Character Keys

In three differents versions of the story of Lion, Old Ben and the hunt, Faulkner evokes a prehistoric context for the ritual. In "Lion" it is Quentin Compson who, waiting on his assigned stand in the bayou, realizes that the scene before him is no different in appearance from what it was when, long ago, the first human explorer of the wilderness in Yoknpatawpha "crept into it and looked around, arrow poised and ready" (192).

In Light in August Yoknapatawpha is served by a volunteer fire department, made up of "men and youths" who "desert counters and desks" in town to drive the "fire truck" out to Joanna Burden's (288).

These two Finns in The Mansion are among the more exotic inhabitants of Jefferson. They escaped "from Russia in 1917" and then "from Europe in 1919" (236). The 1917 Russian Revolution produced a lot of refugees and set off a civil war in neighboring Finland, but the text does not provide any details about what these two Finns were doing in Russia or why they had to "escape" from Europe when they did. "In the early twenties" they arrive in Jefferson, where one becomes a cobbler, taking over Nightingale's shop, and the other a tinsmith.

Lee Goodwin has a relationship with this woman while he is stationed in the Philippines. Ruby calls her a "nigger" when telling Temple about how Lee killed another American soldier in a fight over her (59), but since Ruby would be likely to use that term for any non-white person, Negro or Hispanic, it leaves open the question of the woman's racial identity.

These "field hands" at Renfro in "Uncle Willy" "come up out of the fields" to stare up at the spectacle of Secretary trying to teach Willy how to fly the plane (244). Their perspective as they watch a black man teach a white man this skill would presumably depend on their own race, but the story says nothing to indicate what that is.

In The Town Miss Vaiden Wyott mentions "her fiance" when she explains to Wall Snopes why she cannot accept his marriage proposal; all the text says about him is that she is sure that, if he and Wall ever met, they "would be friends" (154).

Ratliff calls the first people he encounters upon returning to Jefferson after his misadventure at the hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt" the "first fellow" and "a fellow" (66). They ask about his facial injuries - one in standard English, one in a country vernacular - and their questions provide Ratliff with a way to begin his story. They don't seem to be the "you" (67), however, to whom he "is telling" the story itself (63).

These "overalled men" in "Appendix Compson" are customers at the farmers' supply store where Jason IV owns a business buying and selling cotton (334). Although the customers are explicitly male, since the store is a "gloomy cavern which only men ever entered" (333), their race is not so clearly defined; the narrative indicates that the store serves "Mississippi farmers or at least Negro Mississippi farmers" (334), indicating that many, if not most of the customers are African-American.

In Requiem for a Nun this man attends Mohataha and the Chickasaws' removal from Yoknapatawpha along with the "Federal land agent" (170).

The federal drug inspectors who audit the narcotics in Uncle Willy's drugstore in The Town criticize him for his poor security of the morphine (163).

The history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun treats the "Federal provost-marshals" who came to the defeated South charged with protecting the rights of the slaves who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War according to the then-popular pro-Southern accounts of Reconstruction: the elections they preside over are described as corrupted by carpetbaggers (87).

An A[rmy] P[rovost] M[arshal] is the head of a unit of military police. This "Federal A.P.M." in Go Down, Moses is one of the Yankee troops who are stationed in Mississippi as part of the post-war Reconstruction (277). He has a black mistress, the sister of Sickymo, which is why he ensures that Sickymo is made a marshal in Jefferson.

Gavin speculates in The Town that this "small though thrifty farmer" (157) finds the money to save his son-in-law's business.

The father of the woman who marries Mink Snopes in The Hamlet is a "roaring man of about fifty"; he's a widower who has a "magnificent quadroon mistress" and the owner of timber land that he harvests using unpaid convict labor that he acquires "through political influence or bribery or whatever" from the state of Mississippi (262).

In Go Down, Moses this "bank president," who tells Ike about the bank account in Ike's name that Cass Edmonds has been paying money into (295), is certainly not Bayard Sartoris, who is also a Jefferson bank president at the time of the novel. This "bank president" is never named, but although the text is not explicit, it seems likely that he is the father of the woman - also never named - whom Ike marries.

The father of Eck Snopes' first wife is unnamed, despite the fact that his "name" figures in The Hamlet. This needs explaining, and the text does try to do that. Eck's (also unnamed) wife dies sometime after the child is born, and her mother, according to Eck, began calling him "after his grandpa" - that is, presumably, her husband (295). But (as Eck 'explains') "he never had no actual name," and we never learn what his grandmother called him (295). (This is the child who eventually gets called "Wallstreet Panic Snopes.")

The father of Vynie Snopes in The Hamlet. He has never approved of her marriage to Ab Snopes. According to Ratliff, one day he "druv up in a wagon and loaded her and the furniture into it and told Ab" if he ever came back into Vynie's life, "he would shoot him" (33-34).

In Sanctuary Ruby's father's last name may be "Lamar." Popeye calls Ruby by that name once (10). What we can say for sure about her father is that he "runs his family" very aggressively, cursing his son for wanting to be the one to kill Ruby's boyfriend Frank and then shooting Frank himself (58). He calls his daughter a "whore" for wanting to elope (58).

In Light in August, this man is mentioned by one of the workers at the planing mill, who says his "pappy" told him how "folks" in Jefferson felt the Burden place "ought to be burned, with a little human fat meat to start it good" (49).

The father of the Chickasaw Indian who narrates "A Courtship" advises Ikkemotubbe about the best strategy for courting Herman Basket's sister, and helps Owl-by-Night look for Ikkemotubbe's horse. Along with "the young men," he also stokes the fire in the steamboat at the end of the story (380), which leaves open a possibility that the text never develops: perhaps like Ikkemotubbe, the narrator's father "went away" from the plantation (362).

The father of the woman whom Reverend Hightower marries is also a minister, and a teacher at the seminary where she and Hightower meet.

In The Sound and the Fury Dilsey refers to someone she calls "pappy" when she threatens Luster: "You just wait till your pappy come home" (59). This is the novel's only reference to the man who is Luster's father. In the account of the Compsons and the Gibsons that Faulkner wrote 16 years after The Sound and the Fury was published - familiarly known as "Appendix Compson" - Faulkner says that Frony "married a pullman porter and went to St Louis to live" (343).

The father of the "boy" who goes rabbit hunting with Chick and Aleck in Intruder in the Dust is "one of Edmonds' tenants," i.e. a share cropper on the Edmonds plantation (4).

This man is a tenant farmer who works land owned by Jack Houston's father. In The Hamlet Jack Houston engages in a relationship with his daughter (228).

The father of the unnamed Negro who marries Fonsiba is only mentioned in passing in Go Down, Moses, but occupies a significant place in the Yoknapatawpha fiction as an African American who served in the Union army. There were in historical fact almost 180,000 'Colored troops' during the Civil War, serving in both non-combat and combat roles, but until recently these men were largely invisible in American representations of that war. This man is the only black "Yankee" soldier in Faulkner's work (261).

In The Hamlet the father of one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend who courted Eula before her marriage eventually sells his son's neglected buggy to a "negro farm-hand" (165).

As Joseph Blotner points out, in a typescript for "The Old People" the father of the story's narrator is referred to as "Mr Compson" (presumably the Mr. Compson who is Benjy, Caddy, Quentin and Jason's father), but the character is given no name at all in this magazine version of the story. All we can say with certainty about him is that he belongs to Yoknapatawpha's upper-class, owns a farm four miles from Jefferson and has an office in town. He goes hunting every November with Major de Spain, Walter Ewell, Boon Hogganbeck and Uncle Ike McCaslin.

The man who was Addie Bundren's father is mentioned in only two paragraphs in As I Lay Dying. We learn from several sources that Addie's "people" lived in Jefferson (171), though we are not given any idea where or what their family name was. We are also told that by the time she meets Anse Bundren, all Addie's family are now buried "in the cemetery" in town (171). Her father is the one member of this family who is individuated, though he exists in the novel only as a voice that she remembers saying "that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead" a long time (175).

These Yoknapatawpha farmers are part of "Knight's Gambit" in two ways. As a larger group, they become part of the audience that watches as Mr. Harriss transforms a traditional county plantation into a kind of Hollywood set. Some of them cross "the whole county" to watch the landscapers and builders at work (161), and "farmers" are specifically included in the groups of spectators who attend the sporting events that are staged there (163).

In Go Down, Moses a growing number of local men join the hunters at Major de Spain’s camp to see Lion hunt down Old Ben. The men have a stake in the hunt: they “had fed Old Ben corn and shoats and even calves for ten years” (224). They are described as “in their own hats and hunting coats and overalls which any town negro would have thrown away or burned and only the rubber boots strong and sound, and the worn and blueless guns and some even without guns” (224).

These are the local Yoknapatawpha men in "Hand upon the Waters" who own the "topless and battered cars, the saddled horses and mules and the wagons, the riders and drivers of which" Gavin Stevens knows by name (72). The men show up to Lonnie Grinnup's inquest in their "clean Saturday overalls and shirts and the bared heads and the sunburned necks striped with the white razor lines of Saturday neck shaves" (72). Among these men are the "folks" who go out to view Grinnup's camp and trotline later and see Joe hanging about (77).

In Intruder in the Dust when Chick sees a truck parked outside his house, he assumes it belongs to someone like "a farmer whose stray cow or mule or hog had been impounded by a neighbor" (72). Although he is wrong, Chick even imagines what this hypothetical person looks like: "a man with a shaved sun-burned neck in neat tieless Sunday shirt and pants" (73).

In The Hamlet this man owns the farm where Ike Snopes finds food for his cow. He is a "man past middleage" with a "grim and puritanical affinity for abstinence and endurance" (211); angry at the loss of his feed and a feed basket, he angrily pursues Ike through the woods.

Quentin MacLachan Compson's mother's family lives in the Scottish highlands at Perth, and raise him there after her death.

In As I Lay Dying, Addie tells Anse Bundren before they marry that "I have people. In Jefferson" - adding when he worries about what such "town folks" will think of him, that "they're in the cemetery" (171). Supposedly re-uniting Addie with her deceased family is the reason for the Bundrens' trek to that same cemetery, but the novel never mentions them again - not even when the Bundrens do finally get to the cemetery.

In "Beyond" Judge Allison mentions the "extra groom" who went with the Allison family when they rode to church in order to tend his son's pony while they were in services (790). "Groom" here means a person employed to take care of horses.

Although Flags in the Dust does not describe this "youth" in any detail, it does specify the "practical joke" for which he was expelled "from the state university": "he had removed the red lantern from the barrier about a street excavation and hung it above the door of the girls' dormitory" (186).

In Requiem for a Nun these "young men from Brooklyn (exchange students at Mississippi or Arkansas or Texas universities)" wave "tiny confederate battle flags" at college football games (194). Calling out-of-state students "exchange students" is an odd formulation, suggesting that 'the North' they come from is essentially a different country - as of course it would have been to the Confederates who originally carried those flags during the Civil War.

In "Dry September" one of the men in the barber shop who debate whether to take vigilante action against Will Mayes is a veteran. Like McLendon, "he too had been a soldier" in the First World War (172), and the narrator later refers to him as "the other ex-soldier" (176).

Two of the major characters in "Knight's Gambit" spend time in Europe before or after the First World War. During the decade Mrs. Harriss and her two children spend in pre-War Europe, the contents of her letters home from Europe relate tales "of the families of the porters and waiters who had been kind or at least gentle with her and the children, and of the postmen who delivered the mail from home" (167).

These "heiresses to European thrones" appear only inside a quasi-Homeric or mock-heroic simile when the narrator of Intruder in the Dust compares Willy Ingrum, who moves to Jefferson from Beat Four, marries "a town girl," and becomes the "town marshal" to the "petty Germanic princelings [who] come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones" (133). It's not clear if Faulkner is thinking of specific members of European royalty.

During his lengthy monologue about race in Chapter 7 of Intruder in the Dust, Gavin Stevens refers with clear contempt to what he calls "the coastal spew of Europe" that lives in the urban, industrial North, an undefined group that he juxtaposes to "the New Englander" who lives "back inland" away from the cities on the coast (150). The distinction is a hierarchical and even moral one: the traditional (i.e.

This good Samaritan in The Hamlet brings Eula home after the salesman who has been courting her took her to a dance in "a schoolhouse about eight miles away" - "and vanished" (147).

In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun "one of the Holston slaves - the cook's husband, the waiter-groom-hostler" - delivers Holston's demand for the lost lock after the bandits and the imprisoned militia have taken apart the jail and escaped (208, 14).

The men whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to as "the steamboat slaves" (367, 378) are the deckhands and firemen who do the physical work on board Captain Studenmare's riverboat.

The unnamed man whom "Red Leaves" calls "Issetibbeha's body servant" - though there is never any ambiguity about the fact that he is owned as a slave by the Choctaw chief - is the short story's central character, Faulkner's earliest non-white protagonist. According to tribal custom, after Issetibbeha's death he must be killed and buried too; the story's main action focuses on his thoughts and actions as he attempts to escape this fate. Although he is not given a name, the story does give him a biography.

There are two references in "Appendix Compson" to the slaves who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the Civil War. The term "slaves" appears only in reference to the "shiftless slaves" owned by the descendants of the Chickasaw tribe who remain in the region after the Indian Removal (329). But the Compson family, like the other "masters of plantations" in Yoknapatawpha, owned a number of slaves as well (328).

Slavery is one of the central themes of Go Down, Moses. There are separate entries in the database for specific individuals and groups of slaves in the novel. This entry represents the slaves who appear in a number of general references to the human beings who were enslaved until the end of the Civil War.

Absalom!'s narrative speculates - hyperbolically - about the existence of a "special" slave in the lawyer's office, whose sole job is to carry faked reports about Sutpen's whereabouts to Bon's mother (244).