Character Keys

Ulysses Grant ended the Civil War as the Commander-in-Chief of all Union forces, and soon afterward became the nation's 18th President. He never appears directly in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but is mentioned in ten of them, always in connection with his leadership of the Union Army of Tennessee during and after the Vicksburg Campaign of 1862-1863. The reference to him in Sanctuary says he "came through the county" of Yoknapatawpha during that period (8; see also "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 136).

The "Garnett" referred to by Gavin in Intruder in the Dust in his nostalgic reference to the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg is General Richard Garnett, whose Confederate brigade led Pickett's disastrous charge against the center of the Union lines (190). He was trying to compensate for a stain on his military record when, feverish and injured, he insisted on leading his men from the front, on horseback. He was killed just before reaching the enemy lines.

In "Two Soldiers" the "General MacArthur" who was "holding" the Japanese invaders at bay in the Philipines in the nightly radio reports that the narrator and Pete listen to (82) was General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Army Forces in the Far East when the U.S. entered World War II. After the Japanese invasion forced him to withdraw from the Philippines, he spoke the parting words - "I shall return" - that were becoming famous at the time "Two Soldiers" was written.

General Burgoyne was a British commander who, as Eula puts it in The Town, "surrendered in the Revolution" after his forces were surrounded by a superior force of colonial soldiers (338). Historically his defeat had important results for the cause of American independence; in the novel, his surrender made V.K. Ratliff's ancestor the family's first American.

"Bee" (Bernard Elliott Bee, Jr.) was a newly appointed general from South Carolina when the battle of "First Manassas" was fought (36); although Requiem for a Nun does not mention it, he was mortally wounded during the fighting there.

Born James Joseph Tunney, "Gene" Tunney was an American professional boxer who became heavyweight champion by defeating Jack Dempsey in 1926, and again in 1927. In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses, his name is used along with three other famous heavyweight boxers to measure how highly the hunters of Yoknapatawpha regard the dog Lion and the bear Old Ben as heavyweights and champions too.

Gavin Stevens appears altogether in seventeen fictions, making him one of Faulkner's most frequently recurring characters. Details about his past vary from text to text between "Hair" (1931) and The Mansion (1960) - "Hand Upon the Waters" describes him as the last remaining descendant of the original settlers of Yoknapatawpha; "Knight's Gambit" and The Mansion are the only texts to describe his service as a non-combatant in World War I. And in those two later texts he abruptly marries a former sweetheart, though elsewhere he appears to be a confirmed bachelor.

In The Town Mr. Garraway inherits his general store and its "worn counter" from his father (328).

Gabe is identified in The Reivers as "the blacksmith" at Priest's livery stable (6). "Though short, he was a tremendously big man," one of whose knees is "terrifically twisted from an old injury in his trade" (9).

Frony Gibson is a member of the black family that lives on the Compson place as servants, and the daughter of Roskus and Dilsey. In The Sound and the Fury she appears in Benjy's memories as a child about the same age as Quentin and Caddy Compson, and in the last section as an adult who still lives close enough to Dilsey to walk to church with her mother on Easter Sunday. She is also Luster's mother, though the novel does not indicate if she has a husband or if, like Caddy's daughter, Luster was conceived out of wedlock.

In "That Will Be Fine" this is the Fred who is the young son of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

Mr. Fraser is the "childless widower" who takes Monk in after his grandmother's death and teaches him how to make whiskey as well as he made it himself (45). They live together for ten years, until Fraser's death. The narrator of "Monk" speculates that "it was probably Fraser who gave [Monk his] name," and the citizens of "the county got to know [Monk] or become familiar with him, at least" through his association with Fraser (45).

In "Ad Astra," Franz is the elder of a pair of twins who are younger brothers to the captured German officer. When his older brother refuses to become baron, Franz, as next in line, is passed over because he is already committed to the career of a military officer. Franz becomes baron designate when the younger twin is killed in Berlin by a jealous husband. Franz progresses through the ranks from colonel to "general of staff" (419), but near the end of the War is assassinated by a German soldier in Berlin.

"Frank" is mentioned in Sanctuary by Ruby in the bitter conversation she has with Temple. He was a young suitor who wanted to elope with her, but when he insisted on going back to her house to tell her father about their intentions, "father shot him" (58). As Ruby says, Frank "wasn't a coward" (58). To Ruby's brother, who also wants to kill him, Frank is "the goddam son of a bitch in his yellow buggy" (58) - a detail that suggests Frank might be more prosperous than her family.

First mentioned in The Mansion as "that one in Spain" on a list that includes "Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany" (183), included by name on the later "Hitler and Mussolini and Franco" (214), General Francisco Franco led the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, coming to power afterward as the country's right-wing dictator. He remained in power until the 1970s.

Francis Benbow is the father of Will Benbow, and grandfather of Horace and Narcissa. He is only mentioned in Flags in the Dust, where the narrative notes that he brought back a lantana tree "from Barbados in a tophat-box in '71 [i.e. 1871]" (164). When he went to the island, however, or what he did there, is not explained.

The oldest of Nub Gowrie's six sons in Intruder in the Dust. Twenty years ago he "wrenched himself free" of his father, got married and became the manager of a cotton plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi (160).

In The Hamlet Mink Snopes tells Ratliff that "our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece" (84). The three Snopeses here are Mink himself, Flem and Isaac. This earlier generation of the Snopes family is never clearly brought into focus, but since we know that Flem has more than two 'cousins,' the implication of this bequest is that his grandfather - Ab's father, who is not mentioned in this novel - married twice, and that this grandmother is one of his two wives.

In the beginning was Flem Snopes. He is the very first character who appears in the very first fiction about Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner sat down to write. He is the "Father Abraham" in the title of that unfinished text, which was going to tell the story of Flem's rise from tenant farmer's son in Frenchman's Bend to bank president in Jefferson, from a sharecropper's cabin to The Mansion - as the final volume of the Snopes trilogy that Faulkner finished over three decades later is titled.

There's no question that the Stevenses are one of the oldest families in Yoknapatawpha, but they may or may not be among the very first. When the most famous Stevens - Gavin - appears in Light in August, the narrator simply says his "ancestors" "owned slaves in Jefferson (444). In "Hand upon the Waters," however, one of the Knight's Gambit stories in which Gavin becomes a kind of detective, the narrator identifies the earliest "Stevens" as one of the first three white men to settle in what became Jefferson.

Ffollansbye, a British officer who also appears in Faulkner's non-Yoknapatawpha short story "Thrift," is the source of much of what the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" tells us about Sartoris and Spoomer. He doesn't seem to be a malicious gossip so much as a sardonic one. For example, commenting on Spoomer's Mons Star, an honor awarded for service in France or Belgium, he says, "it was one decoration you had to be on hand to get" (513), implying that Spoomer's uncle is responsible for his other honors.

In The Reivers Lucius briefly describes his Grandfather's father as a Confederate "color sergeant" who was shot and killed during the fighting in Virginia in 1862 (285). The fact that he was a sergeant rather than a commissioned officer complicates the question of the family's class status. When, for example, Lucius earlier discusses how his great-grandmother, this man's wife, taught his grandfather how to behave as a gentleman, it seems to imply an upper class background (cf.

At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne and Humphries are mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created.

The mother of Theron Adams in The Town is the "old fat wife" of Mayor Adams (11). To the younger people in Jefferson, she and her aged husband are disparagingly called Adam and "Miss Eve Adam" - a "fat old Eve" too old to tempt or be tempted (11).

When Eustace Grimm first appears in The Hamlet, he and his wife have just had a "baby born two months ago" (387). No other details, not even the baby's gender, are revealed, but since Eustace's mother is "Ab Snopes' youngest sister" (399), this child deserves a place on the Snopes family tree.

When Eustace Grimm first appears in the canon, in As I Lay Dying, he is simply someone who "works at Snopes’ place" (192); in that role he brings Anse the team of mules he traded for with Mr. Snopes. He plays a more complex role in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and again in The Hamlet, as the "youngish man" in overalls with a snuff stick in his mouth" from "the adjoining county" who seems to be competing with Suratt and Tull to buy the Old Frenchman place (147).

Euphrony is briefly mentioned in Flags in the Dust as Simon's dead wife, which presumably also makes her the mother of Elnora and Caspey (300). Since Elnora is described by the narrator as a "tall mulatto woman" (9), it seems to follow that Euphrony must have had a sexual relationship with a white man, but this novel makes no attempt to explore that issue. On the other hand, in "There Was a Queen" Elnora's mother is not named, but her (white) father is identified as Colonel John Sartoris. Again, however, no more is said about that.

Eunice Gant is a clerk at Wildermark's store. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Gants who move to Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend in "Miss Zilphia Gant," The Town doesn't mention the fact.)

In Flags in the Dust Eunice is the Benbows' cook. She expresses a sort of maternal concern about Horace's welfare. Narcissa tells her that "Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours" (309).

Eula is mentioned in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel (1929) and two short stories from the 1930s. She's simply Flem's "wife" in Flags in the Dust (166). The stories, however, introduce the character trait that will dominate her portrayal in the Snopes trilogy: her sexual attractiveness. As the youngest daughter of Will and Maggie Varner in "Spotted Horses" she's a "big, soft-looking" girl whom suitors swarm around "like bees around a honey pot" (166).

In Flags in the Dust the owner of the restaurant on the Square refers to "a man like Debs" as a better candidate for President than Woodrow Wilson (122); in The Mansion, at the other end of Faulkner's career, "Eugene Debs" is among the people on the list provided by Charles Mallison of "everybody they called communists now" (237). The historical Eugene V. Debs founded the International Workers of the World (IWW), and was the Socialist Party of America's candidate for President in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920.

Ernest Cotton is a bachelor and an unsuccessful farmer whose hapless attempt to avenge himself against a more prosperous neighbor is at the center of "The Hound." The narrator describes him as "a mild man in worn overalls, with a gaunt face and lack-luster eyes like a sick man" (157). He is also a murderer and would-be suicide, though unsuccessful at those as well. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he made Cotton's character a cousin of Flem named Mink Snopes.)

Mentioned first in The Reivers as "a Negro man" who works for Miss Ballenbaugh (75), Ephum presumably helps her farm, takes care of the horses of the men who stay there, and does other masculine chores around the place. Ned stays overnight at his home, which must be nearby.

In Intruder in the Dust Chick recalls Ephriam, Paralee's father, "an old man, a widower," living in her cabin and walking the roads at night: "not going anywhere, just moving, at times five and six miles from town before he would return at dawn to doze and wake all day" in a rocking chair (61). By consulting a white fortune-teller, Ephriam finds out where Maggie Mallison's lost ring can be found (69). And like Tomey's Turl in the short story "Was," he knows that it's "womens and children" who are best at getting uncommon things done (70).

In "Smoke," Emma Dukinfield is Judge Dukinfield’s daughter. She herself doesn't appear in the story, but the "small, curiously chased brass box" (25) that she brings back from Europe as a present for him plays a crucial role in solving the Judge's murder.

Miss Emily, as the narrator of "A Rose for Emily" explains, is “a tradition, a duty, and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (119). In other words, she is a recluse and a source of fascination for the townspeople of Jefferson, who keep a constant eye on her doings. She never married, and her domineering father kept potential suitors away from her, but after his death she had a potentially scandalous relationship with a single suitor, a Yankee stranger named Homer Barron.

The title character of "Elly" is eighteen years old. She "lives in Jefferson . . . with her father and mother and grandmother in a biggish house" (208). Elly has inherited her given name, Ailanthia, from her grandmother, a link that Faulkner uses to underscore the generational tension between the grandmother's Victorian sexual repression and Southern racial prejudices, and Elly's restlessness with these taboos.

This character is barely mentioned as "Mrs. Sutpen," Thomas' only wife, in "Wash," but as Ellen Coldfield Sutpen, his second wife in Absalom!, she presents a different image of the plantation mistress than someone like Rosa Millard, who presides over the Sartoris plantation in The Unvanquished. In Absalom! Ellen is the daughter of a merchant. She is described as "small-boned" but also "what is known as fullbodied" (51). According to the storytellers, Sutpen marries her to gain respectability.

The Edmonds family descends from Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin "by the distaff" - that is, from McCaslin's daughter rather than one of his sons (5). The first Edmonds in this line may have been the man who married that daughter, or could just as easily be the man who married the daughter of that daughter - the novel provides no information about the sequence, nor any information at all about this man.

In Sanctuary Ed Walker is the county jailer. Apparently he was reluctant to allow Ruby and her child to spend a night in the jail with Lee Goodwin, but his wife, who lives with her husband in the jail and admits them, tells Horace "I dont keer whut Ed says" (181).

This is the second of Eck's two wives in The Hamlet. He marries her six months after arriving in Frenchman's Bend. A "big, strong, tranquil-faced young woman" (220), she is from the family whom he meets while he and Flem are boarding at a farm outside of the village. Together Eck and his wife have three children, but they are only briefly alluded to in this novel. No previous wife is mentioned when Eck and this woman re-appear in The Town; now she is the mother of both Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey - who were step-brothers earlier.

The Town contains two different kinds of lists of the old (white) Yoknapatawpha families. The first such list is constructed by Gavin Stevens as he reflects on the county's history, and unlike the second list in this novel or the kind of role Faulkner provides elsewhere, Gavin's thoughts include the early lower class settlers as well as "the proud fading white plantation names" like "Sutpen and Sartoris and Compson and Edmonds and McCaslin and Beauchamp and Grenier and Habersham" (332).

In The Sound and the Fury Earl owns the hardware store on the Square in Jefferson where Jason Compson works. He tells Jason that Mrs. Compson is "a lady I've got a lot of sympathy for" (227), and apparently for her sake, he puts up with Jason's inadequacies as his employee. When Earl re-appears in The Mansion he gains a last name but loses possession of the store: he manages it for Ike McCaslin, though since Ike "spends most of his time" fishing and hunting he essentially runs it until Jason "eliminates Triplett in his turn" (355).

Durley is one of the men standing around on Mrs. Littlejohn's lot the evening of the auction in "Spotted Horses." He is the one who suggests that Ernest should track down Mrs. Armstid to tell her that her husband has been injured (177).

Although she only appears in the Unvanquished stories, Drusilla Hawk Sartoris is one of the more memorable women in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. She was born in Alabama into the plantation aristocracy, where her role as a lady seemed clearly defined - until the Civil War gave her the opportunity to redefine it.

Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.)

One of the two brothers of Temple Drake in Sanctuary who "are lawyers" (54), and one of the four who appear at the end of Lee Goodwin's trial as the "younger men" who move "like soldiers" when they escort Temple out of the courtroom (289).

In Flags in the Dust Dr. Straud is New York surgeon and medical researcher with whom Dr. Peabody's son, Lucius Jr., works. The novel says his "name is a household word" (400), and Lucius says the doctor has "been experimenting with electricity" (401).

"Young Loosh," as the narrator calls the only child of Dr. Lucius Peabody, practices medicine as a surgeon in New York City, but at least once a year returns to spend a day with his father (400). The description of him in Flags in the Dust is unusually detailed and enthusiastic. It begins: "His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large; and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor . . ." (400).