Character Keys

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses Dan is the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds' place, and is one of the two Negroes who help Roth search for "Alice Ben Bolt," the valuable mule who has gone missing. Dan immediately recognizes the mule's footprint and (as Roth "would realize" later) also recognizes the footprints of the man who led Alice away (229, 81). The fact that Dan doesn't tell Roth about the man puts black employee and his white boss on opposite sides of the color line.

The "Boon or Boone" mentioned twice in the "Appendix Compsons" is most famous for exploring and settling what was then part of Virginia, and what is now Kentucky, creating a route through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains that many settlers would later follow. The settlement referred to in the text is probably Boonesborough, one of the first settlements west of the Appalachians.

The name "Das" is a common South Asian name, derived from Sanskrit. One of its meanings, however, is 'servant,' so it may be used by the subadar in "Ad Astra" not as a name but as a kind of title or label. In either case, this character is "the headman" who supervises the native military personnel; after the battalion's disastrous attack on German lines, he reluctantly admits to the subadar that his troops crossed No Man's Land with unloaded rifles, and almost their entire batallion was annihilated (425).

Mr. Lovelady's daughter is mentioned in passing in "That Evening Sun." She is described as a "child, a little girl," who lives in the hotel with her father and mother (308). When her mother commits suicide, though, Lovelady "and the child went away" (308). He returns alone, and we learn nothing more about his child's fate.

The character whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to twice as "old David Colbert" (365, 374) is presumably based on a real historical figure, Levi Colbert. The son of white father from North Carolina and a Chickasaw mother, he grew up among the Indians. Among the real Chickasaws (unlike Faulkner's) kinship was defined in matrilineal terms, and through his mother's lineage and his own accomplishments Colbert eventually became head chief of the Chickasaw nation - or as the story says about "David," "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).

The character David Hogganbeck in "A Courtship" evokes the heroes of American tall tales about the frontier. "Bigger than any two" of the Chickasaw men "put together" (366), he is a skilled steamboat pilot, an accomplished fiddle player, a formidable opponent in eating, drinking and dancing competitions, and Ikkemotubbe's chivalrous rival for the hand of Herman Basket's sister. For her love he is willing to throw off his job, and for his Indian rival he is willing to lose his life.

In "A Bear Hunt," the married but unnamed and unenumerated daughters of Manfred de Spain occur to the unnamed narrator when he speculates they might have been given a sewing machine by Mrs. de Spain. Manfred is usually depicted as a bachelor, but a son of his is mentioned in "Shall Not Perish."

In The Sound and the Fury Deacon is a fixture among the students at Harvard in 1910, especially the ones who come from the south. Black and, according to Quentin, a "natural psychologist" (97), he meets these southerners when they first arrive in Cambridge, "in a sort of Uncle Tom's cabin outfit, patches and all" (97) and proceeds to manipulate their prejudices to his own benefit. He tells Quentin that "you and me's the same folks, come long and short," and that Southerners are "fine folks. But you can't live with them" (99).

An elder of the Negro church that Joe Christmas invades in Light in August, Vines tells one of the parishioners to ride for the sheriff and tell him "'just what you seen'" (324).

Like John Sartoris, Dennison Hawk was a large plantation- and slave-owner who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War; he was killed at the Battle of Shiloh. He never appears directly in the fictions, but is mentioned in "Raid" and "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished. His Alabama plantation, Hawkhurst, was burned by the Yankees sometime after his death. He is the husband of Louisa, who is Granny's sister, and hence he is Bayard's uncle as well as Drusilla's and Denny's father.

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).

Dewey Dell is the fourth child and only daughter of Addie and Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying. Cora Tull calls her a "tom-boy girl" (8); several male characters comment on how "pretty" she is, "in a kind of sullen, awkward way" (199). Unknown to anyone but her brother Darl and Lafe, her sexual partner, she is pregnant and wants to go to Jefferson to get an abortion. She is able to communicate with Darl without words and she narrates four chapters in the novel.

In both "Wash" and Absalom! Milly's baby is delivered by an old Negro midwife who lives in a cabin "three miles" from the fishing camp (542, 230). The short story refers to her mainly as "the Negress" (535), but Sutpen once calls her "Dicey" (544). She is not named in the novel. In the short story she witnesses Wash killing Sutpen, "peering around the crazy door with her black gargoyle face of a worn gnome" (545), while in the novel she only hears this event from inside the camp. In both texts she flees as soon as it happens.

Dilsey is the matriarch of the Gibson family and the source of whatever emotional stability there is in the Compson family. A major character in The Sound and the Fury, she is married to Roskus, the mother of Versh, Frony, and T.P., and the grandmother of Luster. She is a devout Christian, a loyal servant and a very caring human being. As a character she is both related to the "mammy" stereotype and one of Faulkner's most dignified and impressive creations.

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.

Doc Meeks himself does not appear in The Mansion, but the "patent medicine truck" he drives around Yoknapatawpha advertises "Watkins Products" - a real manufacturer of health medicines that has been in business since just after the Civil War - on "both [its] sides and the back" (171). The novel describes those advertisements as the source of the name that the parents of Watkins Products Snopes gave their son.

Doctor Alford appears in Flags in the Dust as a "newcomer" to Jefferson in his "thirties" (93). He shares offices with Dr. Peabody but expresses impatience and often contempt for Peabody's traditional ideas about the practice of medicine. He is courting Narcissa Benbow, but without arousing much interest in her. He is mentioned in As I Lay Dying when MacGowan tells Jody to send Dewey Dell "upstairs to Alford's office" when she asks "to see the doctor that works" there (241).

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).

Doctor Lucius Peabody is the only character who appears in the first three Yoknapatawpha novels: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He is only mentioned by Quentin in the second, but makes memorable appearances in the other two. According to Flags, he is "the fattest man" in the county (94). His medical practice takes him "out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him" (95).

"A fattish man with thin, curly hair," whose eyeglasses seem to be worn only "for decorum's sake" (149), Dr. Quinn treats Temple when she first arrives at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary. Initially he refused to make a house call on Sunday, but Reba reminds him that she "can put him in jail three times over" (148).

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.

Dollar is the Mottstown store-keeper in Light in August who tells the town about how Mrs. Hines retrieves her husband from the chair where she had left him and rents a car from Salmon to take them to Jefferson.

Doris Snopes is the youngest brother of of Clarence Snopes. He "resembles Clarence not only in size and shape but [has] the same mentality of a child and the moral principles of a wolverine" (327). He appears only in The Mansion.

"Dr" (as Faulkner wrote it, without the period) is a nickname. "Dr Jones" is the bank's janitor, about as old as Bayard (whom he calls "General"), and described only as "black and stooped with querulousness and age" (105).

"Young Loosh," as the narrator calls the only child of Dr. Lucius Peabody, practices medicine as a surgeon in New York City, but at least once a year returns to spend a day with his father (400). The description of him in Flags in the Dust is unusually detailed and enthusiastic. It begins: "His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large; and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor . . ." (400).

In Flags in the Dust Dr. Straud is New York surgeon and medical researcher with whom Dr. Peabody's son, Lucius Jr., works. The novel says his "name is a household word" (400), and Lucius says the doctor has "been experimenting with electricity" (401).

One of the two brothers of Temple Drake in Sanctuary who "are lawyers" (54), and one of the four who appear at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial as the "younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.)

Although she only appears in the Unvanquished stories, Drusilla Hawk Sartoris is one of the more memorable women in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. She was born in Alabama into the plantation aristocracy, where her role as a lady seemed clearly defined - until the Civil War gave her the opportunity to redefine it.

Durley is one of the men standing around on Mrs. Littlejohn's lot the evening of the auction in "Spotted Horses." He is the one who suggests that Ernest should track down Mrs. Armstid to tell her that her husband has been injured (177).

In The Sound and the Fury Earl owns the hardware store on the Square in Jefferson where Jason Compson works. He tells Jason that Mrs. Compson is "a lady I've got a lot of sympathy for" (227), and apparently for her sake, he puts up with Jason's inadequacies as his employee. When Earl re-appears in The Mansion he gains a last name but loses possession of the store: he manages it for Ike McCaslin, though since Ike "spends most of his time" fishing and hunting he essentially runs it until Jason "eliminates Triplett in his turn" (355).

The Town contains two different kinds of lists of the old (white) Yoknapatawpha families. The first such list is constructed by Gavin Stevens as he reflects on the county's history, and unlike the second list in this novel or the kind of role Faulkner provides elsewhere, Gavin's thoughts include the early lower class settlers as well as "the proud fading white plantation names" like "Sutpen and Sartoris and Compson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and Habersham" (332).

This is the second of Eck's two wives in The Hamlet. He marries her six months after arriving in Frenchman's Bend. A "big, strong, tranquil-faced young woman" (220), she is from the family whom he meets while he and Flem are boarding at a farm outside of the village. Together Eck and his wife have three children, but they are only briefly alluded to in this novel. No previous wife is mentioned when Eck and this woman re-appear in The Town; now she is the mother of both Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey - who were step-brothers earlier.

In Sanctuary Ed Walker is the county jailer. Apparently he was reluctant to allow Ruby and her child to spend a night in the jail with Lee Goodwin, but his wife, who lives with her husband in the jail and admits them, tells Horace "I dont keer whut Ed says" (181).

The Edmonds family descends from Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin "by the distaff" - that is, from McCaslin's daughter rather than one of his sons (5). The first Edmonds in this line may have been the man who married that daughter, or could just as easily be the man who married the daughter of that daughter - the novel provides no information about the sequence, nor any information at all about this man.

This character is barely mentioned as "Mrs. Sutpen," Thomas' only wife, in "Wash," but as Ellen Coldfield Sutpen, his second wife in Absalom!, she presents a different image of the plantation mistress than someone like Rosa Millard, who presides over the Sartoris plantation in The Unvanquished. In Absalom! Ellen is the daughter of a merchant. She is described as "small-boned" but also "what is known as fullbodied" (51). According to the storytellers, Sutpen marries her to gain respectability.

The title character of "Elly" is eighteen years old. She "lives in Jefferson . . . with her father and mother and grandmother in a biggish house" (208). Elly has inherited her given name, Ailanthia, from her grandmother, a link that Faulkner uses to underscore the generational tension between the grandmother's Victorian sexual repression and Southern racial prejudices, and Elly's restlessness with these taboos.

Miss Emily, as the narrator of "A Rose for Emily" explains, is “a tradition, a duty, and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (119). In other words, she is a recluse and a source of fascination for the townspeople of Jefferson, who keep a constant eye on her doings. She never married, and her domineering father kept potential suitors away from her, but after his death she had a potentially scandalous relationship with a single suitor, a Yankee stranger named Homer Barron.

In "Smoke," Emma Dukinfield is Judge Dukinfield’s daughter. She herself doesn't appear in the story, but the "small, curiously chased brass box" (25) that she brings back from Europe as a present for him plays a crucial role in solving the Judge's murder.

In Intruder in the Dust Chick recalls Ephriam, Paralee's father, "an old man, a widower," living in her cabin and walking the roads at night: "not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day" in a rocking chair (61). By consulting a white fortune-teller, Ephriam finds out where Maggie Mallison's lost ring can be found (69). And like Tomey's Turl in the short story "Was," he knows that it's "womens and children" who are best at getting uncommon things done (70).

Mentioned first in The Reivers as "a Negro man" who works for Miss Ballenbaugh (75), Ephum presumably helps her farm, takes care of the horses of the men who stay there, and does other masculine chores around the place. Ned stays overnight at his home, which must be nearby.

Ernest Cotton is a bachelor and an unsuccessful farmer whose hapless attempt to avenge himself against a more prosperous neighbor is at the center of "The Hound." The narrator describes him as "a mild man in worn overalls, with a gaunt face and lack-luster eyes like a sick man" (157). He is also a murderer and would-be suicide, though unsuccessful at those as well. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he made Cotton's character a cousin of Flem named Mink Snopes.)

In Flags in the Dust the owner of the restaurant on the Square refers to "a man like Debs" as a better candidate for President than Woodrow Wilson (122); in The Mansion, at the other end of Faulkner's career, "Eugene Debs" is among the people on the list provided by Charles Mallison of "everybody they called communists now" (237). The historical Eugene V. Debs founded the International Workers of the World (IWW), and was the Socialist Party of America's candidate for President in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920.

Eula is mentioned in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel (1929) and two short stories from the 1930s. She's simply Flem's "wife" in Flags in the Dust (166). The stories, however, introduce the character trait that will dominate her portrayal in the Snopes trilogy: her sexual attractiveness. As the youngest daughter of Will and Maggie Varner in "Spotted Horses" she's a "big, soft-looking" girl whom suitors swarm around "like bees around a honey pot" (166).

In Flags in the Dust Eunice is the Benbows' cook. She expresses a sort of maternal concern about Horace's welfare. Narcissa tells her that "Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours" (309).

Eunice Gant is a clerk at Wildermark's store. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Gants who move to Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend in "Miss Zilphia Gant," The Town doesn't mention the fact.)

Euphrony is briefly mentioned in Flags in the Dust as Simon's dead wife, which presumably also makes her the mother of Elnora and Caspey (300). Since Elnora is described by the narrator as a "tall mulatto woman" (9), it seems to follow that Euphrony must have had a sexual relationship with a white man, but this novel makes no attempt to explore that issue. On the other hand, in "There Was a Queen" Elnora's mother is not named, but her (white) father is identified as Colonel John Sartoris. Again, however, no more is said about that.

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).

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.