Character Keys

This youth shouts "Barn burner!" at Ab Snopes after his trial as he leaves the general store with his two sons (5). From Sarty's perspective, this boy appears as "a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon," and though the boy is "half again his size," Sarty attacks him (5-6).

This entry represents the "somebody" who gets a car in both "By the People" and The Mansion and then (as "they" in the short story and as "somebody" in the novel) drives Clarence Snopes home to get a dry pair of pants.

Passing through Jefferson on his way from pre-flight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the wagons and pick-ups of the hill farmers" who are making one of their weekly visits to town (251). By 'hill farmers,' the narrative means the families that farm on the poorer land in the hilly parts of Yoknapatawpha county.

In "Monk" the residents of the hill country from which Monk hails are a "clannish people," and fiercely independent. These descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers live in a country "impenetrable and almost uncultivated" where they "intermarried and made whiskey and shot at all strangers from behind log barns and snake fences." The narrator points out that they seem to know "as little about him [Monk] as we did" (43).

In The Unvanquished this man lives with his family in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills" outside Jefferson (221). He served under John Sartoris in his first regiment. After the war Sartoris shoots and kills him, because he thinks (perhaps wrongly) that the man plans to rob him.

Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses note that after slavery was abolished, planters and plantation owners employed "hired labor" to grow cotton in the Delta; these men are also described as the "Negroes who work" the land for "the white men who own it" (270, 323-24).

The Mallisons hire men at two different points in Intruder in the Dust to drive Mrs. Mallison. This one drives her to Mottstown to watch her son play football.

The "gorilla," the "thug" whom Granby Dodge "hired . . . down here from Memphis” (31) to murder Judge Dukinfield is “a smallish man in city clothes” (28). He is both unremarkable and unsettling, “with a face like a shaved wax doll, and eyes with a still way of looking and a voice with a still way of talking” (28–29). His appearance and criminal propensities recall aspects of Popeye from Sanctuary.

This "horse trader by profession" in Flags in the Dust has the usual unscrupulousness of that profession (127). The fact that "he was usually engaged in litigation with the railroad company over the violent demise of some of his stock by its agency" makes him very similar to I.O. Snopes in "Mule in the Yard." (In Flags in the Dust I.O. runs Flem's restaurant.)

In Sanctuary the owner of the hotel in Jefferson is described as "a tight, iron-gray man" with "a neat paunch" (180). He is very concerned about propriety: when a committee from the Baptist church complains about Ruby's presence in the hotel, he turns her out.

In The Reivers Miss Reba claims she knows the man who owns the hotel in Parsham, who apparently lives in Memphis.

An unspecified number of white men are present at Major de Spain’s annual hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt." Ratliff comments indirectly on the size of the group, saying he was not surprised that Luke Provine would be there because "this here would be the biggest present gathering of men in the county, let alone the free eating and whisky" (68). As alluded to in the title, some may be bear hunters, while others are referred to by Major de Spain as "shotgun fellows on the deer stands" (68). When not hunting, the camaraderie of camp life includes eating, drinking, and playing poker.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, there are two groups of hunters. This group consists of the the men with whom Ike McCaslin hunted in the past, when game was still plentiful in Yoknapatawpha. Ike can remember how they "shot wild turkey with pistols to test their stalking skills and marksmanship, feeding all but the breast to the dogs" (267, 319). Some of these men are the fathers and grandfathers of young men in the story's present-day hunting party.

The narrator of "The Bear" several times adds "and the others" to his references to the leaders of the annual hunting parties - Major de Spain, General Compson, the boy's father (281, 282). It's possible that the phrase is intended to refer to the lower class and non-white hunters Boon Hoggenbeck, Tennie's Jim and Uncle Ash, but it seems at least as likely that "the others" are additional men from Yoknapatawpha who join the hunt at various times.

These are the unnamed hunters in "The Old People," referred to only as "two or three others," who are part of the yearly De Spain hunting party that also includes the Major, the narrator's father, Uncle Ike McCaslin and Walter Ewell (205).

In The Reivers the typical patrons at Ballenbaugh's in its modern iteration are described as "fox- and coon-hunters and fishermen" who return "not for the hunting and fishing but for the table that Miss Ballenbaugh set" (74).

The husband of the "neighbor, a woman" makes an odd parenthetical appearance in The Mansion when someone scrawls a racist protest against Linda Snopes' reform efforts on the sidewalk in front of Flem's house: the woman scrubs out the scrawl because "nobody" was going to deface "the sidewalk of the street she (and her husband of course) lived and owned property on" (251).

In The Mansion the story of the dead man who was married to the former prostitute in Goodyhay's congregation is told in matter-of-fact terms in a couple pages by Albert, a member of the congregation. Albert says nothing about how he married his wife, but describes how he decided to kill himself during the fighting at the start of the Second World War. He is a Lieutenant in command of an infantry platoon falling back as part of the confused retreat in "Malaya" (a British colony on the Malay Peninsula, 305).

In The Mansion The question of Linda Snopes' romantic future is answered several times, at least hypothetically, by the 'husbands' that Ratliff and Gavin imagine she'll marry some day. In the first such musing, Ratliff describes how Stevens imagines that Linda will leave Jefferson and marry "the first strange young man that happens by" (153). On another occasion, Ratliff and Stevens together speculate about whether Linda has already met her future husband during her first two or three days in the "Grinnich Village" (169).

The man with whom Rosa's aunt "elopes" in Absalom! is a "horse- and mule-trader" (59), an occupation that is usually depicted as disreputable. During the Civil War he "offers his talents for horse- and mule-getting to the Confederate cavalry remount corps," and is captured by Union forces, presumably while trying to steal their horses, and departs the narrative as a prisoner-of-war in Illinois (66).

This is the group of men that Lucius refers to in The Reivers, ironically, as "our Jefferson leisure class": the "friends or acquaintances of Father's or maybe just friends of horses" who congregate in the livery stable to pass the time (38). They expect neither "any business" nor "any mail" to come their way (38). In other Yoknapatawpha novels such men typically sit in the barbershop or the park around the courthouse.

The "foals" referred to in the description of the passengers in the Memphis bus station in "Appendix Compson" are the illegitimate children conceived during wartime relationships between "homeless young women" and migratory men in the military (337). These children are described as being abandoned in "charity wards or policestations" (337).

In Absalom!, Rosa has a moment of fantasy while standing in the hallway of "rotting" Sutpen mansion where Bon's body lies; in this never-to-be version of the Sutpen story, all is well, and Rosa can hear "the children" of Judith and Charles Bon in "the nursery" (113).

This unnamed Italian immigrant in The Sound and the Fury does not speak English. When Quentin knocks at her door hoping to find the home of the little girl who has been accompanying him since he left the bakery, the woman seems to understand his question, but her answer is undecipherable: "'Si, si,' she said, holding back, showing me whatever it was" (132).

The tenant farmers on Varner's properties in The Hamlet are described as "patient earth-reeking men" who meet with their landlord each year after they have gathered the crop they raised on his land "to accept almost without question whatever Varner should compute he owed them for their year's work" (67).

In Absalom! Sutpen negotiates his acquisition of land "with or through" the "Chickasaw Indian agent" (25). The adjective is ambiguous, but it's unlikely the agent was a Chickasaw himself. Historically, Indian agents were white men who worked for the U.S. government as the official intermediary between white America and Native Americans.

Like the women and old men in "Red Leaves," the tribe's children do not go out in pursuit of the fugitive slave.

The Indian "doctor" who treats Issetibbeha in his last illness in "Red Leaves" weats a "skunk skin vest" (321) or "waistcoat" (329). He "burns sticks" in an unsuccessful attempt to cure his patient (322).

In "Red Leaves" this stripling attends to Moketubbe on his litter; his pert manner of speaking annoys the older men Three Basket and Louis Berry.

In "Red Leaves" the tribe's women stay on the plantation with the old men and children rather than participate in the chase after the servant.

The funeral ceremonies for Issetibbeha in "Red Leaves" include "almost a hundred guests" who travel in wagons and on foot to the plantation from elsewhere (331) - when the food runs out "the guests returned home and came back the next day with more food" (336), which may mean they are Indians from other tribes or clans. They are "decorous, quiet, patient" (331), and the descriptions of them repeatedly mention the "stiff European finery" and the "bright, stiff, hard finery" they wear for the occasion (331, 339).

In Sutpen's account of life in the mountains of western Virginia in Absalom!, "the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your rifle sights" (179).

In "That Will Be Fine" the youngest child of Uncle Fred and Aunt Louisa is not identified by name or by gender.

In Requiem for a Nun over twelve "successive overlapping generations" of "men and women and children" (159) live in Jefferson between the time it was a settlement and the present of the novel (i.e. c1950). One passage specifically divides the town's population along racial lines: the advent of "screens in windows" means that "people (white people) could actually sleep in summer night air" (190).

These are the "other prisoners" in the jail in Light in August at the same time that Lucas Burch (Joe Brown) is there (303). They are only referred to by Buck Conner when he orders Burch to stop talking.

The "cattle-thieves and moonshiners" and "murderers" who spend time in the jail are described separately from the black prisoners who are confined in the "bullpen" portion of the jail (197). The thieves and whiskey makers go "to trial" from the jail; the murderers go "to eternity from there," since technological progress has brought the electric chair to Jefferson (198). Since Nancy is one of the "murderers," we know that at least in Requiem for a Nun this set of prisoners is not always segregated from the others on the basis of race.

In The Town this man comes to Jefferson to determine his company's liability for Mrs. Widrington's lost dog.

In The Town it is the wife of the furniture salesman in Memphis who knows what kind of furniture Flem wants for his new house, and she provides it. She is mentioned again as "the Memphis expert" who "learns Eula" what the home of a bank vice president should contain (173).

On the interurban that carries him back to Cambridge in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin self-consciously notices how the other passengers in the car are all "looking at my [black] eye" (170). One passenger is individualized: looking at his reflection in the window of the car, Quentin sees superimposed on his own face the reflection of this woman sitting across the aisle from him, wearing a hat "with a broken feather in it" (169).

In The Reivers Lucius has heard that the place he knew as Ballenbaugh's "is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger" (71). (It was illegal to buy or sell alcohol in Mississippi until 1966.)

Italian marble appears in Yoknapatawpha in 4 different Yoknapatawpha fictions: the marble tombstones Sutpen has made for himself and Ellen are imported from Italy in Absalom!; the marble columns for the rebuilt courthouse in Requiem for a Nun are too; and so is the marble medallion that Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes order for Eula's monument in The Town, or the monument itself, referred to as an "outrageous marble lie" The Mansion (460).

The unnamed "secretive" little girl (126) who somehow becomes attached to Quentin in The Sound and the Fury is the child of Italian immigrants, though it is possible that she herself - unlike her older brother Julio - was born in the U.S. Quentin describes her complexion as "like a cup of milk dashed with coffee," implying she is not exactly 'white' (125). She apparently can speak English, but when she meets Quentin at the bakery, she does not tell him who she is or where she lives, and she remains mysteriously silent while he travels with her in search of her home.

Listening to State Senator Clarence Snopes talk about the life he leads in the state capital of Jackson in Sanctuary, Horace conjures up images of "discreet flicks of skirts in swift closet doors" in various hotel rooms (175). That's all the narrative gives us, but it seems safe to assume that inside the skirts are women, and that the women themselves are prostitutes.

In "Monk," this "jailor" is there along with the "other prisoners" in the county jail when Monk attempts to "make a speech" after his arrest (42). (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," "An Error in Chemistry" and Intruder in the Dust with an 'o' in "Monk," Requiem for a Nun and The Reivers.

In addition to the present day jailer, Mr. Tubbs, Intruder in the Dust mentions but doesn't name the man who was the county jailer during the Civil War. Like Tubbs, he lived with his family in the jail. (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," Intruder in the Dust and "An Error in Chemistry" but with an 'o' in "Monk," Requiem for a Nun and The Reivers.

These "Japanese" should be understood to be 'the enemy' that the U.S. in fighting in the Pacific theater of World War Two. The young narrator of "Two Soldiers" as well as his mother refer to the people who attacked Pearl Harbor as "them Japanese" (81, 84). In the later story "Shall Not Perish," the same narrator, a year older, refers to the country's enemy and the forces responsible for his brother's death as "them Japs" (101).

In The Mansion these Japanese troops attack the retreating group of Americans as well as "Aussies, British, French from Indo-China" somewhere in "Malaya" at the start of the Second World War (305). They are never seen, but readers hear them "chirping" in the dark just beyond a line of American foxholes. Their "English" is the stereotypical dialect that once was spoken by Asians in (white) American popular culture: "Maline" (i.e. Marine), "Tonigh youdigh" (306).

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin recalls a story that Mrs. Bland tells about Gerald, involving "a sawmill husband" - the lower-class husband of a woman with whom Gerald has had sexual relations - who confronts him with a shotgun (107). According to Quentin's remembered version, Gerald is supposed to have bitten the gun in two. It's not clear how much of the exaggeration here is Mrs. Bland's and how much Quentin's.

Among the Jefferson people Hawkshaw barbers in "Hair" are children, to whom he gives peppermints.