Character Keys

In comparing Mr. Harriss to Huey Long in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison describes how the politician "made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere," probably not "even caring what the people who wrote and edited it" produced (241). Faulkner is referring to a real magazine, the Louisiana Progress.

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished, what Bayard first sees as a "thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb" is quickly and chillingly recognized as the body of "an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet" (111, 177). Grumby has apparently lynched him to serve as a graphic warning to the boys: pinned to his corpse is a badly written note telling them to "Turn back" (111, 177).

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris finds a "bill from [a] London tailor" in "his overalls in Amiens that day in the spring" (530-31). Although nothing more is said about the tailor, the sentence provides an interesting juxtaposition of the upper class clothing he wore when off duty and these "overalls." (The overalls aviators wore while flying, of course, send a very different signal than the overalls poor white and black farmers and farm hands wear in Yoknapatawpha.)

This "engine-driver" blows the whistle at two different points in Go Down, Moses: after stopping the train on its first run, to scare away the young bear investigating the tracks (303); and to let Ike know they are approaching the area of the hunting camp (306).

In Sanctuary this Pensacola locksmith is called in to open the bathroom door that Popeye locked on the day of his birthday party.

In "The Bear" and again in Go Down, Moses, the narrator points out that the "big woodpecker" heard in the woods is "called Lord-to-God by Negroes" (285, 192).

When in "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II, he has a kind of prevision of a young man from Yoknapatawpha whose death during the fighting overseas will be reported in the local paper, along with a photograph showing "the country-boy face" inside "the uniform still showing the creases of the quartermaster shelves" (251).

These are the employees of Priest's livery stable in addition to the five who are mentioned by name. The Reivers characterizes them as "all the Negro drivers and hostlers" and "the last lowly stall cleaner" (7). Besides the day and night foremen, apparently the only white employee is Dan Grinnup.

These are "the little girls next door" with whom Little Belle plays in Flags in the Dust; they listen "with respect coldly concealed" when she tells them about the "prettier town" in which she used to live with "her real daddy" (378).

Although it's a printed text, "Fool About a Horse" provides a lot of evidence that the narrator is telling rather than writing it, that Faulkner intends us to imagine it as an oral tale being performed for a live audience. Twice the narrator refers to "you," for example (123, 132), and at another point addresses his audience as "gentlemen" (128); the story's repeated use of the locutions "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" also suggests the dynamic of live performance (118, etc.).

These "two ladies" appear in Flags in the Dust in one of the stories young Bayard brings back from the War. Apparently these women were the occasion for a fight in a bar between Bayard and an "Australian major" (124). "Ladies" is certainly being used ironically, but whether the women are simply lower class, or working prostitutes, cannot be established from the text or the context. (See also the entry in this index for Unnamed London Girl.)

Outside the courthouse in "A Point of Law" are "rich white lawyers talking to one another around cigars, the proud and powerful of the earth" (221). When this scene recurs in Go Down, Moses, the people in the group are referred to as "lawyers and judges and marshals" (69). In both texts, the critical perspective on these people seems shared by both Lucas and the narrative.

According to "Knight's Gambit," the end of Harriss' story follows a familiar pattern: "One morning your lawyer’s secretary telephones your wife long distance in Europe and says you just died sitting at your desk" (167). Although this is put indirectly, it is likely that the "lawyer" and the secretary it refers to exist.

Mink Snopes is defended by a court-appointed lawyer in all three volumes in the Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion. As the third novel puts it, he is "too young and eager" (47), though as the first one says, he "did what he could" to defend Mink: "talked himself frantic and at last voiceless before the grave impassivity of the jury which resembled a conclave of grown men self-delegated with the necessity . . . of listening to prattle of a licensed child" (368).

The "hired lawyer" in Absalom! (245) who seems to be responsible for sending Charles Bon on a collision course with the Sutpen family is an extremely elusive figure. He may have been the "legal advisor and man of business" to Bon's mother in New Orleans in the 1850s (252) - or he may have been invented by Shreve and Quentin in a Harvard dorm room in 1910. Outside Chapter 8, the only hint of his existence is in Mr. Compson's ambiguous reference to "the shadowy figure of a legal guardian" in Bon's life (58).

The second lawyer Ruby hires in Sanctuary to secure Lee's release from Leavenworth may work in Kansas or New York City - the narrative is unclear. She pays this second lawyer with money, "all the money I had saved" working in New York during World War I (278), and he finds a "Congressman to get [Lee] out."

Following Labove's admission to the Bar in The Hamlet, these men are present at the celebration for the graduating class in a hotel dining room.

This man owns the land on which Goodyhay wants to build his "chapel" in The Mansion; he has "changed his mind," or, Albert speculates, had it changed for him by "the bank that holds the mortgage" or maybe "the American Legion" (303).

After Ike McCaslin moves into town in Go Down, Moses, this landlady rents him the room where he continues to live at least at the beginning of his marriage.

In Requiem for a Nun this group of "land speculators" and "traders in slaves and whiskey" follow the pioneers into Mississippi (172-73).

This is the "other lady in Mottstown" who - according to the account of the very young narrator of "That Will Be Fine" - had "business" with Rodney, though "just one time" (268). "Business" is the term Rodney gave his young nephew; a less naive narrator would say 'sex.' "Lady" is the term that his culture taught this youngster to use for most white women; another narrator might use a different word here too.

This "woman" is the "nearest female kin" to the aunt whom Quentin's father tells him about in Absalom! (156). She looms very large in the mind of the aunt, but remains invisible in the text of the novel.

The "damned king" of England in "Ad Astra" - whom Monaghan refers to contemptuously and whom the Irish Comyn denies is "his damned king" - was George V (416). King George V ruled the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936. He was also Emperor of India during this period.

The "dispossessed" king for whom in "Appendix Compson" the grandfather of the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha fought (325) is Charles Edward Stuart, who spent most of his life in exile but claimed to be the rightful king of Britain as part of the Jacobite line of Catholic monarchs. His hope of claiming the throne ended in 1746, when the Jacobites were defeated in a final battle in Scotland. Charles himself is perhaps best remembered for a romantic escape through the Scottish countryside after that loss.

In one of the many scenes of pursuit in Light in August, Nathaniel and Juana spend several years searching for a "white preacher" (as opposed to a "priest") to marry them suggests how scarce the Protestant preachers were in the novel's vision of the frontier (247). It's not said where the "preacher" who does marry them in Kansas is from, but on the "Saturday night" before the Sunday wedding he arrives at the Burden home from somewhere else (250).

The Justice of the Peace in Whiteleaf who presides over the trials Armstid vs. Snopes and Tull vs. Snopes in The Hamlet is a "neat, small, plump old man resembling a tender caricature of all grandfathers who ever breathed" (357). With "neat, faintly curling white hair," he wears "steel-framed spectacles" overtop of "lens-distorted and irisless" eyes (357-8).

In The Hamlet this is the justice of the peace in Jefferson who marries Flem Snopes and Eula Varner. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.

The first Justice who appears in "Barn Burning" is a "shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles"; he presides over the Ab Snopes' trial in makeshift court in a general store (4). Described as having a "kindly" face, he discourages Harris from making young Sarty Snopes undergo questioning (4). While the Justice does not have enough evidence to convict Ab of burning Harris' barn, he tells him: "I can't find against you, Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this country and don't come back to it" (5).

In Absalom, Absalom! Thomas Sutpen is arraigned before a justice of the peace. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.

In both the short story "By the People" and the novel The Mansion this is the unnamed Justice of the Peace in Frenchman's Bend whom Will Varner orders to make Clarence Snopes a constable. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.

In The Town these jurors indict Mink Snopes for murdering Zack Houston.

In all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy the jury finds Mink guilty without much deliberation. In The Hamlet they are described as a "grave" and impassive "conclave of grown men" (368). (Only white males served on juries in Mississippi at the time of the story. By law, women were not allowed to serve on Mississippi juries until 1968. Negroes were not legally prohibited from being jurors, but until even later it was common practice to keep them off most juries.)

The phrase "Grand Jury" suggests "something" "secret" and "of a hidden and unsleeping and omnipotent eye" to Percy Grimm's platoon of peace-keepers (456). In Light in August the "Grand Jury" that is empaneled to consider the charges against Joe Christmas does remain mysterious. The narrator, for example, says that "the Grand Jury . . .

Given the political realities of Mississippi circa 1930 it's safe to say that the jurors in Lee Goodwin's trial in Sanctuary are all white and male, but all the narrative ever says about them is that, after Temple's testimony brings the proceeding to an inexplicable end, they take "eight minutes" to convict him of a crime he did not commit (291).

The narrator of "Smoke" refers briefly to "the presiding judge during court term" when describing how one can gain entry into Judge Dukinfield's office (14). It's not clear if this is a rotating or a permanent position.

In The Hamlet this is the Judge who presides over Labove's graduation ceremony from law school.

In Sanctuary the judge who presides over Lee's trial is never individualized at all. He is not even called "judge" by the narrative, just "the Court" (270, 282, etc.). We identify him as "upper class" based on the status of the title "Judge" in Faulkner's other fiction.

These men in Light in August are the white customers of various unspecified brothels "in the (comparatively speaking) south" (225) who beat Christmas when, after "bedding" one of the white prostitutes, he identifies himself as a Negro (224).

The 'johns' who frequent Miss Reba's brothel in Memphis; in his narrative in The Mansion, Montgomery Ward Snopes calls them "customers" and "clients" (81).

According to what Miss Reba says in Sanctuary, the men who have patronized her brothel during the 20 years she's been running it include "some of the biggest men in Memphis" - "bankers, lawyers, doctors" as well as "two police captains" (143). When Horace visits the brothel to talk with Temple, Reba tells him that she's done business with many lawyers, including "the biggest lawyer in Memphis" - and when she adds that this man weighed 280 pounds and "had his own special bed made and sent down here," "biggest" acquires an additional meaning (211).

This "Jicarilla squaw" from "Old Mexico" is the mother of "Byron Snopes's children" (379), the four sinister kids who appear at the end of The Town and then, as soon as Yoknapatawpha realizes how dangerous they are, are sent back into the west. She is mentioned, barely, in The Mansion, but nothing more can be said about her.

The narrator of "Appendix Compson" refers to "the Jew owners of Chicago and New York sweatshops" who manufacture the "fine bright cheap intransigent clothes" that TP wears (343). The stereotypical assumptions about exploitative urban "Jews" betrays a streak of antisemitism that certainly recalls Jason Compson's ethnic prejudices in The Sound and the Fury but that is somewhat shocking in the post-World War Two era of the "Appendix."

The town jeweler in "A Rose for Emily" sells Emily Grierson a man's "toilet set in silver" - usually a comb and a brush, with perhaps a mirror and a clothes brush - engraved with the initials "H.B." (127).

This is the "Jefferson woman shopping in Memphis" in Light in August who sees Mrs. Hightower going into a hotel when she is supposed to be visiting her family in Mississippi (64). When this woman returns home, she tells others what she saw.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. Various anonymous groups bear witness to the events of The Mansion.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. "A Rose for Emily" brings the townspeople as a collection onstage in the story's very first sentence, where the narrator refers to "our whole town" (119).