean Darl has been drafted and "they" are agents of the federal government.

No name is mentioned when Temple tells Ruby that the "gu-governor comes to our house" for dinner (56). The real Governor of Mississippi when Sanctuary was published was Theodore G. Bilbo, an outspoken white supremacist - but it's not necessary to believe that Faulkner intended readers to think of specifically of him. Temple's intention seems to be simply to assert her caste status as a shield.

This is not the Governor in Requiem who appears onstage in Act III but a "Governor of the State" who was once held in the Jefferson jail for thirty days after being sentenced for contempt of court (196). This episode is based on the real experience of former Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo, a native of Oxford, who in 1922 spent the same thirty days in jail. (The Governor who does appear onstage has his own entry in the index: see Governor Henry.)

Referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "one" of the Governor's "lieutenants," this man was taken to court in a paternity suit (196).

The foreman of the grand jury in "Smoke" listens to, objects to, but ultimately pays heed to county attorney Gavin Steven’s conjectures.

In Requiem for a Nun an unspecified group of Indians, identified only as "old Mohataha's forty-year-old grandchildren," charge candy to Ratcliffe's trading post (28-29).

The woman with whom Roth Edmonds has an affair and a child in Go Down, Moses is part of the extended McCaslin family: she is the granddaughter of James Beauchamp and so related to both Roth and Ike McCaslin. She is 'white' enough to pass as 'white' - until the fact that her aunt "took in washing" makes Ike realize that she is a Negro (though Ike uses a more offensive term, 343). She was born and educated in the North, and has taught school in Mississippi. Roth refuses to marry her, and even her "Uncle Isaac" tells her to take her child and "Go back North.

The man Mrs. Bland refers to as "Gerald's grandfather" in The Sound and the Fury is almost certainly her father, so we don't know his last name (148). In her account, he is a very traditional southern aristocrat, and very fussy about the ingredients in his mint julep.

The memory of Mr. Pearson's unnamed grandfather is the first point in "The Tall Men" where he begins to identify with the McCallum family. When Pearson enters the bedroom where the injured Buddy McCallum lies, he sees beside Buddy's bedside a "big, old-fashioned, wicker-covered demijohn" like the one in which his grandfather kept his own whiskey (49).

This character 'appears' in "Knight's Gambit" by way of one of Faulkner's typical negative formulations, in the middle of a sentence that develops the idea that Sebastian Gualdres is a "stranger" in Yoknapatawpha by noting that, when locals visit him at the Backus-Harriss Plantation, they are "guests not of the woman who owned the place and whose family name they had known all her life and her father's and grandfather's too" - that is, they are his guests (174). But the point here is that this woman - Mrs.

The grandfather of the man who is the Governor of the state in "Monk" seems to have been a man of the lower classes with a chip on his shoulder similar to the one Bill Terrel carries. As the Governor says of him to Gavin Stevens, "Mr. Stevens, you are what my grandpap would have called a gentleman. He would have snarled it at you, hating you and your kind; he might very probably have shot your horse from under you someday from behind a fence - for a principle" (57).

According to Charles in The Town Walter's grandfather was a slave who "had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167).

Boon's "mother's mother," as Intruder in the Dust puts it, was "a Chickasaw woman" (91). Five texts refer to this grandmother, though she herself never appears in any of them. In the first mention, in "Lion," there's some uncertainty about whether she might have been his mother instead: as Quentin puts it, "Boon was part Indian. They said half, but I don't think so. I think it was the grandmother who was the Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land Major de Spain now owned and over which we hunted" (184).

In Sanctuary the mother of Popeye's mother seems normal enough when first introduced, as someone who likes the strike-breaker who is Popeye's father. After being widowed, she has remarried a man who takes good care of her boarding house - until one day he disappears with all the money she had in the bank. Perhaps this event is what triggers her madness, a mixture of pyromania and paranoia.

This unnamed woman in Flags in the Dust is, according to Will Falls, his source for the ointment with which he is treating Old Bayard's wen: "My granny got that 'ere from a Choctaw woman nigh a hundred and thutty year ago" (227).

Mentioned but not named in "The Old People," the great-grandfather of the narrator was presumably one of the original planters in Yoknapatawpha, a contemporary of the first Sartorises and Compsons, but all the story definitely says about him is that "almost a hundred years ago" he bought the slaves from whom Sam Fathers is descended from Ikkemotubbe (203).

In "Shall Not Perish," when Mrs. Grier consoles Major de Spain for the loss of his son in the early days of World War Two, she mentions her own grandfather who fought in the Civil War, adding that "I reckon his mother didn't know why [he had to enlist] either, but I reckon he did" (109).

This character is mentioned in The Reivers as an "idiot nephew or cousin or something" of Dan Grinnup, and like him is a last living descendant of the Grenier family, perhaps the oldest white family in Yoknapatawpha (7). He lives "in a tent in the river jungle beyond Frenchman's Bend," on land that had once been part of the big antebellum "plantation" belonging to Louis Grenier (the "Frenchman" from whom the Bend gets its name, 7).

This unnamed grocery store owner in The Town is young Wallstreet Panic Snopes' employer. In time, Wall becomes his partner.

The "groom" in The Reivers who leads the skittish horse Acheron up to the starting line is not described (230). He could be black, like McWillie and the other man who works in Linscomb's stable, but typically Faulkner's fiction will specify race when a character is not white, so on that basis we interpret this man as 'white.'

In Flags in the Dust this "group of negroes" scatters when Bayard and the runaway stallion race down the lane from the livery stable (129).

While talking to Philip in "Elly," Elly invents this "party" of people she will be visiting in order to explain her forthcoming absence - and her need for his silent cooperation. She says that the group she'll be with is comprised of "people you don't know and that I don't expect to see again before I am married" (215).

In a passage in The Mansion that provides a rare glimpse into Stevens' life after he marries the wealthy Melisandre Backus Harriss, the narrator describes his discomfort whenever "guests, even the same guest or guests again," came to dinner (399).

According to The Mansion, male "guests" staying at the Holston House are required to wear "a coat and necktie" in the dining room, while women guests must have their "heads covered" (421). The only guests whom the novel specifically identifies, however, are "drummers" - i.e. traveling salesmen - and they are all men (37).

Ratliff identifies most of the guests at the Kohls' wedding reception in The Mansion as "poets and painters and sculptors and musicians" (191), but seems to think the man who recognizes the necktie he is wearing as an "Allanova" must be "a haberdasher taking Saturday evening off" (192).

Immediately before questioning Temple during Lee Goodwin's trial in Sanctuary, the District Attorney mentions "the gynecologist" who testified earlier about "the most sacred affairs of that most sacred thing in life: womanhood" (283-84). The doctor himself does not appear in the novel.

This "old half-crazed white woman" in Sanctuary is one of Jefferson's most eccentric inhabitants (200). The physical description of her is equally striking: her "lank grayish hair" hangs beside "the glittering collapse of her face" (201). She is reported to make her living by "manufactur[ing] spells for negroes" (200), though her house was also once raided by "officers searching for whiskey" (201). Horace arranges for Ruby to stay in the "lean-to shed room" attached to her house. (This woman may recur as "Mrs.

One of the three black males who are present in the MacCallum household when Young Bayard arrives there near the end of Flags in the Dust. His role in the family or on the family's land is not clear.

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this "a hulking halfwitted boy" helps Jim Gant in his work as a trader (368). It is he who tells Mrs. Gant that her husband has left her, when he tries to collect the $1.75 he loaned to Gant; when she refuses at gun point to give him any money, he becomes "an ancient mariner in faded overalls" as - "wild eyed and drooling a little at the mouth" - he relates his grievance repeatedly to the other people in the Bend (370).

In The Sound and the Fury this "clerk" in the hardware store in Boston sells Quentin two six-pound flat-irons (85).

In The Sound and the Fury the customers come to Earl's hardware store on Friday are mostly country folks who are in town for the visiting show. Jason describes his job waiting on them bitterly as running "to sell some redneck a dime's worth of nails or something" (211).

When Boon and Butch are taken to jail in Hardwich in The Reivers, Reba and Corrie stay in "the jailor's wife's room" (270). The phrasing suggests that, like the jailer in Jefferson in other fictions, this couple lives in the building that holds the jail.

In The Sound and the Fury the annual Harvard-Yale crew race is scheduled to take place a few days after June 2, 1910. Perhaps because Quentin is about use a river to drown himself, he thinks about the race, and the team - "them down at New London" - several times in his section of the novel (77, 105, etc.).