Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
1428 | Unnamed Railroad Brakeman 2 |
This is the train brakeman in "Monk" who sees an accomplice help Bill Terrel carry a body through the bushes and "fling it under the train" (59). Although he's clearly observant, the brakeman could not tell if the victim was dead or alive at the time. |
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3095 | Unnamed Railroad Engineer 1 |
In "Knight's Gambit" this is the engineer of the train Charles Mallison is taking to preflight training; he "blows the whistle at" Charles because he is holding up the train's departure (257) . |
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3602 | Unnamed Railroad Engineer 2 |
In The Mansion Mink sees this engineer "crouched dim and high above the hissing steam" as a night train pulls into the Jefferson station (39). |
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3757 | Unnamed Railroad Engineer 3 |
In The Reivers Lucius notes that "two other men" are waiting with Sam and the conductor beside the train that is going to carry the horse to Parsham; this is the one that, according to him, "must have been the engineer" (161). |
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662 | Unnamed Railroad Flagman 1 |
The flagman who helps Doc and Mrs. Hines into the vestibule at the railroad station in Light in August is not described. |
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1234 | Unnamed Railroad Flagman 2 |
This white railroad employee's haste in getting off the train that carries Bryon Snopes' children to Jefferson in The Town is an early sign of trouble - a red flag of a different kind. |
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587 | Unnamed Railroad Mail Carrier |
The "lank, goose-necked man with a huge pistol strapped to his thigh" to whom, at the end of Flags in the Dust, Horace gives the letter he has written to Narcissa back in Jefferson (374). |
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3374 | Unnamed Railroad Owners |
In The Town, I.O. Snopes refers, resentfully, to the men who own the railroad he regularly sues as "them cold hard millionaire railroad magnits" (i.e. magnates, 260)" - because when Mannie Hait's husband was killed on the track, they awarded all of the indemnity to her. |
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1461 | Unnamed Railroad Workmen |
In The Unvanquished Bayard twice mentions the "workmen" (225) who build Colonel Sartoris' railroad line to Jefferson. He pays them on "Saturdays" (220). |
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2870 | Unnamed Random Boys |
According to "An Error in Chemistry," "generations" of these "random boys" dug into the clay-pit on Wesley Pritchel's farm, where they found "Indian and even aboriginal relics - flint arrow-heads, axes and dishes ad skulls and thigh-bones and pipes" (119). |
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663 | Unnamed Re-Enslaved Negroes |
In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished there is a large group of Negroes who sought freedom with the Union army but who are turned over to Rosa Millard because of a clerical error. They are part of a much larger group of self-emancipated slaves, to Bayard it "looks like a thousand" (52, 110), who are waiting beside the pile of confiscated chests and the pen full of confiscated mules when Rosa Millard presents the faulty requisition order that calls for "110 Negroes of both sexes" to be "repossessed" to her (54, 112). |
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3186 | Unnamed Reader |
Near the end of the third prose section of Requiem for a Nun, the narrator looks up from the story he is telling to address the reader directly as "you" (198). He identifies the reader as "a stranger, an outlander say from the East or the North or the Far West" (198), and speculates that "you" may be college educated, or "perhaps even" have an graduate degree from "Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford" (205). This second person plays a significant if rhetorical role in the way the history of Yoknapatawpha is ultimately evoked. |
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2790 | Unnamed Real Estate Speculators |
In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for causing the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the wildcat manipulators of mythical wilderness townsites" (273). |
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664 | Unnamed Reconstruction Treasurer |
In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished the "scrip dollar" that replaces Confederate money in Jefferson is "drawn on the United States Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County" (66, 199). All we see of this functionary in the story is his "neat clerk's hand[writing]" (66, 199), but presumably he is one of the Northerners working in the defeated South for one of the Reconstruction agencies. |
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3584 | Unnamed Reformist Sheriffs |
The reference to this character|these characters in The Mansion is a good example of how hard it is to create data entries for many of the inhabitants of Faulkner's imaginative world. As part of the novel's description of Jake Wattman's moonshine operation, the narrator refers to the "recurrent new reform-administration sheriff" in Yoknapatawpha who hopes to raid it (244). "Sheriff" is singular. "Recurrent," however, suggests more than one sheriff. |
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2629 | Unnamed Relatives of Lump Snopes |
Lump Snopes' mother in The Hamlet was one "of a moil of sisters and brothers" (218). 'Moil' is an archaic term that can mean 'confusion,' so the sense of this is that she was one of many children; this reading is confirmed when the narrator notes that her father was "a congenital failure" who "begot . . . more children whom he could not quite feed" (218). |
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2187 | Unnamed Relatives of Mrs. Hightower |
Hightower's wife in Light in August is the only child of "one of the ministers, the teachers" in the seminary he attends (479), but this icon represents the imaginary "family" that Hightower invents to explain his wife's periodical absences in Memphis. He tells the congregation she has gone to visit them "downstate somewhere" (63). |
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3758 | Unnamed Relatives of Young Man Sartoris Killed |
In The Reivers, the "collateral descending nephews and cousins" of the young man Colonel Sartoris killed consider Sartoris a "murderer" (73). |
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2630 | Unnamed Remote Kinswoman |
In The Hamlet the orphaned Lucy Pate was raised by this remote relation; she imbued Lucy with the "domestic skill" of a "country heritage" and the values of "constancy and devotion" (227). |
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3375 | Unnamed Resident of Oxford |
In The Town Linda Snopes asks "someone" in Oxford to tell her who was "the nicest lawyer for her to go to" about drawing up a will (343). The novel says nothing about this "someone," but since Oxford is where Faulkner lived, and the lawyer whom this person recommends is Faulkner's close friend [Phil] Stone, to whom the novel is dedicated, it's fun to wonder if Faulkner wrote himself into the novel in the role of this "someone." |
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2587 | Unnamed Residents at Mrs. Littlejohn's |
These women and (mostly) men stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's "hotel" in The Hamlet. In the Ike Snopes' narrative, Faulkner refers to them as "last night's new drummer-faces" - i.e. traveling salesmen who are staying for one night (182). While they can be classified as a group, these individuals are constantly coming and going, staying in Frenchman's Bend for variable amounts of time. Typically only men stay in Yoknapatawpha boarding houses, but in this case we know that Mrs. Armstid stays at Littlejohn's while her husband recovers. |
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2188 | Unnamed Residents of Doane's Mill |
The people of Doane's Mill in Light in August only there temporarily. A few of them, including Lucas Burch, are "young bachelors" (6), but there are also "perhaps five families" living there and working "in the mill or for it" when Lena comes to live with McKinley and his family (4). One of these people is the "foreman" who serves as Lucas Burch's pretext for abandoning Lena Grove in Doane's Mill; another may be this foreman's "cousin," or he may be a figment of Burch's imagination (19). |
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1597 | Unnamed Residents of Horace's New Town |
Flags in the Dust characterizes the residents of Horace's new 'home' town - where he is clearly in exile - negatively. They have turned a Mississippi hamlet into a prosperous but squalid town. The engine of its economy is a factory making an unspecified product from the local cypress trees, which are all being chopped down. The narrator labels this populace with a series of pejorative terms, including "brigands" and "bugs" (373). |
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3587 | Unnamed Residents of Memphis |
The various residents of Memphis who are mentioned in The Mansion include the people who, "forty-four and -five and -six years ago" (i.e. around the beginning of the 20th century), stood on the levee or "along the bluff" over the river to watch the grand river steamboats being loaded and unloaded (315). This group also includes the various crowds that Mink meets throughout the city. |
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1897 | Unnamed Residents of Memphis' Restricted District |
Sanctuary describes the people who live in "the restricted district" of Memphis through which Red's funeral procession passes in terms of their "faces," which "peer from beneath lowered shades" as it goes by (249). While it is not absolutely clear what "restricted district" refers to, the point of this passage seems to be to juxtapose two worlds in Memphis: the underworld and the respectable (but intimidated) citizenry. |
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3759 | Unnamed Residents of Rouncewell's Boarding House |
The other residents of the boarding house where Boon lives in The Reivers are described as "juries" who were in town "during court terms," "country litigants" also in town for court, and "horse- and mule-traders" (25). |
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1598 | Unnamed Residents of the Poorhouse 1 |
In Flags in the Dust Will Falls distributes the "pint of whisky" that is always part of the Thanksgiving and Christmas gift baskets given him by the Sartorises "among his ancient and homeless cronies" (301) in the county poorhouse. |
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3320 | Unnamed Residents of the Poorhouse 2 |
In The Town these poor people, who are housed by the county, know about Mr. Hait's death and have "heard that Mrs. Hait had got eight thousand dollars for him" (242). |
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3299 | Unnamed Residents of Wyott's Crossing |
None of these people are mentioned as individuals in The Town, but Gavin and Charles pay a visit to this community, where the local population was "having some kind of a squabble over a drainage tax suit" (181). |
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1237 | Unnamed Restaurant Customers 1 |
At noon in Rogers' grocery and restaurant in Flags in the Dust are two different groups of people: there are "a number of customers" in the grocery, not otherwise described, and in the restaurant "a number of men and a woman or so, mostly country people" (119). |
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665 | Unnamed Restaurant Customers 2 |
Although the narrator of "Centaur in Brass" says that "we" often saw Mrs. Snopes working in her husband's restaurant, he later suggests that most of the customers there were men from the surrounding countryside. Major Hoxey eats there, but he looks out of place "among the collarless shirts and the overalls and the grave, country-eating faces" of the other diners (151). |
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1235 | Unnamed Restaurant Customers 3 |
In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses, the other customers in the Memphis restaurant where Boon Hogganbeck and Quentin eat dinner listen to the drunken Boon's stories of Lion and Old Ben. |
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1236 | Unnamed Restaurant Customers 4 |
In The Town there are "half a dozen strangers not even kin to Snopeses by marriage" who are eating in the restaurant when Eck asks about what is really in the hamburgers he's cooking (34). |
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2056 | Unnamed Restaurant Manager 1 |
In "Centaur in Brass," after "eliminating" the partner with whom he co-owns the restaurant, Flem Snopes procures a "hired manager" to run it (150). More cipher than character, this man's presence solidifies the town's opinion that the source of Flem's success in Jefferson is his beautiful wife. (Elsewhere in the fictions, when Flem moves on from the restaurant he puts a relative, one of his many 'cousins,' in it, but there's no indication that this "manager" is Flem's kin.) |
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2791 | Unnamed Restaurant Manager 2 |
Go Down, Moses notes that it is "a woman" who manages the restaurant in Memphis where Boon and Ike stop before returning to the hunting camp (222). |
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3466 | Unnamed Restaurant Manager 3 |
In The Mansion this figure runs the restaurant at the airport in Memphis where Gavin and Ratliff stop for a coffee while they wait for Linda. |
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3187 | Unnamed Returning Confederates |
The group of Confederate veterans who are in Yoknapatawpha after they finish active service includes the soldiers who were wounded in "the battle of Jefferson" (183), the men who were cut off from other Confederate forces during the last year of the Civil War, and "the men of '65," the men who fought until the surrender at Appomattox ended the war and left them to "find themselves alien" in the land they had been fighting for after they make their way back to it (184). |
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666 | Unnamed Revenue Agent 1 |
A "revenue agent" was an employee of the U. S. Treasury Department charged with enforcing the Volstead Act prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages during the Prohibition era. In "A Bear Hunt" Uncle Ash invents such a man, telling John Basket and the other Indians (who are making moonshine) that Luke Provine was a "new revenue agent" coming to catch them making illegal whisky (78). |
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1239 | Unnamed Revenue Agent 2 |
Jack Crenshaw and this man whom The Town does not name are federal officers, "revenue field agents" (182), who "are just interested in whiskey, not photography" (183). They find the moonshine whiskey in Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio. (As officials whose task it is to make sure all alcohol production is properly taxed, 'revenuers' play a prominent role in the lore of moonshine whiskey.) |
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1238 | Unnamed Revenue Agent 3 |
The "federal revenue agent" in The Reivers who went out to Ballenbaugh's to investigate the production and sale of moonshine whiskey and never returned worked for the Treasury Department (73). The presumption is that he was killed by the moonshiners. 'Revenuers' - as they were called - were charged with enforcing laws against making and distributing illegal liquor. |
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1240 | Unnamed Revenue Officers and Deputies |
In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, the "revenue officers and deputies" whom Lucas remembers worked for the U.S. government (215, 61). Selling or buying alcohol was illegal by Mississippi state law, but in general the moonshiners who made and sold whiskey were prosecuted for evading federal tax regulations. |
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695 | Unnamed Rich Town Lady |
This is the woman in As I Lay Dying who was going to have a party for which Cora made cakes; when she calls off the party, Cora is left holding the cakes. Cora's daughter Kate describes her, with some bitterness, as one of "those rich town ladies [who] can change their minds," though we have no direct evidence about her social status (7). |
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1900 | Unnamed Rich Woman |
In Sanctuary, the woman who owns the limousine in which Popeye's grandmother leaves him becomes a kind of godmother to the child, making sure Popeye gets medical attention and often bringing him "to her home in afternoons and for holidays" (308). The narrative does not explain her motives in trying to help, but does show how they come to grief when her attempt to give him a birthday party is defeated by his violent antisocial behavior. Even after Popeye is sent to "a home for incorrigible children" (309), this woman continues to help Popeye's mother support herself (309). |
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3188 | Unnamed Riverboat Gambler |
According to the history of Jackson recounted in Requiem for a Nun, as the territory became more settled, the "steamboat gambler" replaced the keelboatman as "the river hero" (83). Since the gambler is only seen being put off the steamboat and "marooned" on a small island, the term "hero" is presumably freighted with irony (83). |
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1599 | Unnamed Robber |
One of the men Colonel Sartoris kills in Flags in the Dust is called "that robber" by Will Fall; the context suggests he was trying to rob the money Sartoris carried as he was building the railroad through Yoknapatawpha. (This character and "that other feller" Sartoris kills in this novel seem combined into the character of the unnamed "hill man" in The Unvanquished, 23.) |
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2454 | Unnamed Roman Consul |
A "consul" was the highest elected official in the Roman Republic. In Absalom! the "youthful Roman consul" traveling among "barbarian hordes which his grandfather conquered" is the symbolic figure with whom Mr. Compson compares Charles Bon, the urban sophisticate visiting the "isolated Puritan country household" of Thomas Sutpen (74). |
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1730 | Unnamed Roman Soldiers |
In his sermon in The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog refers to the Romans who hunt for the newborn Jesus as both the "po-lice" and as "sojers" (296). |
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2955 | Unnamed Roommate of Mrs. Mallison |
In Intruder in the Dust Chick's mother exchanged friendship rings with this "room-mate" when they were in college together "at Sweetbriar Virginia" (68). The woman lives in California now, and her daughter goes to Sweetbriar. |
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1241 | Unnamed Runaway Slave |
The "runaway slave" mentioned in Absalom! is one of the novel's ambiguities. In describing the "posse" that follows and arrests Sutpen, the narrator says that he "had a larger following than if he actually had been the runaway slave" (36). The use of "the" here clearly implies that a runaway slave had been mentioned earlier, but this is the text's only reference to a "runaway" (years later, during the Civil War, many of the enslaved people in Yoknapatawpha will self-emancipate by following the Union Army - but they are not pursued by any "following" whites). |
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667 | Unnamed Runaway Slaves |
Among the various kinds of jailed prisoners mentioned in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun are "runaway slaves who were captured in the settlement" (202, 6). Runaway slaves in the period before the Civil War are very rare in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The story does not say where these slaves escaped from. Instead, it notes that the "single wooden bar" across the door of the jail effectively keeps them from escaping again (202, 6). |
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3590 | Unnamed Russian Poet |
In The Mansion when Linda Snopes Kohl tells the Mallisons "about the people" in the Spanish Civil War, she includes "a Russian poet that was going to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed" (241). It's not clear whom Faulkner has in mind, if he has a real poet in mind at all, but since the other two writers Linda mentions - Hemingway and Malraux - are historical figures who were in Spain, he may mean Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet who was killed fighting for the Republicans in that war. |
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3096 | Unnamed Russian Woman |
The woman in "Knight's Gambit" with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his young nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship is so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917. |
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2455 | Unnamed Sailors |
The "men who said the ship [Sutpen sails on] was going to the West Indies" in Absalom! (197) may not have been sailors or shipmates, but the inference seems justified by the narrative fact that Sutpen "learns to be a sailor" to get himself to the Caribbean (200). |
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3189 | Unnamed Salesgirls in Memphis |
In her account of her confinement in Memphis in Requiem for a Nun, Temple mentions that the perfume and clothes Popeye bought for her were selected by "salesgirls" (112). |
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471 | Unnamed Salesman 1 |
In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, the man who attempts to sell Lucas Beauchamp a metal detector is "young, not yet thirty, with the assurance, the slightly soiled snap and dash, of his calling" (226, 76). When he falls for Lucas' story about buried treasure he ends up renting the machine from Lucas to search for the money on his own. |
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930 | Unnamed Salesman 2 |
In The Mansion this "Four-F potato chip salesman" ran off with Mrs. Goodyhay while Goodyhay himself was serving in World War II (294). |
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2189 | Unnamed Saloon Keeper |
According to the story Joanna tells about her family in Light in August, when her father married his first wife, Juana, this saloon keeper lent some mosquito netting to Nathaniel's sisters to use for making a wedding veil. |
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2631 | Unnamed Sawmill Owners and Workers |
In The Hamlet these "people" are obliquely evoked when the narrator says that the "mounds of rotting sawdust" marking the sites of the sawmills that once turned all the trees around Frenchman's Bend into lumber are the "monuments of a people's heedless greed" (190). |
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2956 | Unnamed Sawmill Workers 1 |
In Intruder in the Dust these three "youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" are all "a little drunk" in Fraser's store when Lucas Beauchamp enters (18). One of them, with "a reputation for brawling and violence," is more than a little racist: he goes after Lucas for his attitude, calling him "biggity" among other names (18, 19). (This crew is probably entirely different from the "[saw]mill crew" who are hired three years later by the Vinson and Crawford Gowrie.) |
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2957 | Unnamed Sawmill Workers 2 |
In Intruder in the Dust the crew who work in the sawmill where trees from Sudley Workitt's land are turned into lumber are "hired by the day" (219). They are almost certainly not the same men as the "three youngish white men from the crew of a nearby sawmill" (18). The two sawmills are close enough in space, but not in time: that earlier group appears three years before the Gowrie's begin harvesting Workitt's timber. |
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2958 | Unnamed School Bus Drivers |
According to Intruder in the Dust, Mondays through Fridays these "owner-contractor-operators" drive the buses that carry the children of the county to school in town, but on Saturdays and holidays they turn the buses into "pay-passenger transport," charging the country people a fare to bring them to Jefferson (132). |
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1246 | Unnamed School Children 1 |
In Flags in the Dust Bayard and Raf are passed by "small groups [of] children going home from school" for lunch at noon, and three hours later they again "walk among school children" going home at the end of the school day (119, 126). These children are described as "little girls with colored boxes and skipping ropes" and "boys in various stages of deshabille" (119). |
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1251 | Unnamed School Children 2 |
The children Addie taught before her marriage in As I Lay Dying are described only from her point of view, which is an avowedly hateful one. To her, they are represented by their "little dirty snuffling noses" (169). She takes pleasure in the thought that when she whips them for "faulting" in school, she becomes part of their "secret and selfish" lives (170). |
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669 | Unnamed School Children 3 |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant" Zilphia's grotesque childhood is set against the normal lives of other Jefferson children, "all the boys and girls" who go to school (372) and who run, for example, "with random shouts back and forth at recess" (371). As they grow up, these children "fall into inevitable pairs," courting and marrying (374). |
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1244 | Unnamed School Children 4 |
In Absalom! the one-room Virginia school that Sutpen attends "for about three months" is "full of children three or four years younger than he" - i.e. 8-10 years old - and "three or four years further advanced" (194). |
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1247 | Unnamed School Children 5 |
In "Monk" the "country school" that Monk attends as a first-grader almost certainly was a one-room schoolhouse, and his schoolmates probably ranged in age from six to sixteen or so (48). But when Monk describes his experience there, he tells Gavin that "they [the students] would all read together out of the books," and that, although he was illiterate, "it was fine . . . to hear all the voices together," including his (48). |
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1245 | Unnamed School Children 6 |
The children who go to the segregated white school in Jefferson appear several times in The Town: not in class, but coming to school (running "toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell," 214); leaving school after "the dismissal bell" has rung (216); and even as part of a marriage proposal: in the midst of their "Lilliputian flow," the much older Wallstreet Panic proposes to Miss Vaiden Wyott, his and the other children's teacher (153). |
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3003 | Unnamed School Friend |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," the one girl whom Zilphia has permission to visit and play with after school is not named or described, but after the two girls have grown up the narrative mentions her marriage (Zilphia herself makes the bride's "white gown," 374), and, after another four years, the birth of her first child, a daughter (for whom Zilphia makes dresses). |
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1249 | Unnamed School Girl 1 |
In The Sound and the Fury the unnamed little girl who walks home from school with the Burgess girl is "scared" of Benjy, though her friend assures her that "he wont hurt you" (53). |
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1250 | Unnamed School Girl 2 |
In The Sound and the Fury Miss Quentin tells Jason she needs money to pay back "a girl. I borrowed some money from a girl" (214). It seems more likely, however, that the money is for an abortion, and that this "girl" is her invention. |
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1248 | Unnamed School Girls 1 |
When the present day of his section in The Sound and the Fury Benjy reaches the gate in front of the Compson house, he thinks of it as the place "where the girls passed with their booksatchels" (51). He may simply be remembering the girls who walked past over a decade ago, or more probably is referring to a new generation of girls who walk past his house in 1928. |
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670 | Unnamed School Girls 2 |
In "Hair" various school girls, with Susan Reed among them, pass the barber shop every morning and afternoon on their way to and from school. |
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3593 | Unnamed School Principal |
This school principal in The Mansion recommends that Tug Nightingale "quit" school after he got "almost as far as the fourth grade" (202). |
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2959 | Unnamed School Superintendent |
In Intruder in the Dust this superintendent of the schools in Jefferson calls Gavin Stevens to ask whether to have school on Monday. |
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2456 | Unnamed School Teacher 1 |
The teacher at the Tidewater school Sutpen attends in Absalom! is described, tautologically, as "the kind of teacher that would be teaching a one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations" (195). Sutpen tells General Compson that the man "always looked dusty, as if he had been born and lived all his life in attics and store rooms" (195). |
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2635 | Unnamed School Teacher 2 |
In The Hamlet the "old man" who runs the Frenchman's Bend school before Labove is referred to only as "the Professor" (113). "Bibulous by nature," as an educator he has no control over the classroom and gets no respect from the students (113). |
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3380 | Unnamed School Teacher 3 |
In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott's colleague is watching when Wallstreet proposes to Miss Vaiden (153). |
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1600 | Unnamed Scottish Engineer |
In Flags in the Dust this man and Colonel Sartoris met while they were both servng in the Mexican War. After the Civil War, Sartoris brings him to Yoknapatawpha to help with the building of the railroad. He seems bemused by Jenny Du Pre's story about "Carolina" Bayard in the one scene in which he appears. |
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2855 | Unnamed Secessionists |
The unnamed secessionists with whom Charles Stuart Compson is associated in "Appendix Compson" endeavored to "secede the whole Mississippi Valley from the United States and join it to Spain" (327). The plotters are headed by General James Wilkinson, whose real-life attempts to sell land to Spain were backed by a number of prominent Kentuckians. |
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2882 | Unnamed Second Cousin of Herman Basket's Aunt |
The "second cousin" of Herman Basket's aunt is also the "grand-niece of the wife of old David Colbert" (363, 365). She does not appear in "A Courtship," but the "silver wine pitcher" she bequeathed her second cousin does (363). |
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2064 | Unnamed Second Goat Owner |
in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" the "second goat owner" lives four miles further from Varner's store than the "first" one, but he too has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes when Suratt gets to his place (139). |
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1601 | Unnamed Second Husband of Joan Heppleton |
Identified in Flags in the Dust only as "young," "American," and an "employee of the Standard oil company," he and Joan Heppleton are married for one year, presumably living in Calcutta where she meets him (321). At the end of that time they are divorced. |
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3004 | Unnamed Second Husband of Zilphia |
In the last section of "Miss Zilphia Gant," the title character returns to Jefferson after a three-year absence, "in mourning," with "a plain gold band" on her hand, "and a child" (381). She tells people about "her second marriage and her husband's death" (381), but it seems most likely that this husband is a figment of Miss Zilphia's imagination and a way to explain that child. In any case, just like the painter whom Zilphia did marry, he's never given a name, and so effectively she remains 'Miss Zilphia' - the name the narrator uses throughout. |
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3405 | Unnamed Second Wife of Zilphia's Husband |
The title character of "Miss Zilphia Gant" learns from a newspaper about this woman "in another state" who marries the man to whom she herself had been married (379); from the detective agency she hires, Zilphia learns about "the birth of a daughter and of the mother's death," a sequence that suggests this woman died in childbirth (381). Although from the agency's reports Zilphia learns enough about this woman's marriage to live "vicariously" inside it (380), what the story passes on to readers is vague and confusing. |
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3097 | Unnamed Secretary |
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). It seems likely that, even if Harriss died in a different way, the "secretary" referred to here exists, and did make this call to Mrs. Harris, who is in Europe at the time her husband dies. |
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2359 | Unnamed Secretary of De Spain |
In "Lion" Major de Spain "calls" this secretary to send a telegram to Boon (198). The secretary does not make an explicit appearance, and may be either male or female. |
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1602 | Unnamed Select Young Girls |
According to the narrator of Flags in the Dust, "each spring" a "certain few young girls" are allowed to pick flowers from the lawn at the Benbow house (164). Since they "ask permission" we can infer that they are polite (164). Their class status can be inferred from the first two adjectives that the narrator uses to describe them. |
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473 | Unnamed Self-Emancipated Mother |
In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this character is carrying "a baby, a few months old" when the party from Sartoris meets her on the road. She is escaping the plantation where she had been enslaved, hoping to reach the Union Army as it moves through Mississippi, and has fallen behind the others in group of former slaves she had been traveling with (Raid, 41). |
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474 | Unnamed Self-Emancipated Negroes 1 |
The first set of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are on the road, trying to catch up with the Union Army as it moves across Mississippi. During the day these groups are 'seen' only as "a big dust cloud" on the road (39); at night they can be heard passing by, "the feet hurrying and a kind of panting murmur" (40). |
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475 | Unnamed Self-Emancipated Negroes 2 |
The second group of former slaves who appear in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished are encountered at the river in Alabama; Drusilla, Rosa, Bayard and Ringo have to move through a huge crowd that is trying to reach the Union army on the other side. It consists of "men carrying babies, women dragging children by the hand, and women with babies, and old ones pulling themselves along with sticks" (48). They are being held away from the bridge by the Union cavalry. |
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932 | Unnamed Self-Emancipated Negroes 3 |
The story "Skirmish at Sartoris" briefly acknowledges the many enslaved people who sought freedom by emancipating themselves as the Union Army passed through Mississippi. Groups of these people, and a few of them as individuals, are described in some detail in the earlier story "Raid." The chapter "Skirmish at Sartoris" in the novel The Unvanquished revises the reference in "Skirmish" to the "Negroes" who "passed in the road [beside Hawkhurst] all night long" (59) as "the niggers passing in the road" at night (189). |
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2458 | Unnamed Self-Emancipated Negroes 4 |
When Absalom! says that Coldfield's two women servants are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66), it indirectly refers to the other enslaved men and women in Jefferson who, like almost all the slaves at Sutpen's Hundred, emancipate themselves as soon as the Union army arrives. |
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1731 | Unnamed Self-Mutilator |
In The Sound and the Fury this "man who mutilated himself" by cutting off his genitals with a "broken razor" is known to readers only through Quentin's recollection of a story Versh tells him (116). |
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2690 | Unnamed Sergeants and Officers |
In "The Tall Men," when Buddy McCallum thinks that his sons are being called up for active duty in wartime, he tells them to obey their "sergeants and officers," adding, "The Government done right by me in my day, and it will do right by you" (53). |
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3469 | Unnamed Servants at Backus Place |
The Backus estate has a whole slew of "butlers and footmen" just for their horses; Melisandre also has an extensive domestic staff of "maids and couriers and nannies and secretaries" (218). Later the "Negro houseman and one of the maids" are mentioned (399). The Mansion does not provide any more details, but it's safe to assume that, like the houseman, most of these employees are black, but given the racial categorization in Yoknapatawpha, it's likely that the 'secretaries' are not. |
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2457 | Unnamed Servants of Goodhue Coldfield |
In Absalom! the two "house servants" who work for Goodhue Coldfield (14), "both women" (42), were legally slaves when he first "came into possession of them" - "through a debt," Mr. Compson says, "not purchase" (66). He "frees" them immediately, but does not give them "their papers of freedom"; instead, he credits the "weekly wage" they earn but don't receive toward their "market value" as slaves, forcing them to work toward their freedom (66). They are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66). |
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2563 | Unnamed Servants of the Prince of Darkness |
In the fantasy of Flem in hell in The Hamlet, these minions - the text refers to them only as "they" and "them" (166) - carry messages between their master and Snopes. One of them is individualized as an "old fellow" who "used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy" (168), but none of them are described. The dialect in which they speak is one that is conventionally associated with the lower class and the rural south: Flem's soul, they say, "wasn't no big one to begin with nohow" (166). |
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3594 | Unnamed Servers at Wedding Reception |
At the wedding reception in Kohl's studio apartment in The Mansion, Ratliff notes the "two waiters dodging in and out with trays of glasses of champagne," but adds that "three or four" of the guests were "helping too" (191). |
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2272 | Unnamed Sewing Women |
These "sewing women" make the trousseau for Elly's wedding, coming to her house "daily" after the engagement to Philip is announced (214). Their race is not specified, which typically means 'white' in Faulkner's fiction, but at the same time domestic workers in the fiction are typically 'black,' so we have chosen to call these women's race unknown. |
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2120 | Unnamed Sexual Partner of Mrs. Hightower |
The man whom Mrs. Hightower meets in a Memphis hotel in Light in August is drunk when he registers under a fictitious name as her husband. It is not clear if she had ever met him on any of her earlier trips to Memphis, nor what role he might have played in her death there, but the narrative says that "he was arrested" (67). |