Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
2087 | Zilphia Gant |
"Miss Zilphia Gant" covers 40 years in the life of its title character. During that whole time the narrator and town continue to call her "Miss Zilphia," although she was married at least once. Physically, she is "pole-thin, with a wan, haunted face and big, not-quite-conquered eyes" for most of her life (372), but "plump in a flabby sort of way" at others (375), sickly "from anemia and nervousness and loneliness and actual despair" (372), and beset in her "ineradicable virginity" by insomnia and dreams (379). |
|
1482 | Zeb Fothergill |
In Flags in the Dust Fothergill is a member of Colonel John Sartoris' irregular unit, with a special ability to get behind Union lines and come back with at least one horse. He and the Colonel are horse racing when Sartoris surprises and captures the company of Yankee cavalry. |
|
161 | Zachary Edmonds |
Zachary Edmonds is the son of Cass and Alice, the father of Roth, and the great-great-grandson (on the "distaff" side) of the patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, from whom the Edmondses inherit the big plantation which Zack runs during the late 19th and early 20th century. In the Go Down, Moses stories he is characterized mainly through his relationship to the Negro tenant farmer Lucas Beauchamp - who is also his cousin. Like Bayard Sartoris and Ringo, the white and black boys grow up together, living "almost as brothers lived" (54). |
|
242 | Youngest Child of Byron Snopes |
When Byron Snopes's four children step off the train in Jefferson, Chick describes the youngest as "a little one in a single garment down to its heels like a man's shirt made out of a flour- or meal-sack or maybe a scrap of an old tent" (378). He never indicates the sex of this child, perhaps because he cannot determine it himself - or perhaps to emphasize the strangeness of the four as a group. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.) |
|
2716 | Yokohama |
"Yokohama" is the name of a city in Japan rather than a person (269). When in "Delta Autumn" Boyd adds the name to the list of dangers the U.S. faces along with, for example, "Hitler," he seems to be using it as a generic (and somewhat racist) way to refer to 'someone from Japan' (269). |
|
195 | Yettie Snopes |
Mink Snopes' wife - given a first name, Yettie, in The Mansion, the second and last fiction in which she appears - plays a small part in the large saga of the Yoknapatawpha Snopeses, but has a very powerful backstory, as it's described in The Hamlet. Mink met during his travels, when after seeing her "standing in the savage lamp-light . . . in the open door of the mess-hall in that south Mississippi convict camp" (243-44), he called a halt to his travels and took a job at the camp. Her mother died in giving birth to her. |
|
2299 | Yance |
In "Vendee" Bayard says that the livestock pen at Ab Snopes' cabin was "just like the one Ringo and Yance and I had built at home" (100). The reference to Yance is puzzling, since no character with that name is ever mentioned anywhere else in the fictions, and other Unvanquished stories describe in detail how Bayard, Ringo, Joby and Loosh build that pen at Sartoris. Faulkner might just have forgotten Joby's name: when he reprinted this story as a chapter in The Unvanquished, he changed the name "Yance" to "Joby." |
|
3278 | Wyotts |
Miss Wyott is a teacher in Jefferson in The Town, but the narrative notes that her "own people" - that is, her ancestors - "had come from the country (her own branch of it remained there where they had owned the nearest ford, crossing, ferry before Jefferson even became Jefferson)" (154). (In The Reivers Faulkner re-names the family that owns this spot Wylie.) |
|
3279 | Wyott, Grandfather of Doctor Wyott |
In The Town, this grandfather of Old Doctor Wyott founded the Jefferson Academy. |
|
3709 | Wylie 2 |
This "Mr Wylie" in The Reivers is a "family friend" of the Priests in 1905 (69). He lives on the place "eight miles from Jefferson" that his ancestor, "the first Wylie" in Yoknapatawpha, moved to sometime before the Civil War (69, 73). (In earlier editions of the novel his and his ancestor's name was Wyott.) |
|
3708 | Wylie 1 |
The man whom Lucius refers to in The Reivers as the "first Wylie" seems to have played a major role in shaping Yoknapatawpha County (71). When he set up his store at a crossing over the Tallahatchie River, the Indians still lived in the area. Because his place was "the head of navigation" - the furthest "small steamboats" could travel upriver from the Mississippi - the "whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint candy" that Yoknapatawpha imported from Vicksburg and the "cotton and furs" that it shipped out to the world were loaded or unloaded at his place (72). |
|
2904 | Worsham|Habersham, Father of Belle|Eunice |
This character's name reflects what is probably just be Faulkner's forgetfulness about recurring characters, though he may have had a reason for over-writing the Worshams with the Habershams between 1942 and 1948. In any case, the character named Belle Worsham in Go Down, Moses is the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356); the same character is named Eunice Habersham in Intruder in the Dust, where the narrative points out that the house she lives in "had not been painted since her father died" (74). |
|
1300 | Worsham, Grandfather of Belle |
In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Belle Worsham tells Gavin Stevens that the "parents" of Mollie and Hamp Worsham were slaves who "belonged to my grandfather" (260, 357). His last name is probably Worsham, but that is not specified. |
|
728 | Woodrow Wilson |
The 28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson led the country into the First World War and was still in office when Rafe MacCallum mentions his name, disparagingly, in Flags in the Dust (122). He is mentioned again in The Mansion, where the U.S. Declaration of War against Germany on April 2, 1917, is referred to as "the President's declaration" (204). In the aftermath of World War I, Wilson was one of the key promoters of the League of Nations. |
|
727 | Winterbottom |
Never given a first name, Winterbottom is a farmer in Frenchman's Bend who has a small role in two texts and is mentioned in a third. He is present at the auction in "Spotted Horses." Light in August begins when Lena Grove walks past his farm. And Flem Snopes mentions that he boarding "at Winterbottom's" near the end of The Hamlet (388). |
|
3619 | Winbush, Wife of Grover Cleveland |
In The Mansion Grover Winbush's jealous wife is convinced that the nude woman pictured on the French postcard that Winbush brings home from Montgomery Ward was actually Winbush's "private playmate" (77). |
|
3277 | Winbush, Mother of Grover Cleveland |
In The Town, the mother of Grover Cleveland Winbush lives out in the county, at Whiteleaf. Her son sends her "a dollar's worth of furnish" (food staples) every Saturday morning (176). |
|
3620 | Winbush, Mother of Fonzo |
According to Mink's narrative in The Mansion, Fonzo Winbush's mother "wasn't a Snopes" (80). She tells Fonzo never to stay anywhere that isn't managed by a woman who looks "mature and Christian" and "most of all motherly" (80). |
|
435 | Wilmoth |
In both the story "Go Down, Moses," and the story as Faulkner published it in Go Down, Moses, Mr. Wilmoth is the editor the Jefferson newspaper. He is described as "an older man, though with hair less white than [Gavin] Stevens', in a black string tie and an old-fashioned boiled shirt and tremendously fat" (259, 355). |
|
2906 | Willy Ingrum |
Jefferson's daytime marshal in Intruder in the Dust, charged with helping the sheriff maintain order in the town. Among his duties is directing traffic so that the town's white school children can safely "cross the street" (133). His last name points to the fact that he is "a Beat Four Ingrum come to town as the apostate sons of Beat Four occasionally did" (133). |
|
3403 | Willow-Bearer |
In "A Justice" "the Willow-Bearer" - his name never appears without the definite article - apparently performs an undefined ceremonial function related to the selection of the new "the Man" - the tribal chief whose title also always includes the "the" (349). |
|
2714 | William Dudley Pelley |
Mentioned by a character in "Delta Autumn" as one of ominous signs on the horizon of contemporary events (269), William Dudley Pelley was a journalist, a novelist, a screenwriter and publisher before making a name for himself a fascist and a religious leader. In 1936 Pelley ran for president as the candidate for the Christian Party, preaching antisemitism and socialism as staples for a new Christian Commonwealth. He supported Hitler's ideology regarding Jews. |
|
191 | Will Varner |
Will Varner appears or is mentioned in ten different texts, as "Uncle Billy" in the first two and as "Will" in all but one of the others (in "Centaur in Brass" he is the unnamed father of Flem Snopes' wife). In those first two - As I Lay Dying and "Spotted Horses" - he is a farmer and veterinarian who (in the absence of a real doctor) sets the broken legs of two different human critters. But in the other texts he makes a much more commanding figure as "the principal landowner" in Frenchman's Bend, to quote from his third text, "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (136). |
|
1982 | Will Starnes |
In "Hair," Will Starnes is the father of Sophie, Henry Stribling's (Hawkshaw's) first fiancee. He owns a house and land, all mortgaged. Starnes is lazy - some people suggest he may have died because "he was too lazy to keep on breathing" - and unambitious, "satisfied to be a landowner as long as he had enough to eat and a little tobacco" (138). He does not object to Sophie's engagement to Stribling, whom Mrs. Starnes considers to be beneath them. |
|
1750 | Will Mayes |
A Negro who works as the night watchman at the local ice plant in "Dry September," Will Mayes is ambiguously accused by a white woman named Minnie Cooper of assault and lynched by a mob of Jefferson men. The lynching is not narrated. Although the barber says repeatedly that "I know Will Mayes" (169), and believes he is innocent, the narrative refers to him mostly as "the Negro" and does not describe him - his age or physical experience - extensively. Nor does story ever say what, if anything, happened between Will and Minnie. |
|
726 | Will Legate |
Will Legate appears in four fictions, primarily as an accomplished hunter. He is a member of the Yoknapatawpha hunting party in "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, a son of one of Ike's "old companions, whom he had taught" the discipline of hunting (268, 320). |
|
1481 | Will Falls |
Flags in the Dust begins with "old man Falls" (3). During the Civil War, Will Falls served with Colonel John Sartoris' irregular outfit. The stories he tells Old Bayard about that past serve to fetch "the spirit of the dead man" into the novel's post World War I present (3), and the old Choctaw salve with which he successfully treats Bayard's wen reinforces the role he plays as a connection to the old South. He lives frugally in the county poor farm, regularly walks the three miles into town, and his "faded overalls" give off a "clean dusty smell" (3). |
|
28 | Will Benbow |
Will Benbow is presumably the only son of Francis. He is mentioned in Flags in the Dust and Sanctuary. He married Julia, with whom he had two children, Horace and Narcissa, and practiced law in Jefferson. He died a few years before the U.S. entered World War I. Narcissa remembers him in the first novel as "a darkly gallant shape" - "a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness" (172). He is not mentioned by name in Sanctuary, but only appears in Narcissa's references to "my father and mother" (118) and "our father and mother" (184). |
|
875 | Will Beard |
In Flags in the Dust Will Beard is a "mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size" (104), Will Beard owns a grist mill in Jefferson and probably owns the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives - though that is run by his wife. He is identified by the "evil reek" of his "black evil pipe" (104, 105). |
|
725 | Wilkie 2 |
Wendell Wilkie was the Republican candidate for President who ran against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940; he is mentioned in Go Down, Moses on a list of political figures that includes both Roosevelt and Hitler (322). |
|
979 | Wilkie 1 |
Wilkie is mentioned by Mrs. Bland in The Sound and the Fury, when she tells the young people in her car about Gerald's grandfather back in Kentucky who insisted on picking "his own mint" for his juleps: "He wouldn't even let old Wilkie touch it" (148). It seems safe to say that Wilkie was a servant in the Bland family. |
|
2371 | Wilde |
According to Mr. Compson, the scene in Absalom! in the Sutpen graveyard with Bon's wife and child "must have resembled a garden scene by the Irish poet, Wilde" (157). Wilde - who died in 1900, nine years before Mr. Compson would have said this - wrote in many genres, but in particular his poetry was an important influence on the apprentice work of William Faulkner. |
|
1365 | Wilbur Provine |
According to Ratliff in The Town, Wilbur Provine "was really a Snopes" - which is another way of casting aspersions on his character. Provine runs "a still in the creek bottom by a spring about a mile and a half from his house" (177). The judge at his trial for moonshining gives him a five-year sentence for making whiskey - and for making his wife walk so far to fetch water for their home. |
|
724 | Whitfield 2 |
"Whitfield's cabin" is the first "church" in Yoknapatawpha (213, 23), and presumably the Whitfield who lives there is an ancestor of the "Reverend Whitfield" who is an important character in As I Lay Dying and also appears in several other fictions. Although this original Whitfield is only mentioned in "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun, it seems safe to say that he is not a full-time preacher, but a settler who holds lay services in his cabin. |
|
3272 | Whit Rouncewell |
In The Town Whit Rouncewell first appears when he tries to find the town's night marshal Grover Cleveland Winbush after seeing "them two fellows in Christian's drug store" (169). He is probably a relative of Mrs. Rouncewell, perhaps her son; he is definitely a contemporary of Linda Snopes: later in the novel, he is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He appears again in The Mansion, the next and last book in the Snopes trilogy. |
|
228 | Wesley Snopes |
Wesley Snopes is the father of Virgil and Byron. He appears as "the actual Snopes schoolmaster" instead of by name in The Town (42) and by name in The Mansion. In both novels, in addition to being the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend, he is a religious figure, a "revival song-leader" (Mansion, 79) "whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place" (Town, 43). |
|
2866 | Wesley Pritchel |
Wesley Pritchel owns a small farm in "An Error in Chemistry." He is unhappy when his "dim-witted spinster" daughter, Ellie, marries Joel Flint, a carnival pitch man (113). Pritchel is irascible and likes to be left alone. He is murdered by Joel Flint. |
|
1513 | Watts 1 |
In Flags in the Dust Watts is referred to as the owner of Jefferson's hardware store. (As the Jefferson story continues to grow across the course of Faulkner's career, identifying the owner of this store becomes more and more confusing to data enterers like us; Watts is only mentioned in this first text.) |
|
281 | Watkins Products Snopes |
Another Snopes who appears for the first time in the last novel of the Snopes trilogy, Watkins Products Snopes is the carpenter and kinsman whom Flem hires to renovate the house that was formerly owned by Manfred de Spain; it is Wat's work, along with Flem's ambitions, that create 'the mansion' of the novel's title. He is named for a real company that has sold health products since 1868. His exact relationship to Flem or any of the other Snopeses is never specified. |
|
106 | Wash Jones' Daughter|Melicent |
The "daughter" of Wash Jones and the mother of Milly is not named either in the short story "Wash," were she is first mentioned (536), or in Absalom!, where she plays a somewhat more visible role, but she has her own entry as "MELICENT JONES" in the "Genealogy" at the end of the novel (308). In the novel itself, she lives with her father for some years in the "abandoned" fishing camp at Sutpen's (99). The daughter she gives birth to there is "fatherless" (139). |
|
105 | Wash Jones |
The title character of "Wash" can hardly be called its hero, but his story there and again in Absalom! acquires great moral force before it ends in blood and fire. Described in the novel as a "gaunt gangling man malaria-ridden with pale eyes and a face that might have been any age between twenty-five and sixty" (69), he survives as a "hanger-on of Sutpen," the richest planter in Yoknapatawpha (308). |
|
723 | Walter Ewell |
Walter Ewell is a farmer in Yoknapatawpha, but in the six fictions where he appears or is mentioned he is always described as (to quote The Mansion) one of the "best hunters in the county" (34) - an assertion born out repeatedly on the annual hunting trips to Major de Spain's camp in the woods. When the unnamed boy in "The Bear" hunts his first deer on his own it is symbolically appropriate that "he borrows Walter Ewell's rifle" to do so (290). |
|
3660 | Walter Clapp |
In The Reivers Acheron's trainer - the "white man" whom Lycurgus refers to "Mr Walter" (221) - must be the same man whom a member of the crowd at the race calls "Walter Clapp" (235). |
|
3244 | Walter |
Walter is Willy Christian's janitor in The Town. "His grandfather had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167). He and Willy have a lot in common, according to Charles Mallison, except that "if anything Walter was a little more irascible," and instead of morphine, Walter has a weakness for the store's "medicinal alcohol" (167). |
|
246 | Wallstreet Panic Snopes |
Wallstreet Panic Snopes - given his absurd name absurdly, in the hopes that it might mean he'll get rich, but more often called "Wall" in the fictions - is a very young "little periwinkle-eyed boy" when he first appears in The Hamlet (304). He appears in all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy, and his eyes are still "an incredible tender youthful periwinkle blue" at the end of The Mansion (461). |
|
3671 | Wade Hampton |
Wade Hampton fought with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. He was a brigadier general during the fighting at Gaine's Mill in 1862. In The Reivers Lucius' great-grandfather was serving under Hampton as "a color-sergeant" until being wounded in that battle (278). |
|
3254 | W.C. Handy |
In The Town W.C. Handy, the famous Negro band leader and composer "from Beale Street in Memphis," provides the music for the Cotillion Ball (76). In the larger canon, Handy also provided Faulkner with the title of the short story "That Evening Sun" (1931) - one of Handy's most famous songs is "St. Louis Blues" (1914), which begins "I hate to see that evening sun go down." The novel calls him "Professor Handy" (76); Handy called himself, and has often been called by others, 'the Father of the Blues.' |
|
182 | Vynie Snopes |
In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished the woman who opens the door of Ab Snopes' cabin to Bayard and Ringo is presumably his wife - at least, our database makes that presumption. She tries to throw them off the track by telling them that "Mr. Snopes" has gone to Alabama (101, 162). In The Hamlet Ab has two wives. This first one is named Vynie. |
|
2361 | Vynie |
The woman whom the narrator of "Fool about a Horse" calls "Mammy" is named "Vynie." She works hard and frugally to contribute to her family's farm income, so she is resentful, suspicious, and caustic about her husband's misadventures in horse-trading. When his foolishness results in the loss of the milk separator she wanted, she cries for the first time in her son's experience. Still resolute, she goes off alone to recover the separator, but in the end she is as big a fool about that machine as her husband is about the horse. |
|
3436 | Vladimir Lenin |
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). |
|
885 | Vladimir Kyrilytch Ratcliffe I |
In The Town, this is the first member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family in the U.S. Eula Snopes calls him V.K. Ratliff's "six or eight or ten times grandfather"(338) - but that's exaggerated. Originally from Russia, he arrives in the new world during the Revolution as an ensign in the British army. After being captured, he escapes and is rescued by "a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him" (338). He marries and takes the last name of the woman who saved him: Nelly Ratcliffe. After the Revolution he becomes "a Virginia farmer" (338). |
|
69 | Virginius MacCallum's Father |
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. |
|
70 | Virginius MacCallum I|Anse McCallum |
The patriarch of the family that first appears in Flags in the Dust as the MacCallums and then re-appears in the 1940s as the McCallums also has two first names: Virginius (in Flags) and then Anse (in The Hamlet and "The Tall Men"). At the start of the Civil War he walked from Mississippi to Virginia to enlist (because his mother came from Virginia) and served til the surrender at Appomattox. |
|
737 | Virginius Holland |
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. |
|
16 | Virginia Sartoris Du Pre |
Virginia Du Pre - or as she is called more frequently, Aunt Jenny - is the sister of Colonel John and the first in the series of formidable dowagers in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. She traveled to Yoknapatawpha a few years after the end of the Civil War that saw her father and husband killed and the family mansion in Carolina burned down. She brought with her a handful of flower cuttings from the ancestral estate which in Mississippi's less congenial soil she nurtures into an equally lush garden. |
|
243 | Virgil Snopes |
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). |
|
876 | Virgil Beard |
In Flags in the Dust Virgil Beard is a "pale, quiet boy of twelve or so" (104), the son of the people who own the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives. To disguise his handwriting in the letters he sends Narcissa, Byron gets Virgil to write them by promising to buy him an air rifle. Despite Snopes' attempts to dodge that promise, Virgil is shrewd enough to make sure that he gets his gun - and uses it to kill a mockingbird. |
|
3704 | Virgil |
The "single temporary clerk" who mans the desk at the Parsham hotel is named Virgil in The Reivers but not described (190). |
|
2903 | Vinson Gowrie |
Vinson, the 28-year-old white man whose murder launches Intruder in the Dust, is the youngest of Nub and Amanda Gowrie's six sons. The only one "with an aptitude for trading and for money," he can write checks that the local banks will honor and is "said to own several small parcels" of Yoknapatawpha farmland (162). The business he is engaged in at the time of his death is harvesting timber in partnership with his brother Crawford. |
|
63 | Versh Gibson |
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. |
|
958 | Vernon Tull's Siblings |
In As I Lay Dying, Vernon Tull mentions the "last chap" his mother had as he recounts his mother's long life and death (30). That wording implies he had more than one sibling, but there is no way to say how many more. |
|
1336 | Vernon Tull's Mother |
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). |
|
959 | Vernon Tull's Father |
In As I Lay Dying Vernon Tull mentions his father as he recounts his mother's long life and death. |
|
491 | Vernon Tull |
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). |
|
721 | Vernon 2 |
In "Death Drag" Vernon owns the café where Captain Warren and Jock talk. He seems like an attentive and successful businessman; people know his place by his name, and Jock and Captain Warren seem comfortable there. He may be the same "Vernon" who is married to the Sheriff's daughter in The Sound and the Fury, though there is no direct evidence of that. He is certainly not the Vernon - Vernon Tull - who lives in Frenchman's Bend. |
|
978 | Vernon 1 |
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. |
|
3703 | Vera |
In The Reivers Vera works as one of the prostitutes at Miss Reba's. Because she is away, "visiting her folks up in Paducah," Boon and Lucius stay in her room (99). |
|
3618 | Varner, Wife of Will 2 |
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). |
|
2651 | Varner, Future Wife of Jody |
The Hamlet looks over three decades into the future to describe the eventual end of Jody Varner's invisible bachelorhood in rather stark, but grammatically conditional terms: when Jody turns "sixty five," he "would be caught and married by a creature not yet seventeen probably, who would for the rest of her life continue to take revenge upon him for her whole sex" (352). |
|
3617 | Varner, Father of Will |
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). |
|
2650 | Varner, Children of Will and Maggie |
Will and Maggie Varner have produced sixteen children. Jody and Eula are important characters in The Hamlet and other texts. The remaining fourteen children are summarily described as "scattered, married and buried, from El Paso to the Alabama line" (6). Will suggests that this "mess of children" are largely male, a "passel of boys" who "soon as they got big enough to be worth anything . . . done married and moved away" (339). |
|
236 | Vardaman Snopes |
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. |
|
2899 | Vardaman Gowrie |
Vardaman Gowrie and his brother Bilbo are identical twins, "identical as two clothing store dummies" (159) or "two clothes pins on a line" (160). Intruder in the Dust treats them identically too. "About thirty, a head taller than their father," their faces are "surly quick-tempered and calm" (160), though they act together with energy in the search for their murdered brother's body. |
|
681 | Vardaman Bundren |
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.") |
|
756 | Vangie Burden |
She is one of three daughters of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline in Light in August. "Vangie" is presumably a nickname for "Evangeline," which is her mother's name. Unlike their older brother Nathaniel, who is dark like their mother, all three daughters have blue eyes. |
|
1785 | Van |
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. |
|
463 | V.K. Suratt|Ratliff |
This is one of Faulkner's favorite characters. He appears under two different last names, first as V.K. Suratt (in his first four appearances, in texts published through early 1932), then - apparently after someone named 'Suratt' complained to Faulkner - as V.K. Ratliff in six more texts, beginning in early 1934. Under either name he is an itinerant sewing machine salesman who travels throughout Yoknapatawpha at first on a wagon drawn by a sturdy mismatched team of horses, and then in a small, specially outfitted truck. |
|
462 | V.K. Ratcliffe III |
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). |
|
884 | V.K. Ratcliffe II |
In The Mansion this is the member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family who gets as far west as Tennessee. |
|
3779 | Unspecified Compson Ancestors |
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. |
|
1627 | Unnamed Youth |
In Flags in the Dust, while Bayard recovers from his first accident, this "youth who hung around one of the garages in town" drives his car to Memphis for repairs (267). |
|
2725 | Unnamed Youngest Negro in Delta Camp |
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). |
|
1957 | Unnamed Youngest Brother of German Prisoner |
The youngest of four German brothers in "Ad Astra" flourishes in the German military service, beginning as a "cadet of dragoons" (417) and eventually becoming an aviator. When his eldest brother last sees him, he "iss now ace with iron cross by the kaiser's own hand" (419). In 1916, he is shot down by the Canadian air ace Bishop. |
|
3393 | Unnamed Younger Generation in Jefferson |
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). |
|
3392 | Unnamed Younger Bondsman |
In The Town Ratliff calls the first man sent to Jefferson by the company that insures the bond on Mayor de Spain a "pleasant young feller" who realizes at the end of "one quick horrified day" that settling Gavin's law suit calls for someone with more experience (87). |
|
1605 | Unnamed Young Writer |
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. |
|
1927 | Unnamed Young Women in New York |
During the First World War, Ruby worked in New York City, where according to her description in Sanctuary "even the little ratty girls [were] wearing silk," presumably as presents from all the "soldiers with money to spend" (278). |
|
3207 | Unnamed Young Southern Woman |
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). |
|
3206 | Unnamed Young Northern Woman |
Requiem for a Nun's narrator creates this 'character' as a point of reference. As part of his description of Jefferson's "Female Academy," he mentions a hypothetical "young female from Long Island or Philadelphia" who receives an invitation "signed by Queen Victoria" (177). |
|
3116 | Unnamed Young Men of Ikkemotubbe |
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). |
|
2967 | Unnamed Young Men in Jefferson |
This is the group that the narrator of Intruder in the Dust refers to (twice) as "the young men and some not so young" (27, 39) who "work hard all week [hanging around] in the poolhall" (39). They are also identified with the barber shop, and on ordinary evenings after the movie ends at least some of them can be found "drinking coca cola and playing nickels into the drugstore jukebox" (208). Some of them "have some vague connection with cotton or automobiles or land- and stock-sales"; all of them bet on "prize fights and punchboards and national ballgames" (39). |
|
2672 | Unnamed Young Men in Frenchman's Bend |
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). |
|
3714 | Unnamed Young Man Sartoris Killed |
In The Reivers the "twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth" who was killed by Colonel John Sartoris cannot be specifically identified (73). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions Sartoris kills a number of different men. If Faulkner is thinking of one of them here, it is most likely the man Sartoris shot as a robber in both Flags in the Dust (1929) and "An Odor of Verbena," the last story in The Unvanquished (1938). |
|
2251 | Unnamed Young Man in Beyond |
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). |
|
1625 | Unnamed Young Man at Belle's 2 |
This is the person referred to simply as "another young man" by the narrator of Flags in the Dust; he comes by the Mitchell house to play tennis. Harry Mitchell describes the set who congregate around his wife as "a bunch of young girls and jelly-beans" (193). (In the 1920s "jellybean" was a slang term for a young man who wore stylish clothes.) |
|
1624 | Unnamed Young Man at Belle's 1 |
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.) |
|
2467 | Unnamed Young Girls 3 |
The "chosen young girls in white dresses bound at the waist with crimson sashes" whom Shreve imagines in Absalom! are decked out for a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262). "Decoration Day" is better known as "Confederate Memorial Day," out of which the U.S. Memorial Day holiday eventually came. It was first observed soon after the Civil War ended, and in fact is still unofficially observed in some places in the South - in April, however, not "June" (262). |
|
1988 | Unnamed Young Girls 2 |
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. |
|
398 | Unnamed Young Girls 1 |
These young ladies in "A Rose for Emily," the "daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries," are the students to whom Emily Grierson teaches the decorative art of "china-painting" (128). |
|
3514 | Unnamed Young Girl |
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). |