Character Keys

The "damned king" of England in "Ad Astra" - whom Monaghan refers to contemptuously and whom the Irish Comyn denies is "his damned king" - was George V (416). King George V ruled the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936. He was also Emperor of India during this period.

This "woman" is the "nearest female kin" to the aunt whom Quentin's father tells him about in Absalom! (156). She looms very large in the mind of the aunt, but remains invisible in the text of the novel.

This is the "other lady in Mottstown" who - according to the account of the very young narrator of "That Will Be Fine" - had "business" with Rodney, though "just one time" (268). "Business" is the term Rodney gave his young nephew; a less naive narrator would say 'sex.' "Lady" is the term that his culture taught this youngster to use for most white women; another narrator might use a different word here too.

In Requiem for a Nun this group of "land speculators" and "traders in slaves and whiskey" follow the pioneers into Mississippi (172-73).

After Ike McCaslin moves into town in Go Down, Moses, this landlady rents him the room where he continues to live at least at the beginning of his marriage.

This man owns the land on which Goodyhay wants to build his "chapel" in The Mansion; he has "changed his mind," or, Albert speculates, had it changed for him by "the bank that holds the mortgage" or maybe "the American Legion" (303).

Following Labove's admission to the Bar in The Hamlet, these men are present at the celebration for the graduating class in a hotel dining room.

The second lawyer Ruby hires in Sanctuary to secure Lee's release from Leavenworth may work in Kansas or New York City - the narrative is unclear. She pays this second lawyer with money, "all the money I had saved" working in New York during World War I (278), and he finds a "Congressman to get [Lee] out."

The "hired lawyer" in Absalom! (245) who seems to be responsible for sending Charles Bon on a collision course with the Sutpen family is an extremely elusive figure. He may have been the "legal advisor and man of business" to Bon's mother in New Orleans in the 1850s (252) - or he may have been invented by Shreve and Quentin in a Harvard dorm room in 1910. Outside Chapter 8, the only hint of his existence is in Mr. Compson's ambiguous reference to "the shadowy figure of a legal guardian" in Bon's life (58).

Mink Snopes is defended by a court-appointed lawyer in all three volumes in the Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion. As the third novel puts it, he is "too young and eager" (47), though as the first one says, he "did what he could" to defend Mink: "talked himself frantic and at last voiceless before the grave impassivity of the jury which resembled a conclave of grown men self-delegated with the necessity . . . of listening to prattle of a licensed child" (368).

According to "Knight's Gambit," the end of Harriss' story follows a familiar pattern: "One morning your lawyer’s secretary telephones your wife long distance in Europe and says you just died sitting at your desk" (167). Although this is put indirectly, it is likely that the "lawyer" and the secretary it refers to exist.

Outside the courthouse in "A Point of Law" are "rich white lawyers talking to one another around cigars, the proud and powerful of the earth" (221). When this scene recurs in Go Down, Moses, the people in the group are referred to as "lawyers and judges and marshals" (69). In both texts, the critical perspective on these people seems shared by both Lucas and the narrative.

These "two ladies" appear in Flags in the Dust in one of the stories young Bayard brings back from the War. Apparently these women were the occasion for a fight in a bar between Bayard and an "Australian major" (124). "Ladies" is certainly being used ironically, but whether the women are simply lower class, or working prostitutes, cannot be established from the text or the context. (See also the entry in this index for Unnamed London Girl.)

Although it's a printed text, "Fool About a Horse" provides a lot of evidence that the narrator is telling rather than writing it, that Faulkner intends us to imagine it as an oral tale being performed for a live audience. Twice the narrator refers to "you," for example (123, 132), and at another point addresses his audience as "gentlemen" (128); the story's repeated use of the locutions "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" also suggests the dynamic of live performance (118, etc.).

These are "the little girls next door" with whom Little Belle plays in Flags in the Dust; they listen "with respect coldly concealed" when she tells them about the "prettier town" in which she used to live with "her real daddy" (378).

These are the employees of Priest's livery stable in addition to the five who are mentioned by name. The Reivers characterizes them as "all the Negro drivers and hostlers" and "the last lowly stall cleaner" (7). Besides the day and night foremen, apparently the only white employee is Dan Grinnup.

When in "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II, he has a kind of prevision of a young man from Yoknapatawpha whose death during the fighting overseas will be reported in the local paper, along with a photograph showing "the country-boy face" inside "the uniform still showing the creases of the quartermaster shelves" (251).

In "The Bear" and again in Go Down, Moses, the narrator points out that the "big woodpecker" heard in the woods is "called Lord-to-God by Negroes" (285, 192).

In Sanctuary this Pensacola locksmith is called in to open the bathroom door that Popeye locked on the day of his birthday party.

This "engine-driver" blows the whistle at two different points in Go Down, Moses: after stopping the train on its first run, to scare away the young bear investigating the tracks (303); and to let Ike know they are approaching the area of the hunting camp (306).

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris finds a "bill from [a] London tailor" in "his overalls in Amiens that day in the spring" (530-31). Although nothing more is said about the tailor, the sentence provides an interesting juxtaposition of the upper class clothing he wore when off duty and these "overalls." (The overalls aviators wore while flying, of course, send a very different signal than the overalls poor white and black farmers and farm hands wear in Yoknapatawpha.)

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished, what Bayard first sees as a "thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb" is quickly and chillingly recognized as the body of "an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet" (111, 177). Grumby has apparently lynched him to serve as a graphic warning to the boys: pinned to his corpse is a badly written note telling them to "Turn back" (111, 177).

In comparing Mr. Harriss to Huey Long in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison describes how the politician "made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere," probably not "even caring what the people who wrote and edited it" produced (241). Faulkner is referring to a real magazine, the Louisiana Progress.

In The Sound and the Fury this woman is mentioned by Jason when he remembers the last time he saw Lorraine in Memphis. He gives "the maid" five dollars (194). It is likely that Lorraine herself is a prostitute, and that the maid works for the brothel, not Lorraine personally. And while Jason does not specifically say the maid is black, based on the other maids in and out of brothels in Faulkner's world it is safe to assume she is.

When Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II in "Knight's Gambit," he thinks how soon newspapers delivered by the "RFD carrier" report the news of the local young men who have been killed in the fighting (251). The federal "R[ural] F[ree] D[elivery]" system brought mail directly to Americans who lived in the countryside, away from post offices.

In The Town this mail rider delivers "a dollar's worth of furnish every Saturday morning" to Grover Cleveland Winbush's mother - that is, a dollar's worth of food staples (176). (Working for the Rural Free Delivery program, mail carriers distributed mail from central post offices in towns like Jefferson to the people who lived in the surrounding countryside.)

It's likely that in The Mansion "the mail carrier" (33) and "the mail rider" (140) who deliver the mail to Frenchman's Bend are the same unnamed person. As the "rider" he delivers a "special wrote-out private message" from Hoke McCarron to Eula Varner (140). As the "carrier," he also gives Mink a ride to Jefferson, until he kicks Mink off the wagon for accusing him of stealing his five-dollar bill (33).

In her "terror and . . . ratlike desperation," the girl riding in the car that Christmas flags down in Light in August tries to defend herself against him with the threat of her "pappy and brothers" who live "right up yonder!" (285). She seems too frightened to be making them up.

In The Sound and the Fury Benjy remembers seeing "a head come out" of the room where "Father was sick" (34). "It wasn't Father," he knows - though he doesn't know his father has just died - but someone Benjy has not seen before. He seems to be taking charge when he tells T.P. to take Benjy "out of the house," which suggests he might be a doctor (34).

In "Monk" there are two unnamed men present when Monk is found holding a pistol beside a man who has been shot. This is the man who did not do the killing - though of course he becomes an accomplice when he refuses to tell the truth about who did do the killing.

This is the "second man" who is at Max's house when Joe arrives there looking for Bobbie in Light in August; Joe had "never seen" him before, but he is obviously a kind of partner in Max and Mame's prostitution racket (214). He certainly dresses the part of a gangster from this era: "His hat was tipped forward so that the shadow of the brim fell across his mouth" (214). He assists Max and Mame's hasty departure from town. He beats Joe into insensibility.

In The Sound and the Fury Quentin notices this man "filling a pail" with water from the pump where Shreve is helping him wash his face (165).

More a symbol of modernity than a character in Flags in the Dust, this man is driving badly and wearing "a woman's stocking wrapped about his head and tied beneath his hat" when he swerves into the path of Young Bayard's car, causing the accident in which Old Bayard dies (326).

The narrator of "Race at Morning" calls the man with whom his mother ran off "two years ago" a "Vicksburg roadhouse feller" (307). "Roadhouse" is a dialect term for an inn or tavern on the side of a road. This man may have worked there, or perhaps the phrase just means the roadhouse is where he and "maw" met (307).

In Intruder in the Dust we only hear the voice of this "young man" in the car that circles the Square on Sunday night: "no words, not even a shout: a squall significant and meaningless" (48).

In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses this "man in uniform" (the story, 188) or "man in a uniform cap" (the novel, 222) approaches Boon in the washroom at the station in Memphis to tell him he he can't drink there, but in both texts, after looking "at Boon's face," he decides to say nothing. The cap suggests he may be a porter, in which case he'd be a Negro, but that isn't made explicit.

This is "the second" of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust. He is wearing either a "felt hat" or a "sweat-stained panama," but is not described, except as one of the "massed duplicates" of the first man, who has "brown farmer's hands" and a "brown weathered face" (137).

This is "the fourth" of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning in Intruder in the Dust. He is wearing either a "felt hat" or a "sweat-stained panama," but is not described, except as one of the "massed duplicates" of the first man, who has "brown farmer's hands" and a "brown weathered face" (137).

In Intruder in the Dust Chick's fantasy of Miss Habersham's long drive through the counties around Yoknapatawpha climaxes when, along a lonely country road, she is confronted by "a man in his nightshirt and unlaced shoes, carrying a lantern," who asks her where she's trying to go (185).

This is the Texan with whom Anse McCallum traded fourteen rifle cartridges for two of the same kind of horses that appear in The Hamlet. The man also tried to trade four more horses for a rifle, but Anse refused.

In Absalom! Sutpen hires Wash Jones and "another man or two" to help in his post-war effort to restore Sutpen's Hundred to its pre-war status (130). Rosa identifies them as "men like Jones" (134).

Standing outside Miss Reba's brothel in Sanctuary, Virgil and Fonzo see this man get out of a taxi with a "plump blonde woman" (192). The couple's behavior outside the door causes Fonzo to suck in his breath, and Virgil to assume that they must be married, but while the narrator never says so explicitly, it's clear enough that she is a prostitute and he is one of her customers. He leaves in the taxi after dropping her off at the house.

According to the friend in "Elly," this unnamed man was killed by Paul's uncle after he had suggested that the uncle was part black - or as the friend puts it, in language that reminds us that in the racist world of the story, such a 'suggestion' is actually an accusation, that the uncle had "nigger blood" (209). The friend says she "just heard" this story (209). Elly calls it a lie. So it's possible neither the incident nor the uncle ever existed.

In Absalom!, Judith Sutpen finds a buyer for the crossroads store about a year after her father's death. The man himself never appears in the novel, but the money he pays her is used to buy at least one and possibly two of the tombstones in the Sutpen's graveyard.

In The Hamlet Ratliff asks this man in Columbia, Tennessee, about "the whereabouts of his [Ratliff's] cousin," and sells him a sewing machine (61).

In "Knight's Gambit" this man "grabs Max" to prevent his loss of control during his fencing "lesson" with Sebastian Gualdres (190).

On Eck's first day alone in the blacksmith shop in The Hamlet, this man brings in his "wagon with a broken hound" for repair (72). The "hound" in question is part of the wagon's frame, rather than a dog.

Since Sutpen believes that his "guests" will expect him to use "dogs" (rather than his slaves) to track down the escaped architect in Absalom!, this is the "man with the dogs" (178).

In The Mansion Dad mentions this "mama's boy" when he tells Mink about Goodyhay's experiences during World War II. According to him, during a landing on a Japanese-held island, this Marine got "scared or tangled up in something" while under attack and had to be rescued by Goodyhay (295).