Character Keys

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

Ash, or Uncle Ash, is an old Negro who works for Major de Spain. In the five fictions in which he appears, he is most often seen in the woods, as the cook and chief servant on the Major's annual hunting trips, "a-helping around camp," as Ratliff puts it in "A Bear Hunt," where Ash first appears (67) - though in the last section of "The Bear" in the novel Go Down, Moses he sits in the corner of De Spain's office in Jefferson, pulling the cord on the "bamboo-and-paper punkah" that provides the Major with a breeze in the heat of Mississippi (301).

Despite his name, in Sanctuary "Uncle Bud" is a "small bullet-headed boy of five or six" (250), "with freckles like splotches of huge summer rain on a sidewalk" (251). He is related somehow to Miss Myrtle, though he is only staying with her temporarily, and will soon "go back home" (252) to "a Arkansaw farm" (251) - perhaps the same Arkansas orphanage where the four children whom Reba is supporting live. He is adept at "snitching beer" (253); after he breaks into the icebox and drinks a whole bottle, he brings Chapter 25 to a close by throwing up.

In Intruder in the Dust Uncle Hogeye Mosby is mentioned as an epileptic "from the poorhouse" whose public seizures always attract spectators (180).

Called "Uncle Job" in "Smoke" and "Old Man Job" in The Town, he is the elderly Negro janitor and factotum to Judge Dukinfield.

If there is something demeaning about the way so many characters in The Reivers refer to him as "Uncle Possum," Parsham Hood is nonetheless one of Faulkner's more impressive black characters. His clothes and facial hair make him look like a white planter or a southern "colonel": upon first meeting him Lucius describes him as "an old man very dark in a white shirt and galluses and a planter's hat, with perfectly white moustaches and an imperial [beard]" (164). At another point Lucius says his appearance is "even regal" (218).

The man whom the narrator of "Uncle Willy" calls "Uncle Robert" (239) is presumably his biological uncle, the brother of his "Papa" or "Mamma" - although given the other "Uncle" in the story (i.e. Willy, who is not related to the narrator), and the way Southern culture often uses the term ceremonially with white as well as black men, it's hard to be certain of that.

When he becomes vice president of the bank in The Town, Flem employs this salesman in a Memphis furniture store to provide him with appropriate home furnishings.

This is the group in The Hamlet whom Lump Snopes refers to as "a few of the boys" (258). They don't appear directly in the narrative, but Lump tells Mink his plan to take these young white men one night to the home of the Negro who found Mink's shotgun, and terrify him "with a couple of trace chains or maybe a little fire under his feet" in order to force him to admit, falsely, that he stole the gun (258).

The term "butler" in this instance from "Knight's Gambit" is a euphemism, used somewhat facetiously to describe the subordinate gangsters who take part in the funeral services for Mr. Harriss: "eight or ten of the butlers in their sharp clothes and arm-pitted pistols brought him home to lie in state" (168).

He is mentioned in Flags in the Dust by Old Man Falls simply as "that other feller" Colonel John Sartoris killed sometime after the Civil War, "when he had to start killin' folks" (23). (He may be the same character as the "hill man Sartoris kills in The Unvanquished [221], but that is not clear.)

In The Mansion this is the "feller" - i.e. the fellow - mentioned by Ratliff who was "pistol-whipped" by Clarence Snopes when he was constable in Frenchman's Bend, and who complained effectively enough to get Clarence removed from the position (68).

At the beginning of "Uncle Willy" the narrator identifies "the good women in Jefferson" as the people who are to blame for "driving Uncle Willy out of town," and thus for the narrator's own choice to follow him (225). The crusade against Willy's behavior is led by two particular women, Mrs. Merridew and Mrs. Hovis, yet at points the narrative seems to see the town's "good women" and the town's 'white' women as essentially synonymous.

This is the second of the two sets of "half-breed servants" on the Haitian plantation in Absalom! (199).

There are various groups of hunters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. These "hunters" are the essentially transcendent community created by the narrator at the start of the chapter called "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses. In this passage, "hunters" refers not to any specific characters but to an exalted meta-cultural and spiritual category of "men": they are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181).

While remembering his three earlier trips to Memphis in The Mansion, Mink Snopes thinks about "the mentor and guide who had told him about the houses in Memphis" where one could buy sex (317). This "guide" accompanies him to the city on his first trip, forty-seven years ago.

"Delta Autumn" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses describe the "forgotten aboriginals" of Mississippi as the ancestors of the Indians who lived there until the 19th century (271). According to the narrative, the mounds on which the Indians buried their dead were originally built by these aboriginals as a refuge from the annual flood water. These aboriginals were the first humans who entered the wilderness and altered it. (See also the entry for Unnamed First Aboriginal in the index.)

In "Monk," an unnamed accomplice helps Bill Terrel carry a body through the bushes and "fling it under the train" (59).

In "Death Drag" these "Fourth-of-July holidayers" died when, "about two years ago," Jock was forced to crash land the plane he was giving them a ride in, breaking the gas line, and one of them "struck a match" (194).

The District Attorney who tries Popeye in Sanctuary believes the conviction was "too easy," and assumes Popeye will mount an appeal (312).

After Popeye is convicted in Sanctuary, this "turnkey" shows considerable solicitude for him, buying cigarettes for him with the money Popeye gives him, but also sharing information about the murdered man and even, on the day of his execution, trying to give Popeye his change (312).

Before finding Popeye guilty, the faceless jury in Alabama that hears the case against him in Sanctuary deliberates for "eight minutes" (312). "Eight minutes" is exactly how long it takes the jury in Jefferson to decide that Lee Goodwin is guilty too - also for a crime he did not commit (291).

Popeye's lawyer at his trial for murder in Sanctuary is "a young man just out of law school," with "an ugly, eager, earnest face" (311). He tries to defend his client, who is himself indifferent to the trial, with "a gaunt mixture of uncouth enthusiasm and earnest ill-judgment" (311-12).

One of the three people in Sanctuary who testify against Popeye at his trial for a murder he did not commit is "a fellow policeman" of the murdered officer (311). We learn nothing about his testimony, or whether he is sincerely mistaken.

This is the sheriff in Sanctuary who, with a sarcastic comment, "springs the trap" when Popeye is executed by hanging (316).

This character is "the other guy" in "Ad Astra" who was flying with Sartoris' brother when he was shot down (414). He is serving as a British aviator, presumably in the same "Camel squadron" as Sartoris, but given all the non-English aviators in the story, we cannot say where he was from (414). The Sopwith Camel was a standard single-seat British aircraft during World War I.