Character Keys

In Chapter 6 of The Mansion, Gavin Stevens refers to "the same old cynical manipulators" who had caused World War One and were now, in the late 1930s, about to start the Second World War: "the parasites - the hereditary proprietors, the farmers-general of the human dilemma" (178). The specific names he mentions in the passage include Benito Mussolini, "this one man" in Germany (Adolph Hitler), Huey Long in Louisiana and "our own Bilbo in Mississippi" as well as two racist and anti-Semitic organizations: the "K.K.K. and Silver Shirts" (179). V.K.

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, these are the "two strange white men" whom Lucas believes "came in here after dark one night three years ago and dug up twenty-two thousand dollars and got out again before anybody even seed um" (227, 78).

In Go Down, Moses various combinations of the "gaunt, malaria-ridden" men who live in the wildest parts of the big woods (210) appear in throughout the year to look at the dog named Lion while Sam is training him. Many of them feel invested in the hunt for Old Ben, since the bear often raided their crops and attacked their livestock.

Like Gene, the bootlegger they work for in Sanctuary, the two "young men" who bring additional alcohol for the funeral are described as "soiled" (246).

In Light in August someone called the "word-of-mouth messenger" brings news of Nathaniel from Colorado to the Burdens living at that time somewhere west of St. Louis (243).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun this inhabitant of the settlement is sent to the "post-office-store" to "fetch the old Carolina lock from the latest Nashville mail-pouch" (202, 6).

Sanctuary refers to these women at a double remove: Horace is at the Sartoris place when he tells the story of Lee Goodwin at the Old Frenchman place telling him about the "Mexican girls" he met while serving as a sergeant in the U.S. cavalry (109).

On the train to Oxford in Sanctuary are "three middle-aged women" who cannot find seats, because of the "gay rudeness" of the college students who pushed into the car ahead of them (169).

According to the narrator of "Ad Astra," two military mechanics were required to "shoehorn" the exceptionally large Comyn "into the cockpit of a Dolphin, like two chambermaids putting an emergency bolster into a case too large for it" (410). (The Sopwith Dolphin was one of the standard British fighter planes during the First World War.)

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun the sergeant who commanded the militia unit that captured the outlaw gang was reported by some to have "recognized one of the bandits as a deserter from his corps" - and reportedly himself recognized by "one of the bandits" as "a former follower of his, the bandit's trade" (201, 5).

Through the window of her mother's shop in "Miss Zilphia Gant" Zilphia watches her former schoolmates "fall into inevitable pairs" - i.e. begin dating - and notes that some of them end up at "the minister or the church," i.e. getting married (374). She may be thinking of an actual "minister" or using the term figuratively.

The minister of the church that Sutpen's family attends in Absalom! tries to stop Sutpen from racing his carriage to church by "speaking [to him] in the name of the women of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County" (17). This stops Sutpen from coming to church, but the racing continues for a while. Although the novel doesn't say so, it's likely that this man is an Episcopalian minister.

When Captain Gualdres and his new bride appear in Gavin Stevens' office to say good-bye at the end of "Knight's Gambit," Gualdres refers to the marriage ceremony that has just taken place by saying, "We just leave the padre" (238). Although it's not made explicit, it's extremely likely that Gualdres himself is a Catholic - but if this "padre" is a Catholic priest, this would be the only time in the Yoknapatawpha fictions that Faulkner mentions a local Catholic church.

In Light in August, this is 'the white minister in Santa Fe" - in other words, he's a Protestant from the U.S. rather than a Catholic priest from Mexico - whom Nathaniel Burden hears about. Nathaniel and Juana hope he will marry them, but as they arrive in Santa Fe they see "the dust of the stage" that was carrying him away (247). The fact that he had been there inspires them to live in Santa Fe "a couple more years," hoping he will return (247). He never does.

After Monk is arrested, he is unable to identify his supposed victim. As the narrator of "Monk" puts it, "he named as his victim (this on suggestion, prompting) several men who where alive, and even one who was present in the J.P.'s office at the time" (42). His ignorance here provides further proof of Monk's incompetence to participate in his own defense.

In both "Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the texts briefly mention the Indians who once inhabited Mississippi. As the "successors" of the aboriginal inhabitants, they turned the aboriginals' raised refuges from the water into burial mounds, which suggests their inevitable historical fate: all that is left of these Indians in the present are their words as the names of "the little towns" along the river (271, 325).

According to the account of the development of Mississippi from wilderness to civilization in Requiem for a Nun, "the politicians" follow the "land speculators" (172). The novel's history of the place that became Jackson more specifically notes the role the legislature played in creating a new state capital after the Mississippi territory achieved statehood in 1817, though it also notes, wryly, how at various later moments "the Senate" and "the House" alternately sought to change the location (85-86).

in The Hamlet Will Varner is having an ongoing affair with the "middle-fortyish wife of one of his own tenants" (156).

In Requiem for a Nun this 20th-century "planter" is a generic figure whose fate suggests the kinds of changes that have occurred in Yoknapatawpha: where once he had slaves and then tenants to work his fields, after his "son" is drafted in the second World War it is the planter himself who does that, riding "on the seat of his tractor" (193).

One of the more exotic characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, this "Mohammedan" prince has a "European mistress" in Requiem for a Nun; he never appears in the novel, but is mentioned as the man who built the "hideway" in the south of France where Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens take their honeymoon (122).

The "regular customers" for Lucas Beauchamp's moonshine - whom he thinks of in "A Point of Law" as his "established clientele" (213-14) and in Go Down, Moses as his "established trade" (35) - are not described in either text. It can safely be assumed from the other fictions that all are male. And given the way moonshine is bought and consumed throughout Faulkner's fiction, it is probably safe to assume they are of both races and from various levels of Yoknapatawpha society.

Intruder in the Dust includes the story of the Frenchman's Bend man who has been making moonshine whiskey "for years bothering nobody," until his wife and another local woman start feuding (227).

This is the mother whom Judge Allison meets in "Beyond," a young woman who wears "a plain, brushed, worn cape" with "a plain, bright, pleasant face" and "a pleasant, tranquil voice" (791). When she first appears she is "carrying a child" (791), but she does not provide any details about her previous existence. She treats her son "with an air fond and unconcerned," soothing him when he fusses and doling out toys to him (793). Ingersoll tells the judge to "Follow her" (791).

Boon Hogganbeck's "mother's mother" was a "Chickasaw woman" (91). Boon and his Chickasaw grandmother are mentioned in a number of Faulkner texts, but the only mention of his mother in the fictions is the passing acknowledgment paid her in this phrase in Intruder in the Dust. From the other texts, however, we can safely infer that she - and her never mentioned father, and Boon's never mentioned father - were white.

Elly's mother lives with her, her husband and especially her mother-in-law in a "biggish house" in Jefferson (208). She is a negligible figure in her daughter's life, though it is her suggestion that Elly drive to Mills City to pick up that mother-in-law that precipitates the story's violent climax.

The "young woman" in "Red Leaves" whom Doom seduces in New Orleans is first described as the "daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family" (318). She is mainly white, but when her son Issetibbeha remembers her a few pages later, the narrative explicitly refers to "her Negro blood" (321). Given the casualness of the later reference, Faulkner might have expected his readers to read the designation "West Indian" as code for racial mixing in the first description, though that's by no means certain.

In "Red Leaves," "Moketubbe's mother" is introduced as a "comely girl" (320) whom Issetibbeha marries after seeing her at work in a melon patch. She is described as having "broad, solid thighs," a "sound back" and a "serene face" (321). Her race is not specified. Our identification of her as "Black" and "Enslaved" (rather than "Indian" and "Tribal Member") is based on her clothing (a "shift") and the fact that she is engaged in field labor, along with the way seeing her reminds Issetibbeha of his "own mother," with "her Negro blood" (321). But this is an interpretive choice.

This "woman with hard, bright, metallic city hair and a hard, blonde, city face" comes to Yoknapatawpha in "Monk" when Mrs. Odlethrop's son returns home after a long absence (43). The word "city" in that description suggests she is from Memphis, or someplace similar, but that is not made clear in the story. Nor can we say for sure that she is Monk's mother, though the fact that the infant Monk is seen at the Odlethrops' shortly after she and the son leave - for unknown reasons, though perhaps because Mrs.

Mrs. Harriss's mother is referred to as her husband’s "own life’s one monogamous love" (150). (Based on other Yoknapatawpha fictions, this woman is Mrs. Backus, but that name is not used in "Knight's Gambit.")

The unnamed twelve-year-old narrator of "Race at Morning" calls his mother "maw" (307). She abandons him and his father two years before the story takes place, when she "took off in the middle of the night with a durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake without even waiting to cook breakfast" for her son (308).

Never named, the woman in Sanctuary who gave birth to Popeye is "the daughter of a boarding house keeper" in Pensacola (302-03). She is already pregnant with him, and carrying the disease (probably syphilis) that will leave her an "invalid" (309), when she marries Popeye's father, a professional strike-breaker whom she has only known for 3 days when they decide to marry. They were married less than 3 weeks when he takes off, leaving her to raise the child who is born with the same disease.

In Absalom! Sutpen tells General Compson that his first father-in-law's wife "had been a Spaniard" (203); much later in the novel he tells his son Henry that in fact, as he discovered after marrying, she "was part negro" (283). The Chronology at the end of the novel treats her mixed racial identity as a fact - "Sutpen learns his wife has negro blood" (305) - but the actual novel does not independently confirm it. This woman never appears in the novel herself, apparently having died before Sutpen gets involved with her husband and daughter.

Neither Buddy's wife nor her parents appear directly in "The Tall Men." Mr. Gombault notes that Buddy's wife isn't buried in the McCallum family graveyard: "Buddy's wife wanted to be buried with her folks. I reckon she would have been right lonesome up here with just McCallums" (60).

In As I Lay Dying, the marshal of Mottson argues with Anse to get him to move the stinking coffin out of town.

After Joe Christmas' arrest in Light in August, the unnamed sheriff of the county that includes Mottstown encourages the crowd outside the jail to respect the law.

After Rodney's death, which the young narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is still ignorant of, he sees these "ladies with shawls over their heads" coming to offer their condolences to the family.

When she imagines herself dead as a way to escape Popeye's sexual assault in Sanctuary, Temple's fantasy includes "all the people sitting around the coffin, saying Dont she look sweet" (219).

In Sanctuary two of the people in attendance at Red's funeral - "middle-aged women" (246) - are described "weeping quietly," but most seem mainly interested in the free alcohol Gene is providing and in getting the flowers off the crap table so that gambling can resume. They include men in both "dark suits" and "the light, bright shades of spring," and women, the "younger ones" wearing "bright colors" and the older ones "in sober gray and black and navy blue, and glittering with diamonds" (243).

When Light in August describes Christmas walking in Jefferson around 9 p.m. it says that if he'd taken the same route at 7 p.m. he "would have passed people, white and black, going toward the square and the picture show" (i.e. the movies, 114). This is a rare instance in the fictions of people of both races doing the same thing - though of course there were separate "White" and "Colored" seating areas inside the theater.

In The Town these "folks are still going home from the second running of the picture show" when they see two strange men in Christian's drugstore (162).

According to The Town, I.O. Snopes sells mules to "farmers and widows and orphans black and white, for whatever he could get, down to some last irreducible figure" (245).

While chasing his niece and his money in the last section of The Sound and the Fury, Jason imagines a scene in which he commandeers someone's team of mules to pull his car from the imagined mud that is trying to stop his pursuit. The team's "owner" whom he strikes down is, of course, like the whole episode, his own invention (306).

While "Lawyer" Stevens and Sheriff Hampton seem to take charge of the events in Jefferson in Intruder in the Dust, the narrative does remind readers that the town and county have the usual elected officials. The out-of-town architect who wants to buy the jail door takes his request to "the mayor and the alderman and at last the board of supervisors" (54). And Hampton does say he got the mayor's permission to give the night marshal Monday night off (216).

If you believe what Bill Terrel says in "Monk," the man he killed seduced his daughter. But the daughter denies this, Terrel's story is not believed by the jury that convicts him of "Manslaughter," and the rest of Faulkner's story supports the idea that it is a lie (55). On the other hand, who this victim really was, or why Terrel killed him - that remains a mystery.

According to Sheriff Hampton in Intruder in the Dust, Jake Montgomery's Tennessee roadhouse was closed by the police after "a man went and got killed in it one night two-three years ago" (112-13).

These men and women in "Shall Not Perish" visit the museum in Jefferson "without charge" (111). The narrator says they are "people like us from Frenchman's Bend," by which he seems to mean poor farmers and their families, from "our county or beyond our state too" (111).

While never seen nor (unlike the band the traveling show brings to Jefferson) even heard, the performer who "can play a tune on a saw" (15) is mentioned or (when Luster spends so much of Easter trying to imitate him) alluded to in all four sections of The Sound and the Fury. He is perhaps the novel's figure of the artist.

The narrator in "A Courtship" who tells the story of Ikkemotubbe, David Hogganbeck and Herman Basket's sister tells us very little about himself. It's highly likely that he is male, though that is not definitively said. He is an Indian: his use of "us" to refer to the Chickasaws and his reference to "my father's house" (369) locate him inside Issetibbeha's tribe, as does his diction, for example when he calls the helmsman on the steamboat the "boy slave who turned the wheel" (366) or uses "moons and moons" as a temporal reference (377).

The unnamed narrator of "Ad Astra" served during World War I as an American flying in a British squadron (408). In his only explicit references to himself, he talks about the "pleasant" but tense feeling that precedes the moment "in combat" when "you know something is about to happen" (421). Until the last pages of the story he remains a silent witness to the events, but he reports what the others say and do clearly and without bias.