Character Keys

The younger of the two men who discover Lonnie's body in "Hand upon the Waters" is described as "a youth, less than twenty, by his face" (67). He tells Stevens that, after the discovery, he "won't never eat another" fish (74).

In "All the Dead Pilots" these are the women who married the aviators who survived the First World War and the children who were born to them in "suburban homes almost paid out" (512).

In her account in Absalom! of the men who begin returning home from the Civil War during its final winter, Rosa refers to the men's "beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped" (126). She does not say by whom.

In Light in August this "gaunt, leatherhard woman" recognizes Joe Christmas when he comes to her door for food; when he asks "what day this is," she tells him it is Tuesday, and threatens to call her man if he doesn't go away (332).

In Sanctuary Ruby tells Temple that she once gave away a fur coat "to a woman in an alley" (62). Ruby lived in many different places, so there's no way to tell what city the alley might be in - and the text provides no other information about the woman at all.

This young woman in Flags in the Dust is described as "a slim, long thing, mostly legs apparently, with a bold red mouth and cold eyes" (384). She is Bayard's companion at the Chicago night club where he agrees to fly the experimental plane; her mouth may be bold, but she says she is afraid of him: "He'll do anything" (386).

In The Sound and the Fury, when Quentin looks around after Shreve pumps water on his face, he sees a "woman cross the door" of a nearby house, "but she didn't look out" (165).

Referred to as "another lady" in Intruder in the Dust this woman angers another woman in Frenchman's Bend, apparently by winning a baking competition (227). Her husband is locally well-known and -patronized as a maker of moonshine whiskey. The narrative's use of "lady" is clearly sarcastic.

In "Raid" and then again in The Unvanquished, this woman informs Rosa Millard that she and her party have entered Mississippi.

Among the people attending Red's funeral in Sanctuary, this "woman in a red dress" deserves to be singled out. She plays a role that recurs in Faulkner's fiction: the agent of chaos. Just as the crowd "grows quiet" listening to the orchestra play a hymn, she enters "unsteadily"; her first word is "Whoopee" (245). Later, her demand that Joe "get that damn stiff out of here and open the [crap] game," accompanied by "a burst of filthy language" (248), sets off the violence that brings the funeral literally crashing to an end.

"The Unvanquished" - both the story and the novel with that title - includes an unusual reference to "white women" and "Negroes" (149, 93). The text brings these two groups together as the people in Yoknapatawpha who are equally threatened by the existence of Grumby's gang of "Independents" - though the "white women" are "frightened" while the Negroes are "tortured" (149, 93), and that it's hard to see what place Negro women occupy in this phrasing.

Lying in the dark at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary, Temple remembers being in her dorm in college, talking with other women students as they all dressed for a dance. One of them is accused by the others of knowing too much about sex and another, "the youngest one," is made sick by the conversation (152).

The narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" displays considerable sympathy for the impact of war on women who remain at home while the men in their lives are at the front, going so far as to say that they "died" on the day war was declared (514). This group includes the "mothers and sweethearts" to whom the soldiers write letters from the war (512), and the "three day wives and three-year widows" whom the soldiers marry hastily on their way to the war (514).

In both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, these women help Mrs. Armstid cope with her circumstances by giving her materials - "string saved from packages and bits of cloth" to weave into "fancy objects" she can sell ("Lizards," 142) . In The Hamlet Mrs. Armstid calls them "the ladies in Jefferson" (360).

The female clientele at the "joint" where Linda takes Gavin in The Mansion would be more surprised by an ear trumpet than a "G string" (275). They are presumably, like Linda, women who work in the shipyard because the male population has gone to fight in the war; the reference to the "G string" as well as the noise in the "joint" is the narrative's way of implying how non-traditional, by the standards of southern gentility, is their behavior and appearance.

The "Jackson women" who in Requiem for a Nun sponsor the three-day "Kermis Ball" to raise money for a Confederate monument in 1887 may belong to an early version of a group like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (87). The term "kermis" refers to an outdoor festival.

As a group the men who work at the planing mill in Light in August observe and comment on the appearance and behavior of Joe Christmas and Joe Brown during and after the nearly three years these two outsiders work there too. On the Saturday Lena arrives in Jefferson, they see the smoke of the fire and joke about it - and about the Burdens, who they see as outsiders too.

In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War in "Knight's Gambit," Gavin Stevens refers to the combatants involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.)

In Light in August Reverend Hightower's father learns how to practice medicine during the Civil War by helping the Confederate doctors work on the "bodies of friends and foe alike" (473).

In The Town Charles mentions that "one of Captain McClendon's company was wounded in the first battle in which American troops were engaged and was back in his uniform with his wound stripe in 1918" (123). He is the first veteran of World War I to return to Jefferson. (Historically, this first battle was the Battle of Cantigny, 28 May 1918.)

The Town refers to the "Yankee raiders" who were present in Mississippi during the Civil War as the stuff of "legend" - the legend of the treasure that remains hidden where the plantation owners supposedly buried their "money and plate" to keep them safe from these invaders (8). (In earlier Yoknapatawpha fictions, the Sartorises did bury their silver and Union troops did dig it up.)

Cotton is the main crop of Yoknapatawpha, and as Flags in the Dust points out, it is raised by two very different kinds of growers - planters or croppers - on two very different kinds of land: the "other planters further up the valley" from the Sartorises own the county's rich bottom land, while the "smaller croppers" have to manage "with their tilted fields among the hills" (289).

The group of "young men" who are attracted to Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship" includes, but is by no means limited to, Owl-by-Night and Sylvester's John (363). Without exception, these would-be suitors "look away" from her once Ikkemotubbe's interest becomes known (363). They even help him in his efforts to attract her attention. At the end of the story, at least some of these "young men" leave the plantation on the steamboat with David Hogganbeck and Ikkemotubbe (380), but the text does not say how far they go.

Ratliff hypothesizes in The Mansion that one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend might "persuade" a young girl on a Wednesday night to go "off into the bushes before her paw or maw noticed she was missing" (134).

These young girls in "Hair" come "giggling down to the post office and soda fountain in the late afternoon" (141) to flirt with the young fellows.

This "youth in a battered ford" drives by the Mitchell house to pick up "the girl Frankie" (193) in Flags in the Dust. He is probably part of the young set that congregates around Belle Mitchell, and that her husband Harry describes as "a bunch of young girls and jelly-beans" (193). They seem to be just a few years younger than Horace or Bayard. (In the 1920s "jellybean" was a slang term for a young man who wore stylish clothes.)

This young man is the first to speak with the Judge in Beyond (and in "Beyond"). He died in a car accident when, late for his wedding, he was "driving fast" and "had to turn" when a "child ran into the road" (784). He assumes that the Judge is looking for his own wife, and he sympathizes with him because "It must be hell on the one who has to watch and wait for the other one he or she has grown old in marriage with, because it is so terrible to wait and watch like me, for a girl who is a maiden to you" (784).

In Quick's account of Buck Thorpe's life in Frenchman's Bend in "Tomorrow," he mentions "about a half a dozen" other young men who both fought with Thorpe and often sat on the gallery at Varner's store listening to and laughing at his talk (109). The fighting is described as violent - he beats his adversaries "unconscious from time to time by foul means and even by fair on occasion" - and the talking is described as drunken (109).

In "A Name for the City" this party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trails the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208).

Requiem for a Nun establishes the social status of Jefferson's "Female Academy" by referring to the value that a "certificate" from it has for "a young woman of North Mississippi or West Tennessee" (177).

Identified as the "son of a carpenter," this "youth" in Flags in the Dust occupies only half a paragraph of text, but his story contains a number of intriguing details (181). Despite his blue-collar origin, Belle Mitchell decides to "make a poet" of him, and sends him to New Orleans presumably as part of that process (181). Faulkner also wanted to be a poet, and went to New Orleans at the start of his writing career.

For a long time prior to 1904, at least according to Charles' account in The Town, "the young people" of Jefferson accepted the rule of their elders, but De Spain's candidacy for mayor "was the opportunity which that whole contemporary generation of young people had been waiting for, not just in Jefferson but everywhere," to change the status quo (12). As voters, this younger generation gives De Spain a landslide victory: "they had displaced the old dug-in aldermen and themselves rode into office as the city fathers on Manfred de Spain's coat-tails" (14).

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the "youngest Negro" among the hunting party performs a specific job for the white hunters: he sleeps in the tent with them, "lying on planks" beside the wood stove and tending it throughout the night (273, 333). It is also "the young[est] Negro" who brings the young woman into the tent to talk with Ike McCaslin (277, 339).

In the "Appendix, Compson:1699-1945" that Faulkner wrote in 1946, seventeen years after The Sound and the Fury was first published, he traces the Compson patrimony all the way back to Scotland in the 18th century. The 1929 novel, however, contains only a few much vaguer references to the family history; Jason thinks, for example, about the "governors and generals" in the family past (230), and Quentin thinks that "one of our forefathers was a governor and three were generals" (101). It's likely that the Compson that Mr. Compson mentions as his father's "father" (76) was the governor.

This man, the grandson of a Russian immigrant, is the first Yoknapatawphan member of the family that culminates in the V.K. Ratliff who appears in ten fictions. He arrives early enough in the county's history to be one of the men who "started Jefferson," as The Town puts it (338). He appears fairly late in the Faulkner's career, first appearing in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun as the nascent settlement's "post trader" - i.e. the person in charge of the Indian agency's trading post (206).

In Sanctuary Van is one of the gangsters who works with Popeye to get Lee's whiskey from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis. He is introduced into the narrative by his "harsh, derisive laugh" (53). He stirs up the menace at the Old Frenchman's by fighting with both Gowan and Lee over Temple, and ripping open the raincoat she is wearing, but drives away with a shipment after that.

In As I Lay Dying, Vardaman is the fifth and youngest child of Anse and Addie Bundren. He narrates ten chapters in which we follow the progression of a child's grieving process after the death of a parent. He also reveals poignant and specific examples of the poverty in which he resides. He is described by the other narrators as very small. (Vardaman is named after James K. Vardaman, who served one term each as Mississippi's Governor [1904-1908] and Senator [1913-1919]; he was a militant white supremacist whom his supporters called "The Great White Chief.")

Vardaman (and his twin brother Bilbo) are minor figures in The Town and The Hamlet, one of the three (or four, in the second novel) sons of I.O. Snopes and his second wife. Also like Bilbo, he is named for one of the segregationist politicians in modern Mississippi politics, in his case for James K. Vardaman, a very outspoken white supremacist who served as both a Governor of Mississippi and a United States Senator.

The Mansion mentions in passing that Will Varner looks "like what his father had been," a Confederate cavalrymen who served with Nathan Bedford Forrest (18).

In The Mansion Will Varner marries again twelve years after his first wife's death; his bride is a woman "of twenty-five or so" who was being "courted" by his grandson (458).

The "Vernon" who appears briefly in The Sound and the Fury is not Vernon Tull. This one is the husband of Myrtle, the Sheriff's daughter. He and Myrtle are in the Sheriff's house when Jason comes to report that he has been robbed.

Vernon Tull is a farmer in Frenchman's Bend who appears in ten different Yoknapatawpha fictions. In As I Lay Dying he narrates six of the novel's sections, which gives readers a particularly intimate connection to him; in these chapters he is one of the novel's more reliable commentators, particularly when he suggests that it might be a mistake for a person "to spend too much time thinking" (71).

The "mammy" that Vernon Tull speaks of in As I Lay Dying is his biological mother - not a black caregiver or wet nurse, as would be the case with a 'mammy' in an upper class white Yoknapatawpha family. Vernon thinks of her in reference to the hard lot women have in life: she "lived to be seventy and more" having worked everyday of her life and never having been sick (30). At the end of that life she puts on "that lace-trimmed night gown she had had for forty-five years and never wore," lays down, and tells her family "I'm tired" (30).

In The Sound and the Fury Versh Gibson is the first-born son of Roskus and Dilsey. In the earliest scenes that Benjy remembers, he works as Benjy's caretaker. Sometime before his father's death he has moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis; Dilsey blames her husband for his "bad luck talk" that "got them Memphis notions into Versh" (31). He is mentioned again, briefly, in "That Evening Sun," but otherwise does not appear again in the fictions - not even in "Appendix Compson," where his mother, sister, brother and nephew are described living in Memphis in the early 1940s.

The "single temporary clerk" who mans the desk at the Parsham hotel is named Virgil in The Reivers but not described (190).

The biography of Virgil Snopes is one of the more unusual, even among the various Snopeses. When he first appears, in Sanctuary, he provides an occasion for comedy rather than alarm, as a sexually very naive young man who, on his first trip to the big city of Memphis, mistakes a brothel for a boarding house, and the prostitutes for the surprisingly large family of the landlady, Miss Reba. His friend and fellow babe-in-the-wood Fonzo takes him to another brothel, but afterwards Virgil complains about having to pay three dollars for something "you caint tote off with you" (196).

In "Smoke," Virginius Holland is a son of Anselm (Senior) and twin brother of Anselm (Junior). The Holland brothers share "dark, identical, aquiline faces" (15), but have different temperaments. Virginius, as the twin who probably takes after his mother, tries to mediate between his brother and their father. No one has ever witnessed Virginius lose his temper. Nonetheless, even Virginius is forced by his father, eventually, to vacate the Mardis-Holland home. Hereafter, Virginius lives with his cousin Granby Dodge, whose mortgages he rather naively pays off.

The only detail about Virginius MacCallum's ancestry provided in Flags in the Dust is that he received a mule from his father when he first got married. That one detail, however, makes it likely that his father also lived in Yoknapatawpha, and that he was a small farmer.

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin led the Communist revolution against czarist rule in Russia, and was the head of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1924. Gavin mentions him in The Mansion when he refers to Communist Russia as "Lenin's frankenstein" (259).