Character Keys

The relatives of Joanna Burden who remain in New Hampshire in Light in August are named Burrington. Her nephew Nathaniel - he has the same name as her great-grandfather - offers a $1000 reward for her killer after he is informed about her murder.

She is the wife of the original Vladimir Kyrilytch and mother of the second. She is the daughter of a Virginia farmer who hid and fed the Russian-born mercenary soldier when he escaped from an American prison during the Revolutionary War. At some point they married, and began the line of "V.K."s that culminates in the character readers meet frequently in the fictions. As her story is told in The Townand repeated in The Mansion, her maiden name was Ratcliffe, and the couple adopted it as their married name. Over time, the "c" and "e" were dropped from the spelling.

In Faulkner's fictions "Yankees" typically refers to the Union soldiers during the Civil War or people from the North in general; in The Sound and the Fury, however, it refers to the New York Yankees baseball team. The 1927 Yankees, which featured Babe Ruth as part of a lineup called 'Murderers' Row,' is often cited as the greatest team in baseball history. Despite this, in his April 1928 conversation with Mac, Jason Compson insists "They're shot" (252), adding that he'd never bet on them.

Nub Lowrie's appearance in Intruder in the Dust is memorable. His name - Nathan Bedford Forrest Gowrie - comes from a former slave-dealer who was also one of the Confederacy's most effective generals and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan; his nickname - "Nub" - combines the initials of his first names with the fact of his missing left arm. How he became handicapped is not explained, but the loss doesn't diminish the force of his character. He is "a short lean old man with [pale] eyes . . . and a red weathered face"; his voice is "high thin strong [and] uncracked" (156).

Described in The Hamlet as "sturdy short-legged black-browed ready-faced man" (63), Bookwright is one of several characters in Frenchman's Bend who keep Ratliff apprised of the goings on about the hamlet when he is gone. At the end of that novel, he and Ratliff and Armstid are swindled by Flem Snopes into purchasing the Old Frenchman’s Place - an event that is referred to again in The Mansion.

At the start of Flags in the Dust, in Will Falls' re-telling about the time the Yankee patrol chased Colonel Sartoris away from his plantation, he reminds the Colonel's son Bayard that among the people living there was "yo' aunt, the one 'fo' Miss Jenny come" (22). According to Falls' story, she is "a full-blood Sartoris," but this is the only time Faulkner's fiction mentions her existence.

In The Hamlet the Old Frenchman's son has disappeared from the scene along with the rest of his family, except for a single detail: this heir to the Old Frenchman plantation - possibly accompanied by his father - rode into Jefferson in the early days of the Civil War to recruit men to the Confederate army (373).

Miss Wyatt is Emily Grierson's great-aunt in "A Rose for Emily," and reputed to have been insane: she went "completely crazy at last" (123), the narrator says, but provides no further details, about either her or her illness. Emily's father and her other "kin in Alabama" have a falling out "over the estate of old lady Wyatt" after she dies (125). (There are six other characters named Wyatt in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but whether or how this woman is related to any of them is not established.)

Old Man Killgrew is a farmer who lives near the Griers in Frenchman's Bend. Although he never appears in person, he is mentioned in all three of the World War II stories about the Grier family. Killigrew is seventy years old, and prosperous enough to have a cook. He hunts foxes the old-fashioned way, which in Faulkner's Mississippi means "squatting on a hill" rather than riding to the hounds (27). His and his wife's deafness means that the Grier sons can stand outside his house and hear his radio reporting on the progress of the war.

Orestes is one of the last Snopeses added to the family tree. He appears late in The Mansion as "a new Snopes living in Jefferson" (354). Also called Res, his exact relationship to Flem is never made clear. Flem establishes him in the converted carriage house on the Compson place, which Flem now owns, where the hog farm Res operates becomes a source of increasingly violent friction with his neighbor.

In The Reivers Otis is Corrie's nephew, visiting Memphis from his home in Arkansas in order to acquire "refinement" (97). Although he has his fifteenth birthday in the course of the story, he is smaller than the 11-year-old Lucius. As Lucius says the first time he sees Otis, "there is something wrong about him" (104). By the time Lucius calls him a "demon child" (154), most readers are likely to agree.

Otis Meadow fill is the irascible neighbor of Orestes Snopes in The Mansion, and is "so mean [i.e. miserly] as to be solvent and retired even from the savings on a sawmill" (361).

In "Knight's Gambit" Paoli is the "famous Italian fencing-master" who taught Max Harriss (169). According to Harriss' unnamed sister, Max was "the best pupil Paoli had had in years" (190).

In "Fool about a Horse," Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, but as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). His attempt to best Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region, ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his ineptitude.

In Flags in the Dust "Pappy" is the "older negro" (213) of the two who rescue Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge and carry him home; he is suspicious both of meddling with a white man and of the automobile. The "younger negro" is his son, John Henry (213).

The mother of Aleck Sander - named Paralee in Intruder in the Dust and Guster in The Town - has been a servant in the Stevens-Mallison household for a long time, perhaps her entire life. She lives in a cabin behind the white family's house. Like her employer, Maggie Mallison, she is protective about her own child, but she is also a kind of 'mammy' to Chick Mallison. She is never given a last name, but the earlier novel mentions her father Ephriam, and the later novel gives her a husband (Big Top) and another son (Top, or Little Top).

The legendary Pat Stamper, master of "the science and pastime of horse trading in Yoknapatawph county," makes a fool of Pap, who tries to trade with him in "Fool about a Horse," and of Ab Snopes, when that story is revised and interpolated into The Hamlet. With the help of his Negro hostler, he can even get not only the better of each trade but "actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars" - as it's put in the novel (37) - out of the farmers who try to take him on.

There is a lot that "Elly" never explains about Paul's character - where he lives, for example, and what he does - but the one mystery that matters most is his racial identity. Paul visits Jefferson as a white man, but the friend who introduces him to Elly insists he is really black. As part of her proof, she recounts a story in which Paul's "uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209).

In Go Down, Moses Buck McCaslin purchases Percival Brownlee from Bedford Forrest, and quickly learns that Percival is unable to perform any of the tasks to which he and his brother Buddy assign the slave. When Percival is emancipated as a result of the McCaslins' frustrations with him, he refuses to leave the plantation. He disappears during the Civil War, but reappears during Reconstruction as a preacher, "leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano voice," and again in the "entourage" of an Army paymaster (278).

Introduced into Light in August in Chapter 19, twenty-five year old Grimm brings Joe Christmas' life to a violent end. A captain in the state national guard, he organizes American Legion members to patrol Jefferson even though both the Legion commander and the sheriff refuse to give him permission. When he insists on carrying a gun, the sheriff makes him a special deputy (455). Like Christmas, Grimm's life seems strangely determined.

In "Two Soldiers" Pete Grier, the oldest of the two Grier sons, enlists in the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "I got to go," he says; "I jest ain't going to put up with no folks treating the United States that way" (83). Before December 7, 1941, he worked on his family's farm in Frenchman's Bend. The "ten acres" of land he himself owns was given to him by his father "when he graduated from the Consolidated" (82). According to his younger brother, who idolizes him, Pete was a very hard worker: "He never got behind like Pap, let alone stayed behind" (82).

The "Pettigrew" in the short story "Beyond" is Judge Allison's attorney and the executor of his will, responsible for making sure that the Judge's last wishes are implemented - though he doesn't seem to do so. In Requiem for a Nun - published almost two decades after "Beyond" - a man named 'Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew' is the source of the name of the town that is the seat of Yoknapatawpha county, but it's not likely Faulkner is consciously thinking of a connection between the characters.

Philip is "a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits" who courts the title character of "Elly" with clock-like regularity (213). As a Jefferson boy whom she has known "from childhood," Philip is the epitome of a suitable husband for Elly (213). His draw as a suitor is indicated in the same breath as his current occupation: "an assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day" (213).

In Go Down, Moses Phoebe (or "Fibby," as her name is written by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin" inherited and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). She is the wife of Roscius (spelled "Roskus" in the ledger, 252), and like him manumitted when Old Carothers dies in 1837; also like him, according to the ledger, she "Dont want to leave" (252) and remains on the plantation until her death in 1849.

"All" of Mr. and Mrs. Poleymus' children "are married and gone"; The Reivers does not say how many they had, or where they went (251).

The narrator of Sanctuary describes Popeye as someone with "that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin" (4). Although Temple once calls him "that black man" (49), and Horace refers to "Popeye's black presence" (121), Popeye is white. A modern psychologist would label him a sociopath. Horace calls him one of "those Memphis folks" (21), the gangsters who buy homemade whiskey from Lee to sell in the speakeasies of the city. He was born on Christmas, in Pensacola, Florida.

Preacher Birdsong is a World War I veteran who "learned to box in France in the war" (192). He "lives out in the country," and likely is connected to the Birdsong family in Frenchman's Bend that appears in two other texts - but that's not made explicit. "Preacher" is his name, not a job title. Charles Mallison has seen him boxing with Matt Levitt.

The "Prince of Darkness" that Faulkner describes trying to deal with Flem Snopes in Hell is apparently the son of the original Satan, "the Prince's pa" (168). Flem gets the better of him - or maybe we mean the worse.

In "An Error in Chemistry," Joel Flint says during his impersonation of Wesley Pritchel that 'he' had "four children," all of whom have died (130); Joel is just mean enough to include the one he killed, Ellie, in this count. As Ellie Flint (nee Pritchel) she has her own entry in the database.

In The Unvanquished Professor Wilkins is teaching and boarding Bayard Sartoris while Bayard pursues a law degree. He seems to have grown fond of Bayard and calls him "my son" when he has to deliver the sad news about Bayard's father's murder (212). Professor and student have had conversations about the principles of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, particularly "Thou shalt not kill." He is afraid that Bayard is contemplating breaking it as he "believed he was touching [Bayard's] flesh which might not be alive tomorrow" (216). Bayard refers to him as "Judge Wilkins" (212).

The unnamed children of Lucius Provine. The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" makes only one direct reference to them, saying their father "makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64).

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This Pruitt appears in "Tomorrow," where his widow tells Gavin Stevens how poor she and her husband were when they married: "we didn't even own a roof over our heads. We moved into a rented house, on rented land" (96-97).

When Faulkner creates four earlier generations of Compsons in the "Appendix" he wrote in 1945, Quentin MacLachan Compson - the great-great-great grandfather of the Quentin Compson who appears in The Sound and the Fury - is the first one who is given a first name. This Quentin I is the "son of a Glasgow printer, orphaned and raised by his mother's people" (326) in the Perth Highlands.

Quentin Compson is a major character in two of Faulkner's greatest novels, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and the narrator of four early short stories. He is also the oldest son in one of the most prominent Yoknapatawpha families but born after the South's defeat in the Civil War and at the end of the 19th century, and so has to try to grow up in a modern world that that has no place for him.

In "All the Dead Pilots," this R.A.F. aviator was flying below Sartoris when the latter was "shot down while in pursuit of duty over enemy lines" and witnessed his death (530).

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," and the twin brother of Stuart, Rafe appears in more texts - five - than any of his brothers. In Flags he is an old friend of the Sartoris twins, John and Bayard, and tries to help Bayard with his pain by offering homemade whiskey and a chance to talk about the war. He is only mentioned in As I Lay Dying as the twin brother of the MacCallum (Stuart) whose first name Samson can't remember (119).

Requiem for a Nun refers to three generations of descendants from the "Ratcliffe" who first arrived in the settlement that became Jefferson, and notes how over that time the name "lost the 'c' and the final 'fe' too" (13). Although he is not singled out in this text, the latest descendant is V.K. Ratliff, one of Faulkner's favorite characters - although in the Requiem passage Faulkner seems to have forgotten that his name still has both "f"s.

"Miss Reba" Rivers - whom Temple in Requiem for a Nun calls "the madam of [a] cat house" in Memphis (111) - appears by name in Sanctuary, The Mansion and The Reivers. She is a colorful character: fat, asthmatic, church-going and hard-drinking, with some pretensions to gentility but no illusions about life. When readers first meet her she is carrying a "rosary" in one hand and a "tankard" of beer in the other (144). In Sanctuary the great love of her life, someone named Mr.

Named Redlaw in Flags in the Dust and Redmond in The Unvanquished, this man was Colonel Sartoris' partner in building the railroad through Yoknapatawpha until the two men fell out; after Sartoris defeated him in an election, Redlaw shot and killed him. His name changes to "Ben Redmond" in The Unvanquished, where he also plays a larger role. The second novel adds the detail that he did not fight in the Civil War, one of the things Sartoris taunts him about during the political campaign - though many people in Jefferson know that "he aint no coward" (226).

"A rotund man with bristling hair and lapping jowls like a Berkshire hog" (102), Res is the cashier at Old Bayard's bank in Flags in the Dust.

Reverend Gail Hightower's story is one of the three principal plot lines in Light in August. After seminary, he worked hard to secure the position of minister to the Presbyterian church in Jefferson, the site where his grandfather had died in a Civil War raid twenty years before his own birth. His obsession with that grandfather results in his loss of his wife, his pulpit and his vocation. For most of the twenty-five years he has lived in Jefferson, he has been treated as a pariah: the narrative describes him as a "fifty-year-old outcast" (49), "tall, with thin . . .

In The Sound and the Fury Shegog is the visiting clergyman from St. Louis who gives the Easter sermon at the Negro church in Jefferson. Physically he is unimpressive: "The visitor was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat. He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey" (293). But he possesses a powerful voice: the congregation soon forgets "his insignificant appearance in the virtuosity" of his voice (293).

This is the named man among the "two negro men" and the boy in the MacCallum kitchen in Flags in the Dust (336). Mandy calls him "Richud" (337). Buddy calls him "Dick" (338). So it seems likely that his full name is Richard, though neither that nor his role in the household or on the family's land is spelled out.

In The Town, this second-grade boy moves to Jefferson with his parents. When it is discovered that he has polio, the school that he and Chick attend is closed. He is hospitalized in Memphis, and Eula says to Chick, "Let's hope they got him to Memphis in time" (324).

Rider, the protagonist of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, is one of Faulkner's most memorable black characters. We never learn his real name; "Rider" is a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken" before he became the devoted husband of Mannie (249, 144). He is depicted from two different perspectives in both texts.

Historically, Robert Ingersoll was a late 19th-century orator and philosopher nicknamed "The Great Agnostic," whose rejection of Christianity was widely discussed in his day and in Faulkner's. In "Beyond," Faulkner locates Ingersoll in the story's version of heaven, and gives him the role of interlocutor to the protagonist's doubts about God and the afterlife; Ingersoll listens to what Judge Allison says about his life and ideas, but he doesn't offer any solutions or answers.

The "Uncle Rodney" (266) of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is the youngest of three children. He is also guilty of theft, fraud, and embezzlement. He is also a serial philanderer. Rodney manages the latter "business" by manipulating his nephew, Georgie, with promises of future monetary rewards. "By God," he tells Georgie, "some day you will be as good a businessman as I am" (280). His attempted elopement with a married woman on Christmas Eve goes horribly wrong, and Rodney winds up "wrapped in a quilt" and carried back to his family like a "side of beef" (286).

Rosa Millard - "Granny" to two boys, one white and one black - is one of Faulkner's most formidable old women. As John Sartoris' mother-in-law, she runs his plantation while he's away fighting in the Civil War.

Rosie, a servant working for the family of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine," seems to have a clear understanding of her employers' characters. In particular, she chastises young Georgie: "You and money! If you ain't rich time you twenty-one, hit will be because the law done abolished money or done abolished you" (265). Rosie, like Emmeline, has to do some of the cooking due to the absence of Grandma and Grandpa's servant, Mandy. Although she grumbles about her work, she performs it conscientiously.