Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
1707 | Unnamed Men Who Assist Anse |
In The Sound and the Fury these two men help break up Julio's attack on Quentin, and then keep an eye on Julio during the walk to the Squire who will decide Quentin's case. They may be the marshal's assistants, or simply two bystanders who are pulled into the story by Julio's attack on and accusation against Quentin. |
|
2827 | Unnamed Men Who Borrow Money |
The narrator on "Shall Not Perish" speculates about "the men who would come to Major de Spain after bank-hours or on Sunday to ask to have a note extended" (106-107). |
|
3794 | Unnamed Men Who Caused the World Wars |
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. |
|
2134 | Unnamed Men Who Chase Christmas |
After Joe Christmas escapes from the deputy outside the courthouse, his pursuers include "three men" in a car. They follow Christmas and Grimm into Hightower's house and watch as Grimm castrates Christmas. One of them vomits at the sight. The narrator of Light in August says that these men "are not to lose it," will never be able to forget what they saw (465). |
|
949 | Unnamed Men Who Find Treasure |
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). |
|
2430 | Unnamed Men Who Hunt Architect |
When in Absalom! Sutpen realizes that the French architect has run away, he sends word to General Compson "and some others" in town; these "others" are the "guests" who are invited to witness or take part in the "race" to recapture the runaway, as if it were an entertainment (177, 178, 206). Compson brings champagne, "and some of the others brought whiskey" (178). They are wealthy enough to ride horses. In Sutpen's mind, these men will expect him to track the man with dogs (178). |
|
2776 | Unnamed Men Who Live in the Big Bottom |
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. |
|
481 | Unnamed Men Who Work with Ab Snopes |
In the short story "The Unvanquished" and again in the novel The Unvanquished, where the short story is re-titled "Riposte in Tertio," these two men help Ab Snopes as part of Granny Millard's campaign against the Union troops in Mississippi - which is to say, they help Ab take the mules Granny steals to Memphis, where they can be sold back to the Union Army. |
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1846 | Unnamed Men with Gene |
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). |
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2605 | Unnamed Merchant|Installment People |
This is "the merchant" in The Hamlet from whom Houston bought furniture on an installment plan for his new life with his new wife - though the character is unstable: a paragraph later the narrative refers to "the installment people" who don't want "to take the furniture back," as Houston requests, after that new wife dies (239). Presumably the merchant and the people are essentially the same. |
|
1377 | Unnamed Messenger 1 |
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). |
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1378 | Unnamed Messenger 2 |
In Light in August a second "word-of-mouth messenger" brings news of Nathaniel Burden from Old Mexico to the Burdens living somewhere west of St. Louis in 1863. The messenger himself is "going east to Indianny for a spell" (245), so presumably that is where he is from. |
|
598 | Unnamed Messenger 3 |
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). |
|
1130 | Unnamed Messenger 4 |
On his way to jail in The Mansion Mink imagines that Flem has sent a messenger to reach out to him and help him somehow. |
|
1868 | Unnamed Mexican Girls |
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). |
|
2135 | Unnamed Mexican Man |
In Light in August this man is killed by Nathaniel Burden, after claiming that Nathaniel stole his horse. The messenger who reports this event to Nathaniel's family says that "Folks claim the Mexican never owned no horse" (244). |
|
1869 | Unnamed Middle-Aged Women |
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). |
|
2673 | Unnamed Midwife |
The local midwife in "Tomorrow" who delivers the child that grows up to be Buck Thorpe knows that his mother was too ill to "get up from that mattress" (105). |
|
1966 | Unnamed Military Mechanics |
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.) |
|
3172 | Unnamed Militia Band |
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these militia men are "part of a general muster at the settlement . . . for a Fourth of July barbeque" (201, 5). Like stereotypical frontiersmen, they are soon "ejected" from town for their "drunken brawling" (201, 5-6). After running into and capturing a gang of bandits, they return to the settlement in hopes of claiming a reward; instead, they are eventually locked up with the outlaws they had captured. |
|
672 | Unnamed Militia Sergeant |
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). |
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599 | Unnamed Minister 1 |
In "All the Dead Pilots" the undescribed minister who officiated at Sartoris' funeral may have been a military chaplain. |
|
1132 | Unnamed Minister 2 |
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. |
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1134 | Unnamed Minister 3 |
In Light in August this is the fellow minister who takes the hymn book from Hightower and conducts Mrs. Hightower's funeral. |
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1133 | Unnamed Minister 4 |
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. |
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1135 | Unnamed Minister 5 |
In The Unvanquished Bayard notes that Mrs. Habersham "took Father and Drusilla to the minister herself and saw that they were married" (220), but says nothing more about the minister himself. |
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1131 | Unnamed Minister 6 |
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. |
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3324 | Unnamed Minister in Frenchman's Bend |
The minister who leads Eula's memorial service in Jefferson in The Town is "the old Methodist minister who had christened her thirty-eight years ago" in Frenchman's Bend; he is described as "an old man who had been a preacher all his adult life but would have for the rest of it the warped back and the wrenched bitter hands of a dirt farmer" (360). He is mentioned again in The Mansion, where Ratliff calls him "the old Methodist preacher that had baptised Eula" (163). |
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2190 | Unnamed Minister in Santa Fe |
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. |
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2136 | Unnamed Ministers at the Seminary |
The men who are Hightower's teachers at the seminary in Light in August are also Presbyterian ministers. Hightower's decision to marry is based in part on the fact that "most of the faculty were married" (480). |
|
2501 | Unnamed Misidentified Victims |
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. |
|
1708 | Unnamed Missionary to China |
In The Sound and the Fury Jason mentions this "Chinese missionary" whom the rich Jefferson merchant "bought" for "five thousand dollars a year," in order to ease his conscience (194). The reference is ambiguous enough to possibly mean the missionary himself is 'Chinese' or perhaps Chinese-American, but it is far more likely that he is a white American on a religious mission to China. |
|
2723 | Unnamed Mississippi Indians 1 |
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). |
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3173 | Unnamed Mississippi Indians 2 |
Requiem for a Nun lists five Indian tribes as the groups who "dispossessed" the aboriginal mound builders in Mississippi: the Algonquian, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Natchez and the Pascagoula (81). The Algonquian language group was large and widespread, but found almost entirely in Canada and nowhere near Mississippi, so their presence on the list is surprising. |
|
3174 | Unnamed Mississippi Legislators 1 |
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). |
|
3586 | Unnamed Mississippi Legislators 2 |
These 121 Mississippi Representatives are the political colleagues of Clarence Snopes in The Mansion. With him included there are 122 total members of the House, which is a historically accurate number. Clarence addresses these men soon after assuming office. |
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2646 | Unnamed Mistress of Will Varner |
in The Hamlet Will Varner is having an ongoing affair with the "middle-fortyish wife of one of his own tenants" (156). |
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3793 | Unnamed Modern Aryans |
In a confused passage in The Mansion that evokes a number of stereotypes, mostly involving national types (like "German," 146), Gavin Stevens asserts the idea of "the modern virile northern Aryan" to explain why he decided to participate in the First World War by serving on the allied side (146). According to Gavin's idea, it was "the old Aryan stock" as embodied in the English that "established America" (146). |
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3183 | Unnamed Modern Planter |
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). |
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3743 | Unnamed Modern Women |
In The Reivers Lucius compares the "females" of his childhood to the ones alive "now" (191). According to what he has heard, modern women not only "run in and out of gentlemen's rooms in hotels" - they do so wearing "the shorts or scanties" that seem to be the uniform of "their fight for freedom" (191). |
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3175 | Unnamed Mohammedan Prince |
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). |
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2137 | Unnamed Moonshine Buyers 1 |
In Light in August Joe Christmas and Joe Brown make enough money selling illegal whiskey in Jefferson to quit their jobs at the planing mill and buy a car. The narrative refers several times to the men who buy from them, but the closest it ever comes to individualizing these customers is when it says that the "young men and even boys" in town all know that they can purchase whiskey "from Brown almost on sight" (46). |
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1315 | Unnamed Moonshine Buyers 2 |
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. |
|
600 | Unnamed Moonshiner 1 |
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the moonshiner from whom Rider buys whiskey is described as "an unshaven white man" standing at the door of "a hut, a hovel" in the river swamp (246, 140). He is repeatedly referred to as "the white man" during the exchange with Rider. But he expresses concern about Rider's state of mind, and tries to "give" him a pint if Rider will give back the gallon he just bought for "four silver dollars" (246, 140). |
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1136 | Unnamed Moonshiner 2 |
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). |
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1623 | Unnamed Morale Worker |
This is the woman whom Caspey calls "one of dese army upliftin' ladies" when he describes meeting her on an abandoned battle field in Flags in the Dust (61). During the War, women volunteered to give aid and comfort to the American doughboys through a variety of organizations, including the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the YMCA. All we are told about this woman is that she was looking for souvenirs, "German bayonets and belt-buckles" (61). |
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2244 | Unnamed Mother in Beyond |
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). |
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1559 | Unnamed Mother of Belle and Joan |
Mentioned only briefly in Flags in the Dust, in the summary account of Joan Heppleton's life, the woman who is both her and Belle Mitchell's mother is identified by her "ready tearful uncomplaint" (322). |
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2942 | Unnamed Mother of Boon Hogganbeck |
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. |
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262 | Unnamed Mother of Clytemnestra |
According to Mr. Compson in Absalom! Clytemnestra's mother is one of the two women among the twenty slaves that Sutpen brought with him to Yoknapatawpha. The novel does not describe her, nor try to represent the relationship between her and Sutpen, the white man who claims to own her. |
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2265 | Unnamed Mother of Elly |
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. |
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2943 | Unnamed Mother of Football Player |
In Intruder in the Dust this "mother" is mentioned only as one possible reason why a starting player on the Jefferson high school football team won't play in the game against Mottstown (121). |
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119 | Unnamed Mother of Issetibbeha |
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. |
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3413 | Unnamed Mother of Luther Biglin |
Luther Biglin's mother in The Mansion is the "sister of the rural political boss whose iron hand ruled one of the county divisions" (448). This connection helps explain how Luther got the job of county jailer. |
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121 | Unnamed Mother of Moketubbe |
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. |
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1298 | Unnamed Mother of Molly Worsham Beauchamp |
In Go Down, Moses, Miss Worsham tells Gavin Stevens that the "parents" of Mollie Beauchamp "belonged to my grandfather," which means of course that they were enslaved (357). In Intruder in the Dust - where Mollie is named Molly again, Miss Worsham is named Miss Habersham, and Molly's father is not mentioned - the reference to Molly's mother adds the detail that both Molly and Miss Habersham "suckled at Molly's mother's breast" (85). |
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2484 | Unnamed Mother of Monk |
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. |
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440 | Unnamed Mother of Mrs. Grier |
Mrs. Res Grier mentions her mother in both "Two Soldiers" and "Shall Not Perish." Like her mother, she says, whose son was wounded in France in the first World War, she cannot understand why the sons of mothers (including her own Pete) have to fight in wars. |
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3638 | Unnamed Mother of Mrs. Harriss |
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.") |
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2340 | Unnamed Mother of Narrator 1 |
The "Mamma" of the narrator of "Uncle Willy" appears in the text only as the person Mrs. Merridew phones to complain about Willy's new wife (236). Her son does not describe her own reaction to Mrs. Merridew's rage. |
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3212 | Unnamed Mother of Narrator 2 |
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). |
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176 | Unnamed Mother of Ned McCaslin |
In The Reivers, the unnamed mother of Ned McCaslin is "the natural [i.e. illegitimate] daughter" of Lucius McCaslin and one of his female slaves (31). In Go Down, Moses the slave with whom McCaslin has a daughter is named Eunice, and their daughter is Tomasina; from her descends the Beauchamp side of the McCaslin family. These Beauchamps are a major part of the earlier novel's story, and some of them re-appear in The Reivers. |
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1774 | Unnamed Mother of Popeye |
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. |
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2675 | Unnamed Mother of Stonewall Jackson Fentry |
All that the readers of "Tomorrow" learn about Mrs. G.A. Fentry is that, like her mother-in-law before her, she died before she was forty. According to Pruitt, it was "that place," the poor Fentry farm on which she lived and the impoverished life she led there, that killed her (96). |
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2432 | Unnamed Mother of Sutpen's First Wife |
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. |
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2606 | Unnamed Mother of Will Varner |
In The Hamlet Will Varner mentions that his "mammy" once heard an old woman explain that the way a pregnant woman can make sure she has a girl is to "show her belly to the full moon" (339). "Mammy" often implies a black woman, but in this case it seems more likely that Will is talking about his own mother. (The word occurs in a passage thick with his rural vernacular: "I mind me when" "done married and moved," "passel of boys," etc.; 339.) |
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2688 | Unnamed Mother-in-Law of Buddy McCallum |
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). |
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2607 | Unnamed Mother-in-Law of Mink Snopes |
In The Hamlet the mother of the woman who marries Mink Snopes died giving birth to her only child. |
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1340 | Unnamed Mottson Marshal |
In As I Lay Dying, the marshal of Mottson argues with Anse to get him to move the stinking coffin out of town. |
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1711 | Unnamed Mottson Pedestrians |
While Jason waits in his car outside the locked Mottson drug store in The Sound and the Fury, he watches passerbys and reflects on their perspectives about him: "Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life raveled out about him like a wornout sock, and went on" (313). |
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787 | Unnamed Mottstown Sheriff 1 |
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. |
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785 | Unnamed Mottstown Sheriff 2 |
The unnamed sheriff of the county that includes Mottstown in "That Will Be Fine" is going to question Uncle Rodney about the bond theft and forgery. He later watches for Uncle Rodney's attempt to abscond with Grandpa's neighbor's wife and "all the jewelry" (281). |
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2319 | Unnamed Mottstown Women |
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. |
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2433 | Unnamed Mountain People |
The "few other people" who live near the Sutpens in the mountains of western Virginia are described in Absalom! as "living in log cabins boiling with children," "men and grown boys who hunted," and "women and older girls" who "cook" (179). |
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1849 | Unnamed Mourners |
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). |
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2245 | Unnamed Mourners at Judge's Funeral |
The people at the Judge's funeral in "Beyond" are not directly mentioned, but their presence can be presumed by the reference to "the line of motor cars at his gate" (797). |
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1870 | Unnamed Mourners at Red's Funeral |
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). |
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601 | Unnamed Movie-Goers 1 |
In "Dry September" the young audience in the movie theater where Minnie Cooper and her friends go is described as "scented and sibilant in the half dark, their paired backs in silhouette delicate and sleek, their slim, quick bodies awkward, divinely young" (181). |
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1140 | Unnamed Movie-Goers 2 |
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. |
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1139 | Unnamed Movie-Goers 3 |
Sitting in the Square in Intruder in the Dust, Chick watches the "crowd" of movie-goers exit the theater, "blinking into the light," "bringing back into the shabby earth a fading remnant of the heart's celluloid and derring dream" (33). |
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1141 | Unnamed Movie-Goers 4 |
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). |
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3567 | Unnamed Movie-Goers 5 |
In his wanderings around Jefferson at the start of The Mansion Mink notices "the couples, young men and girls and old people and children," "all moving in one direction" (36). Their destination is the town's earliest version of the movies - the "Airdome" (36). |
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3354 | Unnamed Mule Buyers |
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). |
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2294 | Unnamed Mule Drovers |
In "Mule in the Yard" these men help I.O. Snopes 'drive' (i.e. move - no vehicle is involved) his newly purchased mules from the railroad station past the Hait house to his pasture. |
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1687 | Unnamed Mule Team Owner |
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). |
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602 | Unnamed Municipal Officials 1 |
In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, various municipal officials stop by Gavin Stevens' office in his absence. The narrator identifies them only as "officials from the city hall and justices of the peace and bailiffs" from various parts of Yoknapatawpha (263, 360). |
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1142 | Unnamed Municipal Officials 2 |
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). |
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2502 | Unnamed Murder Victim 1 |
According to the narrator of "Monk," the murder victim at the gas station where Monk works and lives is "no loss to anyone" (46). And that is all the story says about him. |
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2503 | Unnamed Murder Victim 2 |
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. |
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794 | Unnamed Murdered Deputy |
Chapter 31 of Sanctuary begins with Popeye being arrested (wrongly) "for the murder of a policeman in a small Alabama town" (302). Later, after he has been (wrongly) convicted for the crime, the novel provides one detail about the victim: according to Popeye's jailer, "folks here says that deppity invited killing" for the "two-three mean things folks knows about" (313). |
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2944 | Unnamed Murdered Man |
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). |
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3505 | Unnamed Murderer |
In The Mansion Mink imagines that someone else will kill Flem before he can. |
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2829 | Unnamed Museum Visitors |
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). |
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1569 | Unnamed Music Teacher |
In Flags in the Dust Little Belle Mitchell's piano teacher, who assists her during her recital, runs closely to type: "a thin, passionate spinster with cold thwarted eyes behind nose glasses" (200). |
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1712 | Unnamed Musical Saw Player |
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. |
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603 | Unnamed Narrator 1 |
"A Rose for Emily" is a first-person narrative, but the identity of its narrator is very hard to establish. It seems very safe to say that his race is "White" - note, for example, how consistently he refers to Tobe as "the Negro" (120, 121 etc.). We also assume the narrator is male; at times the differing actions and motives of "the men" and "the women" are narrated with equal detachment (119, etc.), but phrases like "only a woman could have believed" mayor Sartoris' fiction about the taxes make it seem more likely that narrator is a man. |
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1151 | Unnamed Narrator 10 |
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). |
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1148 | Unnamed Narrator 11 |
The twelve-year-old boy who narrates "Race at Morning" is the child of a share-cropping couple. He is devoted to Mister Ernest, the landlord who adopted him at age ten after both his parents abandoned him. He is earnest and hard-working, and passionate about hunting, but also illiterate - though as Will Legate notes, he "knows every cuss word in the dictionary, every poker hand in the deck and every whisky label in the distillery" (296). |
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1143 | Unnamed Narrator 2 |
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. |
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1147 | Unnamed Narrator 3 |
The narrator of "Hair" never gives us his name, but we do know he has a daughter and that he's from a town that's similar to the "North Mississippi and Alabama" (137) towns he visits as a salesman. After leaving his position as a bookkeeper for a bank, he took to the road selling a "line of work shirts and overalls" (137). He is curious about people, and what little he reveals about his opinions of their behavior suggests misogynistic thinking: "all women are born with the badness in them" (133). |