Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
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1442 | Unc Few Mitchell |
In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished, Louvinia mentions "Unc Few Mitchell" to help Bayard and Ringo appreciate the performance Colonel Sartoris puts on for the Union troops who had ridden up to the plantation in search of him. According to her, he was "born loony" (34, 73). From the way she talks about him, it seems very likely that he is another enslaved person on the Sartoris plantation, but that is not explicitly said. |
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2511 | Tyler Ballenbaugh |
In "Hand upon the Waters," Tyler Ballenbaugh is "a farmer, married and with a family and a reputation for self-sufficiency and violence," and for having won large "sums" as a gambler (75). That reputation returns with him from the time he spent "out West" (75). After his return to Yoknapatawpha, he continues to gamble, by speculating in "cotton futures" and even betting on Lonnie's Grinnup's life expectancy (75). He is cool and levelheaded in comparison with his younger brother. |
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3661 | Ty Cobb |
During Ty Cobb's career as an outfielder with the Detroit Tigers (1905-1921) he set 90 baseball records. In The Reivers Lucius expects the grandson to whom he is telling the story in 1961 to recognize his name along with Babe Ruth's. |
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946 | Turpin 3 |
This is the younger of the two Turpins mentioned in The Mansion. Like the older one, he is associated with Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the hill country. Gavin Stevens recalls that he failed to "answer his draft call" during World War II (459). He is presumably related to the older Turpin, and perhaps to the Turpin family that appears in Flags in the Dust, but the novel does not say how. |
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1321 | Turpin 2 |
In The Mansion the name "Turpin" comes up in two different chronological contexts. Both are associated with Frenchman's Bend, but this is the earlier of the two, the "Turpin" who is listed among the five local young men who are courting Eula Varner in the early 20th century (133). |
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492 | Turpin 1 |
In Flags in the Dust Turpin is the Frenchman's Bend farmer (or tenant farmer) at whose "low, broken backed log house" Byron Snopes stops on his flight from Jefferson after robbing the bank (279). Two Frenchman's Bend 'Turpins' appear in The Mansion at the other end of Faulkner's career, but how they are related to this one is never explained. |
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2731 | Turner Ashby |
Turner Ashby led a cavalry brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. The historical event Cass refers to in Go Down, Moses - how "by chance" Turner Ashby lost and the Union army found "Lee's battle-order" for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's first invasion of the North in 1862 - is a famous piece of Civil War history; the order itself, Special Order 191, is often referred to as the 'Lost Dispatch' or the 'Lost Order' (272). Ashby himself was killed in combat in 1862. |
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2053 | Turl |
The Negro fireman who works the night shift at the Jefferson power plant is named "Turl" in "Centaur in Brass" and "Tomey's Turl Beauchamp" in The Town, which re-tells the story of Flem Snopes' attempt to create a rivalry between him and Tom-Tom, the Negro fireman who works the day shift. In The Mansion's reference to this episode in the town's - and Flem's - history, both these men are referred to together as "them two mad skeered Negro firemen" (183). |
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769 | Tull, Daughters of Vernon |
The children of Frenchman's Bend farmer Vernon Tull and his wife are all girls, but there is no consensus among the fictions about how many daughters they have. In the earliest representation of the Tull family, As I Lay Dying, there are two, named Eula and Kate. In "Spotted Horses" there are three - none named. In The Hamlet, there are four, again not named; though one of these girls is referred to as the "biggest" when all four appear at the Snopes trial, they are described as a unit when they "turn their heads as one head" (357). |
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1861 | Tull Family |
Sanctuary simply refers to the people eating dinner when Ruby comes in to use the phone as "Tull's family" (105). The story "Spotted Horses" (which was published a few months after Sanctuary) is a bit more forthcoming, listing "his wife and three daughters and Mrs. Tull's aunt." On that basis we identify the gender of the family as "female." |
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768 | Tull |
Among the suitors for Eula Varner listed in The Mansion are "Tulls" (130). Tulls appear in almost a dozen fictions; most of them are either Vernon Tull or identifiable as members of his immediate family. The Tull or Tulls courting Eula are unlikely to be Vernon, but presumably are somehow related to him. |
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3446 | Tug Nightingale |
The son of Jefferson's cobbler and himself the local house painter, Tug Nightingale is over thirty years old when he enlists - over his father's furious objections - in the U.S. Army at the start of World War I in The Mansion. He serves in the War as a cook. |
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880 | Tubbs|Euphus Tubb |
The jailer in the three novels set in mid-20th century Yoknapatawpha is a man named "Tubbs" in Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun, and "Euphus Tubb" in The Mansion. In the first novel he is described as a "snuffy untidy pot-bellied man with a harried concerned outraged face" (51); although when Lucas Beauchamp is brought into his jail accused of killing a white man, he complains about having to risk his life "protecting a goddamn stinking nigger" "for seventy-five dollars a month," he is nonetheless faithful to his "oath of office" (52). |
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3632 | Tubbs Children |
The Tubbs' children in Intruder in the Dust are mentioned when he tells Gavin, "I got a wife and two children" (52). |
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490 | Trumbull |
Trumbull first appears in The Hamlet as the man who has been the blacksmith of Frenchman's Bend for "almost twenty years" (69). An elderly man who is "hale, morose and efficient," his character "invites no curiosity" until he is displaced by two of Flem Snopes' cousins, I.O. and Eck (73). Immediately afterward he disappears from Frenchman's Bend, driving "through the village with his wife, in a wagon loaded with household goods," and is never seen again (72). |
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2890 | Top |
As Charles Mallison notes in The Town, "he was Guster's boy and his father was named Top too so they called him Big Top and Top Little Top" (55). Charles however always calls him "Top" in the few places where he appears. He and Gowan Stevens try to help Gavin by setting a trap for De Spain's car. |
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1782 | Tommy |
Barefoot, "shambling," with "matted and foul" hair (10) and a "rapt empty gaze" (113), Tommy in Sanctuary helps Lee make bootleg whiskey and, when Lee is not watching, drinks it too. He has been a familiar figure "for fifteen years about the countryside" (113), and occasionally in town, but no one in Yoknapatawpha knows his last name. His behavior disconcerts both Horace and Temple. Lee and Ruby both call him a "feeb" (9, 128). He is feeble-minded but kind-hearted. After Gowan deserts Temple, Tommy loses his life trying to protect her from Popeye. |
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138 | Tomey's Turl |
In Go Down, Moses Tomey's Turl is both the son and the grandson of the white man, Old Carothers McCaslin, who owned his grandmother and mother. The name by which he is known, Tomey’s Turl, instead of simply Terrel, underscores his ties to his mother, Tomey, but Hubert Beauchamp puts in words the paternal identity that makes white men nervous around Tomey's Turl: he is "that damn white half-McCaslin" (7). And actually, as Ike discovers in the plantation ledgers, he is 'three-quarters' McCaslin, though his incestuous origin is not ever mentioned explicitly. |
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132 | Tomasina |
In Go Down, Moses, Tomey, born Tomasina, is listed in the McCaslin ledgers as the daughter of Thucydus and Eunice, slaves on the McCaslin plantation. Biologically, however, she was fathered by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owned her and who was also her father. Like her mother, Tomey was a slave on the McCaslin plantation, and also like her mother, she was impregnated by Lucius McCaslin. She dies giving birth to their child. |
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1327 | Tom-Tom Bird |
As "Tom-Tom" in "Centaur in Brass" and as "Tom Tom" in The Town, he works as the day fireman for Jefferson's power plant. (In this context a 'fireman' is someone who keeps a fire in a boiler burning, not one who puts fires out.) In both texts he is a "big bull of a man weighing two hundred pounds, "sixty years old," and married to a young wife he maintains "with the strict jealous seclusion of a Turk in a cabin about two miles down the railroad track from the plant" (16, 152). |
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939 | Tom 2 |
The "Tom" in The Town is a customer at the Sartoris bank who cannot read Colonel Sartoris' handwriting on the loan he is trying to take out (147-148). |
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487 | Tom 1 |
In "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses, the deputy who helps arrest Lucas and George is named Tom - though he is unnamed until the sheriff gently rebukes him by name (218, 64). In both texts he is described as with the words "plump" and "voluble" (217, 62); he does most of the talking during the arraignment, and displays some racial pride in the way he explains how easy it was to discover where the black men had hidden the still. |
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486 | Tobe 2 |
The narrator of "A Rose for Emily" describes Tobe as "an old man-servant - a combined gardener and cook" (119), and never refers to him except as "the Negro" or "the Negro man" (120, 122, etc.). The only time we hear his name is when Emily uses it to summon him (121). He appears to have been in her employ since he was "young man" (122), and at least since the time her father died. Earlier drafts of "A Rose for Emily" include an extended conversation between him and Emily. His role in the published version of the story is entirely silent and elusive. |
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938 | Tobe 1 |
This "Tobe" appears in Flags in the Dust as the hostler working for the white horse trader who owns the stallion Young Bayard tries to ride; according to the trader, Tobe is the only person the horse allows to handle him. |
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275 | Thucydides McCaslin |
The slave Thucydides/Thucydus only appears in the novel Go Down, Moses by way of the McCaslin plantation ledgers, but the story outlined there is striking. He is the son of Roskus and Fibby and the husband who marries Eunice in the same year she is made pregnant by Old Carothers McCaslin, the white man who owns all four of these slaves. He was born in North Carolina. In his will Old Carothers bequeaths him land, but like Ike McCaslin, Thucydides renounces this inheritance. Instead, according to the ledgers, he chooses "to stay [on the plantation] and work it out" - i.e. |
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280 | Three Unspecified Snopeses |
During Flem's funeral at the end of The Mansion, Gavin Stevens notices three people whom he has never seen before, and he knows almost immediately that "they are Snopeses," with "country faces" that make him think of "wolves come to look at the trap where another bigger wolf . . . died" (463). These are the last members of the family Faulkner creates, and as an anonymous group they seem meant to suggest how futile is the effort to defeat 'Snopesism.' |
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1402 | Three Basket |
In "Red Leaves" Three Basket is about sixty years old and, like Louis Berry, described as "squat," "burgher-like; paunchy" - and more metaphorically, as well as more exotically, as having a "certain blurred serenity like [a] carved head on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra" (313). He wears "an enameled snuffbox" as an earring (313). Apparently he is a kind of overseer on the Indian plantation. Along with Louis Berry, he spends six days tracking down a Issetibbeha's servant, often remembering Doom's death, which was the last time a runaway slave had to be captured and killed. |
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2665 | Thorpe Brothers |
"Them two brothers" - as Mrs. Pruit calls them in "Tomorrow" - are "black-complected" like their sister (105). They feel sorry for Fentry when they arrive to claim that sister's child, now three years old, and give Fentry a "money purse" to compensate him for the loss (106). He flings it away. |
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2834 | Thorne Smith |
Thorne Smith wrote wildly popular fantasy novels that were known for their provocative illustrations and plots that include much drinking, sex, and humor. According to "Appendix Compson," the "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" in Faulkner's Jefferson hide the copies of Smith's books that they borrow from and return to the library "carefully wrapped" inside newspapers (333). |
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3051 | Thompson, Daughter of Pappy |
This woman - referred to only as "Pappy Thompson's daughter" and the mother of Roz - does not appear in Light in August herself (323). |
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258 | Thomas Sutpen's Sister 3 |
The Sutpens' family cabin in the mountains of Virginia is described in Absalom! as "boiling with children" (179), and the novel never makes it more clear how many siblings Thomas has. At least two sisters are alive and living with him and his father in Virginia when, at 14, he runs away from home (192). But there must have been more: at least, Quentin tells Shreve that, because of the "dampness" and heat in the Tidewater, "sisters and brothers" get sick "after supper and die before the next meal" (184). |
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257 | Thomas Sutpen's Sister 2 |
Based on the phrase "one of the sisters" in Absalom!, we can say that Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters (185). This entry is not the sister who gets pregnant, twice, during the family's trip from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia. |
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88 | Thomas Sutpen's Sister 1 |
Thomas Sutpen has at least two sisters: according to the narrative in Absalom!, "one of the sisters" altered their father's hand-me-down clothes to fit the young Thomas (185). This entry is for the "sister" who, during the family's move from the mountains to the Tidewater region of Virginia, gives birth in "a cowshed" to an illegitimate child (183), and gets pregnant again, though "still unmarried" (181), while they are still traveling. |
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84 | Thomas Sutpen's Mother |
As evoked in Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen's mother was "a mountain woman," "bred in the mountains," but in her case the mountains were in Scotland (195). According to Sutpen, she "never did quite learn to speak English" (195). Her husband calls her "a fine wearying woman," and it is suggested that she made him move from coastal Virginia to the mountains (180). Her death precipitates the husband's decision to return east; since there is an infant in the family when the move starts, it seems likely that she died in childbirth. |
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83 | Thomas Sutpen's Father |
Sutpen's father moves back to coastal Virginia after his wife's death, where he works ("or maybe supposes" to work, 185) on a large Tidewater plantation. He is characterized in Absalom! mainly by his habitual drunkenness, and his "harsh" belief in "his own worth" and "his own physical prowess" (186) - virtues that he seeks to establish by "whupping" a slave from a neighboring plantation (187). |
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256 | Thomas Sutpen's Brother 3 |
Absalom! does not make clear how many siblings Thomas Sutpen has. "The two older boys" - Sutpen's older brothers - have left the family before it moves to the Virginia plantation (181), but they are not his only male siblings: Quentin tells Shreve that, because of the "dampness" and heat in the Tidewater, "sisters and brothers" get sick "after supper and die before the next meal" (184). Even allowing for hyperbole, this implies that there must have been at least one or two brothers besides the two older ones. |
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87 | Thomas Sutpen's Brother 2 |
This is one of the Sutpen family's "two older boys" (that is, older than Thomas) who leave the family's home in the mountains "some time before" their mother dies and their father moves the family east (181). |
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86 | Thomas Sutpen's Brother 1 |
Thomas Sutpen comes from a large family, though Absalom! doesn't say exactly how large. He has at least two older brothers: these "two older boys" leave home "some time before" their mother dies and their father moves the family east (181). This is the brother who "had been as far West as the Mississippi River one time" even before the family left the mountains (183). |
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85 | Thomas Sutpen |
As the central figure in one of Faulkner's greatest novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen is a very different character, depending on which of the novel's story-tellers is telling his story. On the opening pages, for example, he is a dominant if demonic force that, according to Miss Rosa, is responsible for destroying the culture of the Old South. When he gets to tell his own story, however, as transmitted through three generations of Compsons, he appears as a traumatized small boy who is himself determined if not destroyed by the culture of the Old South. |
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1325 | Thomas Pettigrew's Mother |
The mother of the mail rider in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun was "from old Ferginny" (23). When she named her son "Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew," hoping that that famous name might bring her son some "luck," she also indirectly provided the county seat of Yoknapatawpha with its name (23). |
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485 | Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew |
In both "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun, the name of the "special rider" who carries the U.S. mail from Nashville to the Mississippi settlement - Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew - is the source for the name the county seat of Yoknapatawpha. In both texts he is small but stubborn, loyal to the regulations of the federal government but susceptible to the right kind of bribery. |
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1324 | Thomas Jefferson |
Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. President and indirect source of the name of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha, is only mentioned in two of the fictions: "A Name for City" and again in Requiem for a Nun. Both these texts explain how, by way of a mail carrier named Pettigrew, Jefferson acquired its name; neither says anything about Jefferson as a man or President. |
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747 | Theron Quick |
Theron Quick, who appears in The Hamlet as one of the suitors for Eula Varner's hand, could be Lon Quick's son, who appears elsewhere in the novel and has a separate entry in our database. He is among the suitors who ambush McCarron, but ends up being beaten unconscious by Eula, who defends McCarron with her father's buggy whip. He is also one of the two Frenchman's Bend suitors who leave the area "suddenly overnight" once it is discovered that Eula is pregnant - though Ratliff believes both of these young men were "just wishing they had" (140). |
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3238 | Theron Adams |
In The Town Theron is the youngest son of Mayor Adams and Eve Adams; he declines Manfred de Spain's challenge to fight him. |
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204 | Theophilus McCaslin 2 |
In the short story "Lion" Theophilus McCaslin is the grandson of Uncle Ike McCaslin, and a member of the hunting party. (This character never appears in any other story, but later Faulkner uses the name "Theophilus McCaslin" for Ike's father. Those later texts also say that Ike never has any children.) |
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133 | Theophilus McCaslin 1 |
Theophilus McCaslin - better know as "Uncle Buck" - is a son of Old Carothers McCaslin, the twin brother of Buddy, and the father of Ike. While Buddy appears in only two texts, Buck is present or mentioned in ten of them. He is actually called "Theophilus" when he attends the burial of Charles Bon in Absalom! and sends him off as a "Confedrit soldier" (122); the passage contains no hint of the larger McCaslin family or this man's place in it. |
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3415 | Theodore Bilbo |
The man whom Ratliff, facetiously, refers to as "our own Bilbo in Mississippi" in The Mansion was a racist and an outspoken supporter of the Jim Crow system of segregation. He was elected twice as Governor of Mississippi and later three times as a U.S. Senator (179). Two rural white characters in Yoknapatawpha (Bilbo Snopes and Bilbo Gowrie) were named after him. |
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3459 | Thelma |
Thelma is a "new girl" at Miss Reba's brothel in The Mansion (89); Reba tells Mink that she "just came in last week" (84). Apparently she forgets to ask Strutterbuck for money before having sex with him. |
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2748 | The Jew |
Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277). |
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147 | Tennie's Jim|James Beauchamp |
Although always a minor character, this black man reveals a lot about how Faulkner's imagination led him into and out of the haunted issue of slavery and its legacy. In his first published appearance he is "Tennie's Jim" in the hunting story "The Bear"; in that character he's a revised version of "Jimbo," one of the servants Major de Spain takes with him in "The Old People" on his annual hunting trips into the big woods. |
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139 | Tennie Beauchamp |
Tennie was born a slave and worked on the Beauchamp plantation. In Go Down, Moses she is won in a card game by Buddy McCaslin, and brings the surname "Beauchamp" with her when she comes to the McCaslin plantation and marries a McCaslin slave (and half-brother to Buddy and Buck McCaslin) named Tomey's Turl. Together they have six children, three of whom - James ("Tennie's Jim"), Sophonsiba ("Fonsiba"), and Lucas - survive into adulthood. Also at the McCaslin place, she nurses the infant Ike McCaslin. |
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1434 | Tennant |
All we know about this Confederate brigade commander mentioned in The Unvanquished is that when John Sartoris returns to Mississippi after being demoted by his troops, "Uncle Buddy" McCaslin apparently stays behind as a sergeant "in Tennant's brigade in Virginia" (51). |
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223 | Temple Drake Stevens |
As Temple Drake, she is the principal character in Sanctuary (1931); as Temple Drake Stevens, she is at the center of the dramatic portions of Requiem for a Nun. She is (as she says frequently in the first novel) the daughter of a judge, a member of an aristocratic family, and a very complex young woman. In the first novel she is a seventeen-year-old college student, "a small childish figure no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman" (89), the heir to southern traditions trying on the contemporary role of flapper. |
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225 | Temple and Gowan's Daughter |
When Requiem for a Nun begins, the baby daughter of Gowan and Temple Drake Stevens has been murdered by Nancy. |
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64 | T.P. Gibson |
T.P. (Faulkner never explains what the initials stand for) is the second son of Dilsey and Roskus, and like them lives as a servant on the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury. As a young man he takes his brother Versh's place as Benjy's caretaker, and helps his father with the Compsons' horses and cow. In 1910 he gets memorably drunk on the champagne - "sassprilluh," T. P. calls it (37) - that has been bought for Caddy's wedding. In 1928 he no longer lives on the Compson property, but still drives the carriage for Mrs. Compson's Sunday afternoon trips to the cemetery. |
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2877 | Sylvester's John |
Although his name evokes the way enslaved Negroes were often named, Sylvester's John is actually one of the young Chickasaw men who are interested in Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship" - until it becomes clear that Ikkemotubbe wants her. After that, he is one of the young men who willingly help Ikkemotubbe's courtship. |
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91 | Sutpen Infant 3 |
This is the second of the two illegitimate Sutpen children that one of Thomas' older sisters gives birth to before the family reaches the end of their journey in the Tidewater area of Virginia. |
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90 | Sutpen Infant 2 |
This is the first of the two illegitimate Sutpen children in Absalom! that one of Thomas' older sisters gives birth to during the family's journey across Virginia; he or she was born in "a cowshed" (183). |
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89 | Sutpen Infant 1 |
At the time the Sutpens begin traveling east in Absalom!, this youngest member of the family "couldn't even walk yet" (180). The novel's sequence of events implies that his mother died giving birth to him or her, and that death precipitated the father's decision to move back to Tidewater - but that isn't made explicit. |
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93 | Sutpen Ancestors and Descendants |
After the young Thomas Sutpen is turned away from the front door of the Tidewater plantation house in Absalom!, he suddenly recognizes his responsibility to "all the men and women that had died to make him" and "all the living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead" (178). |
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1980 | Susan Reed |
Susan Reed is an orphan who is taken care of by the Burchett family in "Hair"; possibly she is their niece or cousin, but the narrator hints that she may be the illegitimate child of either Mr. or Mrs. Burchett. We first encounter her as a "thin little girl," "about five" years old, with "big scared eyes," and "straight, soft hair, not blonde and not brunette" (131). Once she reaches adolescence, however, her innocent look disappears and she becomes promiscuous, with "flimsy off-color clothes" and a "face watchful and bold and discreet all at once" (135). |
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3399 | Suratt, Oldest Brother of V.K. |
V.K. Suratt's "oldest brother" appears briefly in Flags in the Dust as the person who taught him how "to chop cotton" fast if he wanted to keep from losing his toes (137). |
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3398 | Suratt, Grandfather of V.K. |
While drinking moonshine with Young Bayard and Hub in Flags in the Dust, V.K. Suratt tells them about the time Doctor Peabody amputated his "granpappy's laig," using whiskey as the anesthetic (136). |
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3397 | Suratt, Family of V.K. |
In the story V.K. Suratt tells in Flags in the Dust about Doctor Peabody amputating his grandfather's leg, he mentions that the whiskey and (presumably) the pain caused "granpappy" to "cuss and sing so scandalous" that "the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn" until the operation was over (136). (Suratt himself appears frequently in the fictions, in the later ones as V.K. Ratliff. His character remains essentially the same, but in those later fictions the Ratliff family is different from this Suratt one.) |
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1511 | Sue |
Either Hub's daughter or, less likely, his sister. She does not appear in Flags in the Dust, but Hub tells his wife that Sue will "have to milk" the cow because he is going to town with Bayard and Suratt (138). |
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2916 | Sudley Workitt |
The man who owns the timber that Vinson and Crawford Gowrie are harvesting in Intruder in the Dust is first referred to as "Uncle Sudley Workitt" (215), and later identified as the boys' mother's "second or fourth cousin or uncle or something" (217). He is described as "an old rheumatic man" and "half blind" (219). |
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75 | Stuart MacCallum |
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 Rafe, Stuart is named after the famous Confederate cavalry general, J.E.B. Stuart. He also appears in As I Lay Dying, but not as Stuart - because Samson cannot remember his first name. Like his brothers, he is a 'tall man': honorable, strong, stoic. |
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993 | Stovall |
In "That Evening Sun," Mr. Stovall, the cashier in the Jefferson bank and "a deacon in the Baptist church," knocks Nancy to the ground and "kicks her in the mouth" when she accuses him of having failed to pay her for sex (291). In Requem for a Nun, where Nancy reappears as a major character, Temple Drake re-tells this event; she does not name the man, but refers to him as a "pillar of the church" (96). |
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2661 | Stonewall Jackson Fentry |
Jackson Fentry is farmer and mill caretaker, who, at the beginning of "Tomorrow," refuses to acquit the Bookwright, who has shot and killed Buck Thorpe for seducing his seventeen-year-old daughter. It is discovered that to Fentry, Buck is the son he adopted from a young but dying poor-white woman to whom decades earlier he took in and married just before she died. The son was taken from him at three years of age, to grow up (badly) as a Thorpe, but to him the murdered man is still "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" (100). |
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270 | Stevens, Grandfather of Gavin |
The Stevenses are one of the older Yoknapatawpha families, but there is confusion about its earlier members. The first appearance of a Stevens is in "A Rose for Emily"; he is the eighty-year-old mayor of Jefferson referred to as "Judge Stevens" (122). According to Brooks, Dasher and Kirk, three of the scholars who create charts or indices of Faulkner's characters, this man is the same Judge Stevens who is Gavin's father in half a dozen other fictions. |
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1979 | Starneses in Alabama |
In "Hair," the Starneses in Division have "kin" (140) elsewhere in Alabama. The storekeeper and other neighbors in Division wonder if these folks will claim the Starnes house after Mrs. Starnes' death. |
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1657 | Squire |
In The Sound and the Fury the local justice of the peace or magistrate who hears the complaint against Quentin involving Julio's sister is referred to only as "Squire" (139). His courtroom is "a bare room smelling of stale tobacco" and "a scarred littered table," the book in which he enters Quentin's name is a "huge dusty" one, and he himself has "a fierce roach of iron gray hair" and wears "steel spectacles" (142). He fines Quentin but releases him without a formal charge. |
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3454 | Spoade II |
This is the younger Spoade, who in The Mansion follows his father's footsteps from South Carolina to Harvard. He is a classmate of Charles Mallison; he invites Charles "to Charleston to see what a Saint Cecilia ball looked like" (229). (The Saint Cecilia Society in Charleston is an upper class social club that was originally organized in 1766; its annual balls have been around since 1820.) |
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1656 | Spoade I |
In The Sound and the Fury Spoade is the last name of a senior at Harvard College with Quentin in 1910. He jokingly calls Shreve Quentin's "husband" (78). Quentin says Spoade has "five names, including that of a present English ducal house" (91-92), but he never thinks of him except as "Spoade" - his first name is never given. He is from South Carolina, and lives up to the image of a southern aristocrat in a number of ways besides his name, including the fact that he goes to chapel every day in dishabille. |
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2290 | Spilmer |
Spilmer may or may not still be alive, but the property above the ravine ditch where Mannie Hait hides and shoots a mule bears his name in both "Mule in the Yard" and The Town. |
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137 | Sophonsiba Beauchamp McCaslin |
Sophonsiba is Hubert Beauchamp's sister and the one who insists that their plantation be called "Warwick," as a claim on the family's purported connection to English royalty. The onstage role she plays in Go Down, Moses tends toward absurdity rather than elegance, in part because it is related through nine-year-old Cass Edmonds: "Her hair was roached under a lace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat" (12). |
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148 | Sophonsiba Beauchamp |
In Go Down, Moses Fonsiba Beauchamp is the fifth child of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She is named Sophonsiba after white mistress of the plantation where Tennie was enslaved. In 1886, at the age of seventeen, she marries a Northern black, and moves with him to a farm in Arkansas, where Ike McCaslin finds her and arranges for her $1000 inheritance to be issued to her in monthly installments. Although Ike attempts to remove her from the squalor of her new life in Arkansas, her priorities are evident in the two words she offers in return: "I'm free" (267). |
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1983 | Sophie Starnes |
In "Hair," Sophie Starnes is the daughter of landowners in Alabama. She is said to be a "thin, unhealthy" girl, with "straight hair not brown and not yellow" (139). Over her mother's objections, she becomes engaged to Henry Stribling - AKA Hawkshaw - the "son of a tenant farmer" (138). Before they can marry, however, Sophie dies of "some kind of fever" (138). |
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1518 | Sophia Wyatt |
Sally Wyatt's older sister is named Sophia in Flags in the Dust; she runs the household in which the three elderly Wyatt sisters live "in a capable shrewish fashion" (175). |
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2228 | Sophia Allison |
The mother of Judge Allison in "Beyond," Sophia, was a sickly woman and highly overprotective of her son. Howard's aunts ran the house, patronizing Sophia and keeping Howard under control; Sophia herself is also very controlling of her son. On those occasions when she allowed him to go barefoot outside, for example, "I would know that for every grain of dust which pleasured my feet, she would pay with a second of her life" (790). |
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2325 | Sonny Barger |
Since his store is on or near the street in Jefferson that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls "Nigger Row," it's possible that Sonny Barger is black, but more likely that he is one of Jefferson's white small businessmen who cater to poor people of both races - like Willy in his drugstore (234). The fact that Barger sells the narrator a bottle of "Jamaica ginger" - a legal form of alcohol - suggests a seedy kind of establishment (234). |
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3700 | Son Thomas |
In The Reivers Son Thomas is "the youngest driver" who works at Maury Priest's livery stable (4). The "Son" in his name is not connected to any specific parents. |
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1463 | Son of Professor and Mrs. Wilkins |
In The Unvanquished the son of Professor and Mrs. Wilkins' was killed in "almost the last battle" of the Civil War, which would have been sometime in 1865 (214). When he died, he was about the same age as Bayard is in "An Odor of Verbena." |
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1769 | Son of Lee and Ruby |
The narrator of Sanctuary tells us that Lee and Ruby's child is "not a year old" the first time he appears in the story - sleeping in a box behind the stove, where "the rats cant get to him" (18). Ruby is carrying him or caring for him throughout the rest of the novel. His appearance is another of the novel's unsettling elements. When Horace looks at him lying on a bed, for example, the child is "flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps" (135). |
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241 | Son of Byron Snopes 2 |
In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.) |
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240 | Son of Byron Snopes 1 |
In The Town Byron Snopes has four children with an unnamed Apache woman in New Mexico. They are probably all legally illegitimate, and all are wearing overalls when they get off the train station in Jefferson. None are named, but two are specifically identified as "boys" (378). Charles Mallison's narrative does not differentiate between these boys. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.) |
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2483 | Son of Bill Terrel |
At his murder trial in "Monk," Bill Terrel tries to blame his son for the crime. This son both denies the charge and "proves an alibi," resulting in his father's conviction (59). |
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122 | Sometimes-Wakeup |
Sometimes-Wakeup is one of Doom's two uncles in "A Justice," the brother of the Man prior to Doom, and he lives "by himself in a cabin by the creek" (349). He is apparently a recluse, whom the People only see when they take him food. After Doom murders the Man and the Man's son, Sometimes-Wakeup is next in the order of succession, though he declines to accept the position. |
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745 | Solon Quick |
There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon and Lon Quick are one character. Dasher and Kirk, on the other hand, separate them into two characters, which is what we also do in our data. This entry is for Solon, who appears in three Yoknapatawpha fictions as one of the farmers in the Bend. He is a major character in the comic "Shingles for the Lord," where he and Res Grier try to out-smart each other in a dog-and-work swapping transaction. |
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1508 | Sol |
In Flags in the Dust Sol is the porter who helps Horace with his luggage when he returns to Jefferson from France. |
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3312 | Snopeses |
There are more Snopeses in the fictions than any other family. Over 60 named members of the family have their own entries in our database. |
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186 | Snopes, Twin Sister of Net |
While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. |
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277 | Snopes, Mother of Eck |
The mother of Eck is mentioned in The Hamlet because when Eck's first wife dies, Eck leaves their son, Wallstreet Panic, with his mother to raise, but she plays that role outside the narrative. She is also mentioned in the other two volumes in the Snopes trilogy, again in terms of something that happens outside the narrative, if it happens at all. Because Eck is such a good and generous person, in The Town Gavin Stevens declares that he 'must' be illegitimate, that his mother was committing adultery with someone not named Snopes when he was conceived. |
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2508 | Snopes, Descendants of Ab |
Many of the many Snopeses who appear in the fictions are "descendants" of Ab Snopes (6), but the specific group referred to in "Barn Burning" is made up of the unnamed Snopeses who are alive in "later years," later, that is to say, than the first introduction of automobiles into Yoknapatawpha - i.e. sometime after about 1920 (6). The narrative notes that the "same quality" that makes Ab handle his mules badly will characterize the way these future Snopeses try to "put a motor car into motion" (6). |
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296 | Snopes, Brother of Mink |
In The Mansion Mink Snopes tells the prison warden that Montgomery Ward Snopes is "my brother's grandson" (99). This is the only reference to Mink's brother in the fictions, and chronologically the possibility that a brother of Mink would have a grandchild Montgomery Ward's age is unlikely. Ratliff asks Montgomery Ward if Mink is his "cousin or uncle" (71); Montgomery refuses to answer, but in his own narrative chapter he refers to Mink as "Uncle Mink" (103). |
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301 | Snopes 4 |
The Mansion calls this Snopes "the last" in the sequence of Snopeses who move from Frenchman's Bend to Jefferson, and also "the old one" (136). He is extremely choleric: "fierce eyes under a tangle of eyebrows and a neck that would begin to swell and turn red" as soon as he felt challenged (136). He doesn't actually move into town, but reaches a point "in sight of the town clock" and then refuses to go further (136), settling into a place where he can wage war against the boys who try to raid his "water-melon patch" (137). Some people think he is "Mr Flem's father" (i.e. |
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297 | Snopes 3 |
This is one of the two Snopeses in The Town whose place in the family is impossible to determine. He is mentioned in connection with Ab Snopes' moving into Frenchman's Bend: "another Snopes had appeared from somewhere to take over the rented farm" that Ab had been working (6). Most of the Snopeses start out as tenant farmers, but there's no indication that this particular "Snopes" is one of the male Snopeses to whom the narrative gives a first name, though that is possible. |
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294 | Snopes 2 |
The one member of the Snopes family who appears in "Shingles for the Lord" is not given a first name, and only given two minor roles to play in the story: he brings the ladder to the church in his wagon (38), and is among the members of the congregation who are there to watch as the church burns down (41). |
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284 | Snopes 1 |
The "Mr Snopes" in Frenchman's Bend with whom Anse bargains for a new team of mules in As I Lay Dying is not given a first name (192). According to Armstid, he owns "three-four span[s]" of mules (184), which suggests he is a fairly prosperous farmer, perhaps even a landlord. According to Eustace Grimm, who "works Snopes' place," this farmer is the nephew of Flem Snopes (192) - if so, he is Flem's only nephew or niece in the fictions. |
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3452 | Smith, Father of McKinley |
McKinley Smith in The Mansion is the "son of an east Texas tenant farmer" (373). |