Character Keys

Doris Snopes is the youngest brother of of Clarence Snopes. He "resembles Clarence not only in size and shape but [has] the same mentality of a child and the moral principles of a wolverine" (327). He appears only in The Mansion.

Dollar is the Mottstown store-keeper in Light in August who tells the town about how Mrs. Hines retrieves her husband from the chair where she had left him and rents a car from Salmon to take them to Jefferson.

In the short story "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished, Bayard recalls the minister of Jefferson's Episcopal Church in the days before the War. Like many other white Yoknapatawphans, he is probably away in the War.

"A fattish man with thin, curly hair," whose eyeglasses seem to be worn only "for decorum's sake" (149), Dr. Quinn treats Temple when she first arrives at Miss Reba's in Sanctuary. Initially he refused to make a house call on Sunday, but Reba reminds him that she "can put him in jail three times over" (148).

Doctor Lucius Peabody is the only character who appears in the first three Yoknapatawpha novels: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He is only mentioned by Quentin in the second, but makes memorable appearances in the other two. According to Flags, he is "the fattest man" in the county (94). His medical practice takes him "out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him" (95).

Doctor Habersham is one of the original three white settlers in Yoknapatawpha, or as it's put in Intruder in the Dust, the first text to mention him, one of the men "who had ridden horseback into the county before its boundaries had ever been surveyed and located and named" (73). According to Requiem for a Nun, in fact, with his "worn black bag of pills and knives" he was so important to the settlement that for a time the place that became Jefferson was known as "Doctor Habersham's" (202).

Doctor Alford appears in Flags in the Dust as a "newcomer" to Jefferson in his "thirties" (93). He shares offices with Dr. Peabody but expresses impatience and often contempt for Peabody's traditional ideas about the practice of medicine. He is courting Narcissa Benbow, but without arousing much interest in her. He is mentioned in As I Lay Dying when MacGowan tells Jody to send Dewey Dell "upstairs to Alford's office" when she asks "to see the doctor that works" there (241).

Doc Meeks himself does not appear in The Mansion, but the "patent medicine truck" he drives around Yoknapatawpha advertises "Watkins Products" - a real manufacturer of health medicines that has been in business since just after the Civil War - on "both [its] sides and the back" (171). The novel describes those advertisements as the source of the name that the parents of Watkins Products Snopes gave their son.

Chick Mallison says in The Town that Dink "had married one of Mr Snopes's sisters or nieces or something out at Frenchman's Bend and when Mr Snopes sent I.O. Snopes back to the country the Quistenberrys came into buy or rent or anyway run the Snopes Hotel"; he adds that "Dink was old enough to be Mr Snopes's brother-in-law or whatever it was but he was the kind of man it just didn't occur to you to say Mister to" (378). The "Mr Snopes" in these phrases is of course Flem, but that doesn't help clarify how Flem and Quistenberry are related.

Dilsey is the matriarch of the Gibson family and the source of whatever emotional stability there is in the Compson family. A major character in The Sound and the Fury, she is married to Roskus, the mother of Versh, Frony, and T.P., and the grandmother of Luster. She is a devout Christian, a loyal servant and a very caring human being. As a character she is both related to the "mammy" stereotype and one of Faulkner's most dignified and impressive creations.

In both "Wash" and Absalom! Milly's baby is delivered by an old Negro midwife who lives in a cabin "three miles" from the fishing camp (542, 230). The short story refers to her mainly as "the Negress" (535), but Sutpen once calls her "Dicey" (544). She is not named in the novel. In the short story she witnesses Wash killing Sutpen, "peering around the crazy door with her black gargoyle face of a worn gnome" (545), while in the novel she only hears this event from inside the camp. In both texts she flees as soon as it happens.

Dewey Dell is the fourth child and only daughter of Addie and Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying. Cora Tull calls her a "tom-boy girl" (8); several male characters comment on how "pretty" she is, "in a kind of sullen, awkward way" (199). Unknown to anyone but her brother Darl and Lafe, her sexual partner, she is pregnant and wants to go to Jefferson to get an abortion. She is able to communicate with Darl without words and she narrates four chapters in the novel.

In both "By the People" and The Mansion Devries is the good man from an (invented) county east of Yoknapatawpha who challenges Clarence Snopes in a political race for Congress; in the story it's the 1952 election, while for the novel Faulkner moves it back to 1946. That change necessitates a revision in his biography. In "By the People" Devries has been a soldier "in that decade between 1942 and 1952" (133), and comes back from fighting in Korea with a chest full of medals, including "the top one" (134) - i.e. the Congressional Medal of Honor - and a "mechanical leg" (136).

Like John Sartoris, Dennison Hawk was a large plantation- and slave-owner who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War; he was killed at the Battle of Shiloh. He never appears directly in the fictions, but is mentioned in "Raid" and "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished. His Alabama plantation, Hawkhurst, was burned by the Yankees sometime after his death. He is the husband of Louisa, who is Granny's sister, and hence he is Bayard's uncle as well as Drusilla's and Denny's father.

An elder of the Negro church that Joe Christmas invades in Light in August, Vines tells one of the parishioners to ride for the sheriff and tell him "'just what you seen'" (324).

In The Sound and the Fury Deacon is a fixture among the students at Harvard in 1910, especially the ones who come from the south. Black and, according to Quentin, a "natural psychologist" (97), he meets these southerners when they first arrive in Cambridge, "in a sort of Uncle Tom's cabin outfit, patches and all" (97) and proceeds to manipulate their prejudices to his own benefit. He tells Quentin that "you and me's the same folks, come long and short," and that Southerners are "fine folks. But you can't live with them" (99).

In "A Bear Hunt," the married but unnamed and unenumerated daughters of Manfred de Spain occur to the unnamed narrator when he speculates they might have been given a sewing machine by Mrs. de Spain. Manfred is usually depicted as a bachelor, but a son of his is mentioned in "Shall Not Perish."

The character David Hogganbeck in "A Courtship" evokes the heroes of American tall tales about the frontier. "Bigger than any two" of the Chickasaw men "put together" (366), he is a skilled steamboat pilot, an accomplished fiddle player, a formidable opponent in eating, drinking and dancing competitions, and Ikkemotubbe's chivalrous rival for the hand of Herman Basket's sister. For her love he is willing to throw off his job, and for his Indian rival he is willing to lose his life.

The character whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to twice as "old David Colbert" (365, 374) is presumably based on a real historical figure, Levi Colbert. The son of white father from North Carolina and a Chickasaw mother, he grew up among the Indians. Among the real Chickasaws (unlike Faulkner's) kinship was defined in matrilineal terms, and through his mother's lineage and his own accomplishments Colbert eventually became head chief of the Chickasaw nation - or as the story says about "David," "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).

Mr. Lovelady's daughter is mentioned in passing in "That Evening Sun." She is described as a "child, a little girl," who lives in the hotel with her father and mother (308). When her mother commits suicide, though, Lovelady "and the child went away" (308). He returns alone, and we learn nothing more about his child's fate.

The name "Das" is a common South Asian name, derived from Sanskrit. One of its meanings, however, is 'servant,' so it may be used by the subadar in "Ad Astra" not as a name but as a kind of title or label. In either case, this character is "the headman" who supervises the native military personnel; after the battalion's disastrous attack on German lines, he reluctantly admits to the subadar that his troops crossed No Man's Land with unloaded rifles, and almost their entire batallion was annihilated (425).

The "Boon or Boone" mentioned twice in the "Appendix Compsons" is most famous for exploring and settling what was then part of Virginia, and what is now Kentucky, creating a route through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains that many settlers would later follow. The settlement referred to in the text is probably Boonesborough, one of the first settlements west of the Appalachians.

In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses Dan is the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds' place, and is one of the two Negroes who help Roth search for "Alice Ben Bolt," the valuable mule who has gone missing. Dan immediately recognizes the mule's footprint and (as Roth "would realize" later) also recognizes the footprints of the man who led Alice away (229, 81). The fact that Dan doesn't tell Roth about the man puts black employee and his white boss on opposite sides of the color line.

In The Sound and the Fury Dalton Ames - a new arrival in Jefferson in the summer of 1909 - is the first man Caddy Compson has sex with, and may be the father of Caddy's daughter. Caddy tells Quentin that Ames has "been in the army had killed men" (148) and "crossed all the oceans all around the world" (150). Quentin discovers for himself how good Ames is with a pistol when he tries ordering him to leave town. For more than one reason Quentin feels that Ames is not a proper suitor for Caddy, including the issue of class; his name, Quentin thinks, "just missed gentility" (92).

The Mansion provides no other name but "Dad" for the itinerant worker whom Mink meets at Goodyhay's house. He is "apparently as old as" Mink, and wears "a battle jacket" (293).

In "A Justice," Crawfish-ford - "usually it was Craw-ford" (347) - is the biological father whom Sam Fathers calls "pappy" (347). He and Herman Basket have apparently known Doom since they were children "sleeping on the same pallet and talking at night, as boys will" (345). When Doom acquires Sam's mother as a slave, Craw-ford immediately tries to take her as his own but her husband objects, leading to a prolonged rivalry. Craw-ford impregnates the enslaved woman, but eventually loses the contest Doom arranges between the rivals to determine her mate.

In "Smoke," Cornelia Holland is the daughter and only child of Mr. Mardis. She marries Anselm Holland (Senior). She bears him twin sons - Anselm (Junior) and Virginius - of whom the former "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). Her father's property is held in her name after his death. She dies of unspecified causes when her sons are still children, though the narrator and others believe "her life had been worn out by the crass violence of [her husband,] an underbred outlander" (4).

Yoknapatawpha constables are stationed in each of the county's five Beats. They are paid "a dollar a prisoner every time [they] deliver a subpoena or serve a warrant" (62). Skipworth, the sheriff's constable who lives in and represents the law in Beat Four in Intruder in the Dust, is described as "a little driedup wizened stonedeaf old man not much larger than a boy" (37), but he is brave enough to take Lucas into custody to protect the black man from the anger of a white crowd, and to keep him locked in his house overnight until the Sheriff can get there.

A soldier during the days of the Mississippi Territory, Patton became active in politics when Mississippi achieved statehood in 1817. In 1821, along with Thomas Hicks and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

Thomas Hinds was a hero of the War of 1812 who afterward commanded the Mississippi territorial militia. After Mississippi gained statehood in 1817 he turned to politics, serving in the state legislature and later in the U.S. Congress. In 1821, along with James Patton and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" referred to in Requiem for a Nun who chose the site for the new state capital (79).

Ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris "Sarty" Snopes is the focal character in "Barn Burning." The youngest of sharecropper Abner Snopes' four children, he is "small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud" (4).

Colonel Dick is a Union cavalryman with a "bright beard" and "hard bright eyes" who appears in "Ambuscade" and "Raid" and is mentioned in "The Unvanquished" as a short story. Across these texts as well as The Unvanquished he appears as a chivalrous gentleman who knows how to treat a lady like Rosa Millard even in the midst of the confict between Yankees and rebels.

In The Reivers Lucius calls him "the aristocrat, the baron, the suzerain" (228). He does not appear in person until late in the story, but is invariably referred to as "Colonel Linscomb" by the other characters Lucius meets in Parsham. His plantation (which contains the track on which the horses race) and mansion (where the story unwinds after the races are over) are both extremely lavish and well-maintained. He is obviously an old friend of Grandfather Priest.

In "There Was a Queen," Elnora refers to Miss Jenny's "paw" as having been killed by the Yankees during the Civil War (732). She doesn't say any more about him, and he is not even mentioned in any other texts, but the larger story of the Sartoris family as Faulkner tells it elsewhere, especially in Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished, suggests that this man owned a slave plantation in one of the Carolinas - and that the family's "Cal-lina house" was a mansion before the Yankees burned it down (732).

Like their mother, John Sartoris' two daughters are almost invisible members of the family. This is the older of the pair, Bayard's older sister. She is twenty-two when Jenny Du Pre arrives in Mississippi in 1869; beyond that she is not named or described. From one of Will Falls' stories in Flags in the Dust we learn that she and her younger sister were sent to Memphis during the Civil War; the narrator tells us later that she is planning to marry in June, 1870.

Goodhue Coldfield's father never appears in Absalom!, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen's parvenu status by noting that "our father knew who his father was in Tennessee" (11).

In The Hamlet Cliff Odum helps Mrs. Snopes get the milk separator in Jefferson.

In the short story "By the People," Clarence Snopes' grandmother is identified as Billy Varner's "distant cousin by marriage," which helps explain Varner's interest in Clarence's career (130). (When Faulkner retells the story of Clarence as Varner's protege in The Mansion, his grandmother is not mentioned.)

In Light in August Cinthy (like her husband Pomp) was a slave who belonged to the elder Gail Hightower. She cooked for him, and "raised [his son] from babyhood" (470). After both her husband and her master are killed during the War, she rejects the idea that she is now "free" (477) and moves back to the Hightower home to cook for that son and his family.

In Go Down, Moses this child is the third of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp, and also the third to die in infancy.

In The Sound and the Fury Charlie is one of the boys with whom Caddy explores her sexual desires in adolescence, the only named one before Dalton Ames. Charlie and Caddy are being intimate on the swing in the Compson backyard when Benjy interrupts them. Charlie's reaction to Benjy's anguish is very callous: noting that her brother "cant talk," he continues to "put his hands on Caddy" (47) and gets angry when Caddy leaves with Benjy.

The man named "Charley" in The Reivers (146) is described by Lucius as "a switchman, a railroad man anyway," in "greasy overalls" (141). He helps load the horse into the boxcar.

Charles Bon is a major character in Absalom!, although none of the novel's four main narrators ever saw him. Faulkner's first account of him appears in "Evangeline," a story he tried unsuccessfully to sell in mid-1931; there 'Charles Bon' is an orphan from New Orleans who marries Judith Sutpen and is killed by Judith's brother Henry at the end of the Civil War, apparently because Henry discovers he is already married to a woman with "negro blood." The story contains no hint that he is either Thomas Sutpen's son or part Negro.

Charles Mallison Jr. appears in nine texts, in all but one of them mainly as narrator, especially of the exploits and misadventures of the man he refers to hundreds of times, usually in an admiring tone, as "Uncle Gavin." Gavin is Gavin Stevens, and his nephew is thus a member of one of the older upper class families in Yoknapatawpha, the only child of Gavin's twin sister Maggie Stevens Mallison. Faulkner creates Charles ("Chick," as Gavin calls him once in "Tomorrow," the first time he's given any name) to serve as a kind of Dr.

In Absalom!, the "little boy" in the picture that is found on Charles Bon's body (75) is Bon's "sixteenth part negro son" (80); his grandiloquent name is Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon. When Judith and Clytemnestra bring him from New Orleans to Sutpen's Hundred after his mother dies, Judith tells him to "Call me Aunt Judith" (169), perhaps without realizing that he is in fact her half-nephew and her father's grandson.

In The Town Cedric is the son of Mrs. Nunnery and about five years old. After he goes off to play in a culvert, the search for him results in Eck Snopes' accidental death. Cedric himself returns unscathed.

In Flags in the Dust Caspey is the son of Simon Strother and the brother of Elnora. He is also one of the five men in the novel who are returning from France after the end of World War I. Caspey served in a non-combatant role with the U.S. Army over there; when he returned home to Jefferson, he brought with him some wildly exaggerated tales about his military service, and a set of new ideas about racial equality which made his family very nervous and drove Old Bayard to knock him down with a stick of stove wood.

The great-great-great-grandson of Carothers McCaslin, the first Yoknapatawpha McCaslin after whom he is named, Carothers (Roth) Edmonds is the last owner of the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation in the fictions, the white landlord of the Negro tenant farmers who work the fields that he owns. Among those tenants is his 'black' relative, Lucas Beauchamp, the grandson of Old Carothers. In Go Down, Moses and the stories the precede it - "A Point of Law" and "Gold Is Not Always" - the relationship between Roth and Lucas is mainly an occasion for comedy.

Old Carothers McCaslin has three legitimate white children, one of whom is this daughter. This elusive figure is never named; the first time she appears in Go Down, Moses she is referred to as Cass Edmonds' "grandmother" (who "raised him following his mother's death") and "Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy's sister" (9). She is at the head of the "distaff" side of the white McCaslins (5), "the woman" through whom Cass inherits both McCaslin blood, and, since Ike renounces his inheritance, the McCaslin property (243).