Character Keys

In Absalom!, Rosa has a moment of fantasy while standing in the hallway of "rotting" Sutpen mansion where Bon's body lies; in this never-to-be version of the Sutpen story, all is well, and Rosa can hear "the children" of Judith and Charles Bon in "the nursery" (113).

The "foals" referred to in the description of the passengers in the Memphis bus station in "Appendix Compson" are the illegitimate children conceived during wartime relationships between "homeless young women" and migratory men in the military (337). These children are described as being abandoned in "charity wards or policestations" (337).

This is the group of men that Lucius refers to in The Reivers, ironically, as "our Jefferson leisure class": the "friends or acquaintances of Father's or maybe just friends of horses" who congregate in the livery stable to pass the time (38). They expect neither "any business" nor "any mail" to come their way (38). In other Yoknapatawpha novels such men typically sit in the barbershop or the park around the courthouse.

The man with whom Rosa's aunt "elopes" in Absalom! is a "horse- and mule-trader" (59), an occupation that is usually depicted as disreputable. During the Civil War he "offers his talents for horse- and mule-getting to the Confederate cavalry remount corps," and is captured by Union forces, presumably while trying to steal their horses, and departs the narrative as a prisoner-of-war in Illinois (66).

In The Mansion The question of Linda Snopes' romantic future is answered several times, at least hypothetically, by the 'husbands' that Ratliff and Gavin imagine she'll marry some day. In the first such musing, Ratliff describes how Stevens imagines that Linda will leave Jefferson and marry "the first strange young man that happens by" (153). On another occasion, Ratliff and Stevens together speculate about whether Linda has already met her future husband during her first two or three days in the "Grinnich Village" (169).

In The Mansion the story of the dead man who was married to the former prostitute in Goodyhay's congregation is told in matter-of-fact terms in a couple pages by Albert, a member of the congregation. Albert says nothing about how he married his wife, but describes how he decided to kill himself during the fighting at the start of the Second World War. He is a Lieutenant in command of an infantry platoon falling back as part of the confused retreat in "Malaya" (a British colony on the Malay Peninsula, 305).

The husband of the "neighbor, a woman" makes an odd parenthetical appearance in The Mansion when someone scrawls a racist protest against Linda Snopes' reform efforts on the sidewalk in front of Flem's house: the woman scrubs out the scrawl because "nobody" was going to deface "the sidewalk of the street she (and her husband of course) lived and owned property on" (251).

In The Reivers the typical patrons at Ballenbaugh's in its modern iteration are described as "fox- and coon-hunters and fishermen" who return "not for the hunting and fishing but for the table that Miss Ballenbaugh set" (74).

These are the unnamed hunters in "The Old People," referred to only as "two or three others," who are part of the yearly De Spain hunting party that also includes the Major, the narrator's father, Uncle Ike McCaslin and Walter Ewell (205).

The narrator of "The Bear" several times adds "and the others" to his references to the leaders of the annual hunting parties - Major de Spain, General Compson, the boy's father (281, 282). It's possible that the phrase is intended to refer to the lower class and non-white hunters Boon Hoggenbeck, Tennie's Jim and Uncle Ash, but it seems at least as likely that "the others" are additional men from Yoknapatawpha who join the hunt at various times.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, there are two groups of hunters. This group consists of the the men with whom Ike McCaslin hunted in the past, when game was still plentiful in Yoknapatawpha. Ike can remember how they "shot wild turkey with pistols to test their stalking skills and marksmanship, feeding all but the breast to the dogs" (267, 319). Some of these men are the fathers and grandfathers of young men in the story's present-day hunting party.

An unspecified number of white men are present at Major de Spain’s annual hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt." Ratliff comments indirectly on the size of the group, saying he was not surprised that Luke Provine would be there because "this here would be the biggest present gathering of men in the county, let alone the free eating and whisky" (68). As alluded to in the title, some may be bear hunters, while others are referred to by Major de Spain as "shotgun fellows on the deer stands" (68). When not hunting, the camaraderie of camp life includes eating, drinking, and playing poker.

In The Reivers Miss Reba claims she knows the man who owns the hotel in Parsham, who apparently lives in Memphis.

In Sanctuary the owner of the hotel in Jefferson is described as "a tight, iron-gray man" with "a neat paunch" (180). He is very concerned about propriety: when a committee from the Baptist church complains about Ruby's presence in the hotel, he turns her out.

This "horse trader by profession" in Flags in the Dust has the usual unscrupulousness of that profession (127). The fact that "he was usually engaged in litigation with the railroad company over the violent demise of some of his stock by its agency" makes him very similar to I.O. Snopes in "Mule in the Yard." (In Flags in the Dust I.O. runs Flem's restaurant.)

The "gorilla," the "thug" whom Granby Dodge "hired . . . down here from Memphis” (31) to murder Judge Dukinfield is “a smallish man in city clothes” (28). He is both unremarkable and unsettling, “with a face like a shaved wax doll, and eyes with a still way of looking and a voice with a still way of talking” (28–29). His appearance and criminal propensities recall aspects of Popeye from Sanctuary.

The Mallisons hire men at two different points in Intruder in the Dust to drive Mrs. Mallison. This one drives her to Mottstown to watch her son play football.

Both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses note that after slavery was abolished, planters and plantation owners employed "hired labor" to grow cotton in the Delta; these men are also described as the "Negroes who work" the land for "the white men who own it" (270, 323-24).

In The Unvanquished this man lives with his family in a "dirt-floored cabin in the hills" outside Jefferson (221). He served under John Sartoris in his first regiment. After the war Sartoris shoots and kills him, because he thinks (perhaps wrongly) that the man plans to rob him.

In "Monk" the residents of the hill country from which Monk hails are a "clannish people," and fiercely independent. These descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers live in a country "impenetrable and almost uncultivated" where they "intermarried and made whiskey and shot at all strangers from behind log barns and snake fences." The narrator points out that they seem to know "as little about him [Monk] as we did" (43).

Passing through Jefferson on his way from pre-flight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the wagons and pick-ups of the hill farmers" who are making one of their weekly visits to town (251). By 'hill farmers,' the narrative means the families that farm on the poorer land in the hilly parts of Yoknapatawpha county.

This entry represents the "somebody" who gets a car in both "By the People" and The Mansion and then (as "they" in the short story and as "somebody" in the novel) drives Clarence Snopes home to get a dry pair of pants.

This youth shouts "Barn burner!" at Ab Snopes after his trial as he leaves the general store with his two sons (5). From Sarty's perspective, this boy appears as "a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon," and though the boy is "half again his size," Sarty attacks him (5-6).

Harvard's "proctor" appears in Quentin's section of The Sound and the Fury when he remembers the way Mrs. Bland tried to have Shreve moved out of the suite he and Quentin share - because he didn't strike her as a suitable roommate for a Mississippi Compson. "The proctor reveals enough low stubbornness to insist on consulting Shreve first," and the change is never made (106). (This is an unusual use of 'proctor' - who is usually someone monitoring students taking an exam; perhaps Faulkner meant 'dean' or 'registrar.')

In The Sound and the Fury the annual Harvard-Yale crew race is scheduled to take place a few days after June 2, 1910. Perhaps because Quentin is about use a river to drown himself, he thinks about the race, and the team - "them down at New London" - several times in his section of the novel (77, 105, etc.).

When Boon and Butch are taken to jail in Hardwich in The Reivers, Reba and Corrie stay in "the jailor's wife's room" (270). The phrasing suggests that, like the jailer in Jefferson in other fictions, this couple lives in the building that holds the jail.

In The Sound and the Fury the customers come to Earl's hardware store on Friday are mostly country folks who are in town for the visiting show. Jason describes his job waiting on them bitterly as running "to sell some redneck a dime's worth of nails or something" (211).

In The Sound and the Fury this "clerk" in the hardware store in Boston sells Quentin two six-pound flat-irons (85).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this "a hulking halfwitted boy" helps Jim Gant in his work as a trader (368). It is he who tells Mrs. Gant that her husband has left her, when he tries to collect the $1.75 he loaned to Gant; when she refuses at gun point to give him any money, he becomes "an ancient mariner in faded overalls" as - "wild eyed and drooling a little at the mouth" - he relates his grievance repeatedly to the other people in the Bend (370).

One of the three black males who are present in the MacCallum household when Young Bayard arrives there near the end of Flags in the Dust. His role in the family or on the family's land is not clear.

This "old half-crazed white woman" in Sanctuary is one of Jefferson's most eccentric inhabitants (200). The physical description of her is equally striking: her "lank grayish hair" hangs beside "the glittering collapse of her face" (201). She is reported to make her living by "manufactur[ing] spells for negroes" (200), though her house was also once raided by "officers searching for whiskey" (201). Horace arranges for Ruby to stay in the "lean-to shed room" attached to her house. (This woman may recur as "Mrs.

Immediately before questioning Temple during Lee Goodwin's trial in Sanctuary, the District Attorney mentions "the gynecologist" who testified earlier about "the most sacred affairs of that most sacred thing in life: womanhood" (283-84). The doctor himself does not appear in the novel.

Ratliff identifies most of the guests at the Kohls' wedding reception in The Mansion as "poets and painters and sculptors and musicians" (191), but seems to think the man who recognizes the necktie he is wearing as an "Allanova" must be "a haberdasher taking Saturday evening off" (192).

According to The Mansion, male "guests" staying at the Holston House are required to wear "a coat and necktie" in the dining room, while women guests must have their "heads covered" (421). The only guests whom the novel specifically identifies, however, are "drummers" - i.e. traveling salesmen - and they are all men (37).

In a passage in The Mansion that provides a rare glimpse into Stevens' life after he marries the wealthy Melisandre Backus Harriss, the narrator describes his discomfort whenever "guests, even the same guest or guests again," came to dinner (399).

While talking to Philip in "Elly," Elly invents this "party" of people she will be visiting in order to explain her forthcoming absence - and her need for his silent cooperation. She says that the group she'll be with is comprised of "people you don't know and that I don't expect to see again before I am married" (215).

In Flags in the Dust this "group of negroes" scatters when Bayard and the runaway stallion race down the lane from the livery stable (129).

The "groom" in The Reivers who leads the skittish horse Acheron up to the starting line is not described (230). He could be black, like McWillie and the other man who works in Linscomb's stable, but typically Faulkner's fiction will specify race when a character is not white, so on that basis we interpret this man as 'white.'

This unnamed grocery store owner in The Town is young Wallstreet Panic Snopes' employer. In time, Wall becomes his partner.

This character is mentioned in The Reivers as an "idiot nephew or cousin or something" of Dan Grinnup, and like him is a last living descendant of the Grenier family, perhaps the oldest white family in Yoknapatawpha (7). He lives "in a tent in the river jungle beyond Frenchman's Bend," on land that had once been part of the big antebellum "plantation" belonging to Louis Grenier (the "Frenchman" from whom the Bend gets its name, 7).

In "Shall Not Perish," when Mrs. Grier consoles Major de Spain for the loss of his son in the early days of World War Two, she mentions her own grandfather who fought in the Civil War, adding that "I reckon his mother didn't know why [he had to enlist] either, but I reckon he did" (109).

Mentioned but not named in "The Old People," the great-grandfather of the narrator was presumably one of the original planters in Yoknapatawpha, a contemporary of the first Sartorises and Compsons, but all the story definitely says about him is that "almost a hundred years ago" he bought the slaves from whom Sam Fathers is descended from Ikkemotubbe (203).

This unnamed woman in Flags in the Dust is, according to Will Falls, his source for the ointment with which he is treating Old Bayard's wen: "My granny got that 'ere from a Choctaw woman nigh a hundred and thutty year ago" (227).

In Sanctuary the mother of Popeye's mother seems normal enough when first introduced, as someone who likes the strike-breaker who is Popeye's father. After being widowed, she has remarried a man who takes good care of her boarding house - until one day he disappears with all the money she had in the bank. Perhaps this event is what triggers her madness, a mixture of pyromania and paranoia.

Boon's "mother's mother," as Intruder in the Dust puts it, was "a Chickasaw woman" (91). Five texts refer to this grandmother, though she herself never appears in any of them. In the first mention, in "Lion," there's some uncertainty about whether she might have been his mother instead: as Quentin puts it, "Boon was part Indian. They said half, but I don't think so. I think it was the grandmother who was the Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land Major de Spain now owned and over which we hunted" (184).

According to Charles in The Town Walter's grandfather was a slave who "had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167).

The grandfather of the man who is the Governor of the state in "Monk" seems to have been a man of the lower classes with a chip on his shoulder similar to the one Bill Terrel carries. As the Governor says of him to Gavin Stevens, "Mr. Stevens, you are what my grandpap would have called a gentleman. He would have snarled it at you, hating you and your kind; he might very probably have shot your horse from under you someday from behind a fence - for a principle" (57).

This character 'appears' in "Knight's Gambit" by way of one of Faulkner's typical negative formulations, in the middle of a sentence that develops the idea that Sebastian Gualdres is a "stranger" in Yoknapatawpha by noting that, when locals visit him at the Backus-Harriss Plantation, they are "guests not of the woman who owned the place and whose family name they had known all her life and her father's and grandfather's too" - that is, they are his guests (174). But the point here is that this woman - Mrs.

The memory of Mr. Pearson's unnamed grandfather is the first point in "The Tall Men" where he begins to identify with the McCallum family. When Pearson enters the bedroom where the injured Buddy McCallum lies, he sees beside Buddy's bedside a "big, old-fashioned, wicker-covered demijohn" like the one in which his grandfather kept his own whiskey (49).