Character Keys

Born John Joseph Killion in Greenpoint, New York, he took the professional name of "Jake Kilrain" to protect his parents from the embarrassment of his questionable career as a prize fighter. He lost the heavy-weight championship to John L. Sullivan in a bare-knuckle fight that went 75 rounds in Richbourg, Mississippi, on August 7, 1889.

In The Mansion Wattleg is a moonshiner who sells his whisky out of a "little unpainted store" near Wylie's Crossing that he can take apart and move to avoid the law (244).

"Vardaman" is mentioned twice in Flags in the Dust, once by Aunt Jenny and once by Deacon Rogers (62, 122). Both of them express admiration for his character and politics. Known as "The Great White Chief," James K. Vardaman served one term as Governor of Mississippi (1904-1908) and one term in the United States Senate (1913-1919). A militant segregationist, he vowed to lynch every African American in the state if that ever became necessary. He opposed U.S.

The third Compson named Jason and the father of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy was born around the time the South was defeated in the Civil War and as a result, his story suggests, grew up to become what Faulkner's "Appendix Compson" calls a "cultured dipsomaniac" (335). His story, however, is never directly told. Instead, his character is defined chiefly by his role in the life and death of his oldest son, Quentin. "Father said" is a phrase that sounds again and again from the first to the penultimate page of Quentin's section in The Sound and the Fury (76, 178).

General Jason Compson, the grandfather of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy, appears in thirteen different texts, the most of any Compson. Given Faulkner's willingness to sacrifice consistency to the needs of a particular story, it's not surprising that it's hard to pull all his appearances into one cumulative biography.

Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America for the duration of the Civil War. Although he was born in Kentucky and lived briefly in Louisiana, at the time he was elected to lead the South he had spent almost forty years in Mississippi, and had represented the state in Washington in both the House and the Senate for many years. Despite this Mississippi connection, however, he is mentioned only four times in the fictions, and curiously, mostly by non-Southerners.

There are two characters named "Jesus" in the fictions. This Jesus, Nancy's husband, is described in "That Evening Sun" as "a short black man, with a razor scar down his face." He has been missing since he threatened Nancy in the kitchen of the Compson house, saying that he might kill the white man responsible for her pregnancy ("I can cut down the vine it did come off of," 292). Nancy believes that Jesus went to Memphis but has returned to do her harm. While Jesus directly appears only once, the story is haunted by the possibility of his return.

In "Fool about a Horse," this Jim is Pat Stamper's assistant in the horse- and mule-trading business. We hear him called "Jim" only once, by Stamper (130); the narrator refers to him instead with variations of "that nigger" (127, etc.) But it's important to note that the narrator's vocabulary tells us a lot about the racist world in which the narrator has grown up, but nothing about the man named Jim. In addition to that word, the narrator calls him a "magician" and "a artist" (123, 127). Jim displays a genius for "doctoring" horses and mules to disguise their flaws.

"Mr Jim Avant from Hickory Flat,” one of the four well-known dog breeders and trainers mentioned in The Reivers, is almost certainly intended to be J.M. (James Monroe) Avent was a well-known owner and trainer of pedigreed bird dogs. He co-established the National Bird Dog Championship and in 1930. Time magazine called him the "most celebrated of contemporary handlers," citing too his nickname the "Fox of Hickory Valley," his home in Tennessee. Faulkner either misremembered or misspelled his name in this novel, and he also relocated hi m - perhaps on purpose.

In Absalom! Jim Bond is the child of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and the "inescapably negro" woman he married (168). He is also the great-grandson and last living descendant of Thomas Sutpen, "the scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" (296). He is described as "hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored" (173) and again as "a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face" (296).

In other Yoknapatawpha fictions Gavin Stevens is the elected "County Attorney" who prosecutes even murder cases, but in Intruder in the Dust Gavin says that Lucas' trial will be handled by a "District Attorney": "it's the District Attorney that'll hang you or send you to [prison]," he warns Lucas (58), and this D.A. doesn't live "within fifty miles of Yoknapatawpha" (63). He is presumably referring to the man he later identifies by name as Jim Halladay, who works out of a town or city called Harrisburg, which is "sixty miles" from Jefferson (107).

In "The Old People," Jimbo is a servant of Major de Spain's who accompanies the white men on their yearly hunting trips into the big woods. He helps Uncle Ash with the cooking and with the dogs. (When Faulkner re-tells the events of the short story in Go Down, Moses, Jimbo's character is replaced by "Tennie's Jim," who has a place on the McCaslin family tree.)

In Flags in the Dust, Joan is Belle Mitchell's younger sister who comes to Jefferson while Belle is away getting a divorce, to see what Horace Benbow is like; during the week she spends in town she and Horace have an affair. By the time she gets to Jefferson she has had a wide experience, both of the world (having lived in Hawaii, Australia and India, among other unnamed "random points half the world apart," 322) and of men (having been married a least twice and lived with at least one other man).

Job Wylie was probably born a slave, owned by the man he still calls "Marse Hoke Christian" (233). He has worked in the Christian family drugstore ever since it opened "in eighteen-fifty-something," and in the present also works as Willy Christian's cook and housekeeper (226). Job is very loyal to the Christian family, though according to the narrator of "Uncle Willy" he also embodies Jefferson's "timid clinging to dull and rule-ridden-breathing" (239).

Joby is the oldest among the family of enslaved people who serve as the 'house slaves' of the Sartoris family in two novels and more than half a dozen short stories. He first appears, very briefly, in Flags in the Dust, in the stories Jenny tells about the old days on the plantation; there he is "Simon's grandfather" who helped bury the white family's silver under "the ammoniac barn floor" to hide it from Yankees during the Civil War (37).

In "Death Drag" Jock is one of Faulkner's aviators who cannot stay away from airplanes: a former pilot in the Royal Flying Corps who has lost his civilian pilot's license but continues to fly nonetheless. He is a tall, dashing figure whose stained clothing and unruly hair indicate that he doesn't care about his physical appearance; insomniac and perennially thirsty, he is emotionally tense and self-contained and won't accept offers of help from his former comrade-in-arms, Captain Warren.

Jody Varner appears in seven different fictions, as the manager of Varner's Store and the brother of Eula Varner. In both those roles he is not a prepossessing figure. It's always clear that his father Will is the owner of the store; the most original thing Jody does during his tenure is to hire Flem Snopes as a clerk - though that turns out to be his biggest mistake. The narrator of "Spotted Horses" predicts at the time that in ten years, "it would be Jody clerking for Flem Snopes" (166); it doesn't take Flem nearly that long to displace him, though Jody remains the nominal manager.

There are five characters in the fictions identified only as "Joe." This one lives in Memphis, where he is the proprietor of the Grotto club in Sanctuary (247); he is bald, and lacks culture (he thinks "The Blue Danube" is a blues song, for example, 244), but he does his best to keep Red's funeral as dignified as possible.

There are five characters in the fictions identified only as "Joe." This one has the most significant role to play as the unlikely agent of justice in "Hand upon the Waters." He is “a man not large, but with tremendous arms and shoulders; an adult, yet with something childlike about him” (68). Like Lonnie Grinnup, Joe has severe mental disabilities, being “deaf and dumb” (68). Joe, an “orphan” (70, 71), was “adopted” by Lonnie Grinnup, and he remains fiercely loyal to Lonnie after Lonnie's death.

The local man who built Yoknapatawpha's first automobile in his "back yard on the edge of town" appears in Faulkner's last four novels. That quotation is from Requiem for a Nun, where he is unnamed but described vividly as "a grease-covered man with the eyes of a visionary monk" (190). In the last two novels of the Snopes trilogy he is named Buffaloe. The Town identifies him as the "city electrician" and a "genius" who "in 1904 . . . drove out of his backyard into the street in the first automobile we had ever seen, made by hand completely" (12).

Joe Ginotta is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but one of the three hypothetical men whom Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of the First World War: according to Gavin, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also Joe Ginotta of East Orange, New Jersey" (243).

In "A Bear Hunt," John Basket is a Chickasaw who lives in the settlement near the Indian mound, and well-known as moonshiner who makes what Major de Spain describes as "bust-skull whiskey" (75). Basket unwittingly becomes an accomplice in Ash's act of revenge against Luke Provine when Ratliff offhandedly suggests Luke visit the Chickasaws to get a cure for his hiccups. (There are two other Indians named 'Basket' in three other stories, but there's no indication of a relationship among them.)

John Doe is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but a name Gavin Stevens uses to represent the shared experience of the veterans of World War I. Talking about these survivors Gavin says: "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi," than the other vets from around the country (243).

Pappy's son, the "younger" of the two Negroes who help Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge in Flags in the Dust; he treats Bayard's broken body with great gentleness.

When Gavin refers to "John L. Lewis' C.I.O." in The Mansion he is referring to the American labor leader who founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935 (236).

This man appears in four texts under three different names; in all four he is associated with World War I, but in very different ways. In "Dry September" he is John McLendon, a decorated veteran who takes command of the lynch mob; he has a "heavy-set body," an aggressive temperament, and a wife whom he violently abuses (171). He plays a much smaller role as McLendon in Light in August: a customer at the barbershop who was there when Christmas "run in and dragged [Lucas Burch] out" (87).

In The Reivers John Powell is "the head hostler" at the Priest livery stable (4). A hostler is someone who looks after horses. On his twenty-first birthday, as "ineffaceable proof that he was . . . a man" (6), he bought a pistol that he carries to work in his overalls. Having the gun in the stable is against the rules, but he and Maury Priest handle this "moral problem" (6) by ignoring the its existence, "as mutual gentlemen must and should" (8). The novel does not discuss how Powell's race - he is black - might figure in the way he defines 'manhood' or defies the rules.

Bayard Sartoris names his only son John, after his father the Colonel. This John II is a very minor character, even in Flags in the Dust, the only text to describe him or rather his life in any detail. He married Lucy Cranston, with whom he fathered the twin sons, Bayard (III) and John (III), who are both important characters in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction. Unlike his father, he followed the family's military tradition, fighting for the U.S. in the Spanish-American War. He died in 1901, succumbing to yellow fever and a wound suffered during the war.

The John Sevier mentioned by Aunt Jenny in The Unvanquished was a frontiersmen whose adventures made him a hero "to small boys or fool young women" (244).

Jonas, one of the slaves on the McCaslin plantation when it was owned by Buck and Buddy, appears once in Go Down, Moses in the familiar pose of the 'lawn jockey': "Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting" (9).

Joseph Conrad is a British writer best known for works such as The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. He makes an appearance in "Knight's Gambit" when Gavin describes the Parisian street where he once visited Mrs. Harriss as the kind of street one can visit "simply by opening the right page in Conrad" (256).

Juana is the Hispanic wife of Nathaniel Burden and the mother of Calvin Burden II in Light in August. Born in Mexico, she waits a dozen years to get married and legitimize her child. In 1866 she comes to Jefferson with her husband and father-in-law. She dies not long after her son is killed by Colonel Sartoris, though in the account of her family that Joanna - who is named after her - gives Joe Christmas, she does not mention the cause of Juana's death.

Mink Snopes' murder trial is described, at least briefly, in all three novels in the Snopes trilogy. Though the judge who presides over the trial is not named until the third volume - in The Mansion he is referred to, once, as "Judge Brummage" (48) - there's no reason not to assume that Faulkner imagined the same person on the bench in all three accounts.

In "Smoke," the story where he makes his first appearance, Judge Dukinfield is "a widower of sixty and more, portly, white-headed, with an erect and dignified carriage which the Negroes called 'rear-backted'" (12). The judge has a daughter named Emma. During his seventeen years as a Chancellor, his official judgments have been guided by the belief "that justice is fifty per cent legal knowledge and fifty per cent unhaste and confidence in himself and in God" (12).

Judge Gowan is the judge in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses who quickly and informally finds a common-sense way to dispose of the case against Lucas and George. Although he only appears in this one episode, Faulkner gives him a long history in Yoknapatawpha when, in the short story, Lucas recognizes him as the gentleman who, "thirty and forty years ago," used to stay with "Old Zach Edmonds" on the plantation during quail hunting season (222). The novel lengthens this pedigree: there Lucas remembers him from "old Cass' time forty and fifty years ago" (71).

In The Town Judge Long is the local judge who doesn't preside over Montgomery Ward Snopes' trial; in The Mansion, on the other hand, Judge Long is the presiding judge at Montgomery Ward Snopes' trial. Apparently between writing the two books Faulkner forgot the trouble that Flem Snopes went to in the first one to make sure his relative never appeared in Long's courtroom. In this second novel, Montgomery Ward refers to him as "that old sanctimonious lantern-jawed son of a bitch up there on that Federal bench" (77).

Sutpen's daughter Judith first appears in the prequel to Absalom!, the short story "Wash"; though her character is barely sketched, her actions often anticipate her story in the novel. As "Miss Judith" she lives alone in the big house on the Sutpen plantation during much of the Civil War, after the deaths of her mother and brother and while her father is away fighting (541).

In The Sound and the Fury Julio is the older brother of the unnamed Italian girl whom Quentin tries to escort safely home from the bakery. Julio attacks Quentin, thinking that Quentin has tried to kidnap his sister, or as Julio himself puts it: "I killa heem . . . [he] steala my seester" (139). At the Squire's office Julio wants to press kidnapping charges, but instead accepts money from Quentin as compensation for the time he lost at work while chasing after him.

In As I Lay Dying Eula is one of the two daughters of Cora and Vernon Tull. Apparently while the Tulls were in town she bought a "bead" necklace for "twenty-five cents," perhaps to appeal to Darl Bundren, whom she watches as he passes through the Bundren house (9). Either she or her sister is the daughter Whitfield refers to at Addie's funeral as "Tull's youngest" (179).

In both "Pantaloon in Black" and Go Down, Moses Ketcham is an officer of the law who, despite his Dickensian name, works at the jail and deals with the men who have already been caught. He is at the jail trying to maintain order among the inmates when Rider is brought there. He is not named in Requiem for a Nun when Temple Drake Stevens describes his attempt to subdue the (also) unnamed Negro widower whose grief sends him into a frenzy.

As England's Secretary of State for War, a cabinet minister, Kitchener expanded the British army from twenty to seventy divisions between 1914 and 1916, hence the reference in "All the Dead Pilots" to "a mob of soldiers" (514).

In The Hamlet Labove's father is small time farmer in "the next county" to Yoknapatawpha (114) who sees no point in his son going to a university to become a teacher. He is "annoyed, concerned, even a little outraged that he should have deserted them with the remaining work on the crop - the picking and ginning of the cotton, the gathering and cribbing of the corn - to be done" (117).

Labove's sister, the only one of his five younger siblings to be individualized, is "about ten" years old in The Hamlet; like everyone in the family, she likes to wear the football cleats he brings home (114).

In The Hamlet, which has the most to say about Lump, Ratliff calls him "that Snopes encore" (218); he is referring to the fact that Lump takes his cousin Flem's place as clerk in the Varner store when Flem moves on up to Jefferson. His mother called Lump "Launcelot," surely one of the more egregious ironies in the Snopes' chronicles: as Ratliff elaborates, she chose the name of a Knight of the Round Table because she believed in the "honor and pride and salvation and hope" she had found "between the pages of books" (218).

In Sanctuary Lee Goodwin's career as a soldier included service along the Mexican border and in the Philippines as a cavalry sergeant and, after doing time in Leavenworth for killing another soldier, as an infantry private in World War I. Sometime before the novel begins he has somehow made his way to Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the Old Frenchman place with Ruby Lamar and their sickly infant, and earns his living making whiskey which he sells to locals and to the speakeasies of Memphis.

Greenwood Leflore (as Requiem for a Nun spells his name, though LeFlore is historically more accurate) was the son of Rebecca Cravatt, the daughter of a Choctaw chief (not mentioned in the novel), and Louis LeFleur, a French Canadian fur trader. He was educated by white Americans in Nashville.

Lemuel Stevens - usually Judge Stevens, but "Captain Stevens" in "Tomorrow" (96) - is the father of Gavin, and probably, although scholars disagree about this, the son of another man named Judge Stevens. He appears or is mentioned in 7 different texts. We see him in his role as a judge, but the military title is confusing, since there is no evidence that any of the Stevens family serve in either the U.S. or the Confederate armies.

In The Mansion Mack Lendon is "one of a big family of brothers in a big house" (205).

Lennie is Abner Snopes' second wife - at least, he is given a childless first wife named Vynie in The Hamlet - and the mother of Flem. But her most memorable appearance is as the mother of Flem's younger brother in "Barn Burning." There, amidst all the hardships of a tenant farmer's life, she tries very hard to balance her loyalty to her husband with her love for Sarty. In one of the few times she speaks it is easy to hear her desperation: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner" (14).