Character Keys

These young girls in "Hair" come "giggling down to the post office and soda fountain in the late afternoon" (141) to flirt with the young fellows.

The people who live in the small hamlet of Division are one of the sources of information about the Starnes family that the narrator of "Hair" draws on. Once all the Starneses have died, these residents expect the Starnes' Alabama kin to claim the house. Division folks also note Hawkshaw's annual April visits to "clean up that empty house" (141), and in between they help themselves to the house's picket fence for firewood.

According to the narrator of "Hair," when Susan Reed became promiscuous, "she never drew any lines" - the males she went with included "schoolboys, married men, anybody" (135). None of these males appear directly in the story, but apparently everyone in town, except perhaps Hawkshaw, knows about them.

In "Hair," Will Starnes is the father of Sophie, Henry Stribling's (Hawkshaw's) first fiancee. He owns a house and land, all mortgaged. Starnes is lazy - some people suggest he may have died because "he was too lazy to keep on breathing" - and unambitious, "satisfied to be a landowner as long as he had enough to eat and a little tobacco" (138). He does not object to Sophie's engagement to Stribling, whom Mrs. Starnes considers to be beneath them.

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).

The narrator of "Hair" says Matt Fox, a barber at Maxey's barber shop, "knew more about Hawkshaw than Maxey" (133), which surprises the narrator because Matt does not talk much. Matt is also married and described as a "fat, flabby fellow, with a pasty face and eyes that looked tired or sad something" (133). He is "funny" and "almost as good a barber as Hawkshaw" (133).

Mrs. Cowan owns and runs the Jefferson boarding house where Hawkshaw and Mitch Ewing live in "Hair." She never appears directly in the story, but Matt Fox says that she's the only woman Hawkshaw knows.

Along with her husband, Mrs. Burchett is the guardian of Susan Reed in "Hair." The narrator repeats the local rumor that Susan may be her illegitimate child, but this is never confirmed. Mrs. Burchett seems to be more involved with Susan's care than Mr. Burchett. However, she easily succumbs to Susan's deceptions. According to the narrator, Mrs. Burchett doesn't know that when Susan becomes a teenager, she stops going to school and forges the report cards that Mrs. Burchett signs.

In "Hair" Bidwell is the storekeeper in Division who has the key to the Starnes's house; he shows the narrator around it, and "opens the Bible" which records the mortgage payments Hawkshaw made (146).

At the time of the story, 'subadar' was a rank roughly equivalent to captain, given to Indian nationals who led Indian troops as part of the British armed forces. The subadar in "Ad Astra" identifies himself as a "prince" in India, "my country" (408). Before the War, Bland saw him deliver a speech in Oxford, England, a time when the subadar himself says "I was a white man also for that moment" (409). In France he is attached to a battalion of Indian soldiers who serve the British military, probably by relaying British orders to them.

The rioters at the Cloche-Clos in "Ad Astra" include these "three poilus" - i.e. French soldiers (423). "Poilu," originating in the word for "hairy," was a common name for French infantrymen in World War I, since many of them did not shave or get their hair cut.

According to the narrator of "Ad Astra," two military mechanics were required to "shoehorn" the exceptionally large Comyn "into the cockpit of a Dolphin, like two chambermaids putting an emergency bolster into a case too large for it" (410). (The Sopwith Dolphin was one of the standard British fighter planes during the First World War.)

In "Ad Astra" the captured German aviator explains that one of his brothers was shot and killed by this resident of Berlin, presumably after the man discovered his wife's affair.

In "Ad Astra," because of the War, this young son of the captured German aviator, who lives in Bayreuth with his mother, has never seen his father.

In "Ad Astra" the captured German aviator says his own aristocratic family profoundly disapproved when he told them "I haf married the daughter of a musician who was peasant" (418).

Apparently this aviator in "Ad Astra," whom the narrator refers to as the "Hun patrol leader," was the pilot who shot down Sartoris' brother's plane (414). He may in turn have been shot down by Sartoris; Hume says that Sartoris "must have got him" during the week he spends in the sky seeking to avenge his brother, but as the narrator says, "we didn't know" if the enemy pilot Sartoris shot down was the one he was after (414). (During the First World War, "Hun" was a derogatory term for the German enemy.)

In "Ad Astra" the third child of the German family (and a younger brother of the German prisoner) is the twin of Franz. He feels no obligation to serve his family, and according to his oldest brother, he "did nothing in Berlin" (417). Although he comes home to be assume the title of Baron, his brother continues: "he does not stay at home. In 1912 he iss in Berlin newspaper dead of a lady's husband" (418). It seems likely that the "lady" is this man's mistress.

The "kaiser" whom the German aviator refers to without naming in "Ad Astra" is Kaiser Wilhelm II (Friedrich Wilhelm Victor Albert von Hohenzollern); he ruled Germany as emperor from June 1888 to November 9, 1918. On that date, having lost the support of the army, he abdicated, and fled the country a day later. The German prisoner says he does not serve "baron and kaiser" (418), but he is proud when his brother Franz is declared "ace iron cross by the kaiser's own hand" (419).

The father of the captured German aviator in "Ad Astra" is a nobleman - as the aviator puts it, "my people are of Prussia little barons" - who does not approve when his eldest son renounces the title of "baron" (417). The father dies during the War of natural causes.

In "Ad Astra" Monaghan's father's wealth enables his son to attend Yale and to become acquainted with well-to-do people. The senior Monaghan charges his son to remind these "fine friends," these privileged individuals, that "every man is the slave of his own refuse" and that "your old dad," who made his money working with sewers, "is the king of them all" (415)

In the bistro in "Ad Astra," a French officer, "tall, with a gaunt, tragic face," implies that Monaghan and the military policeman should remove the German prisoner from the premises (422). The officer has a glass eye, probably as a result of the war; it is described as "motionless, rigid in a face that looked even deader than the spurious eye" (422).

The "damned king" of England in "Ad Astra" - whom Monaghan refers to contemptuously and whom the Irish Comyn denies is "his damned king" - was George V (416). King George V ruled the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936. He was also Emperor of India during this period.

This Allied aviator in "Ad Astra" helps Sartoris take revenge on the German pilot who shot down his brother by flying an out-moded airplane as the bait in Sartoris' trap. The narrator says "we" never knew who this aviator was (414).

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.

This is one of Faulkner's characters who are defined by absence and indeterminacy. In "Ad Astra," when the aviator Monaghan explains his "Shanty Irish" origins, he gives a memorable description of his father, but he cannot trace his ancestry before that: other than saying his father came "out of a peat bog," which suggests the Irish peasantry, Monaghan claims, "I don’t know what my grandfather was. I don’t know if I had one. My father don’t remember one. Likely it could have been one of several" (415).

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.

William Avery Bishop (1894-1956) led all Canadian aviators during World War I, being credited with shooting down 72 German planes. The captive German aviator of "Ad Astra" reports that one of his younger brothers, an ace pilot himself, "iss killed by your Bishop . . . that good man" (419).

In the old days described by Quentin's narrative in "That Evening Sun," the husbands of the town's Negro laundresses sometimes "fetch and deliver" the clothes their wives have washed (290).

This "bad man" is the antagonist of the story - a kind of grim fairy tale - that Nancy begins to tell the Compson children (302). The question of the racial identity of this man, and the "queen" who also appears in Nancy's unfinished story, is not definitively answerable, but given how closely Nancy's tale is drawn from her own immediate life, it seems appropriate to make both the villain and the heroine of it black.

Mrs. Lovelady, the wife of the white man who collects insurance money from the local Negroes in "That Evening Sun," commits suicide "one morning" (308). Quentin's narrative gives no further account or explanation of that act.

Aunt Rachel never directly appears in "That Evening Sun." Quentin says she is "old," and lives in a cabin "by herself" near Nancy, smoking "a pipe in the door, all day long" (294). The "Aunt" in her name is clearly conventional, part of the way the Jim Crow culture stereotypes Negroes, but it's not clear whether she is "Jesus' mother": "Sometimes she said she was and sometimes she said she wasn't any kin to Jesus" (294). Quentin's father suggests Nancy could "go to Aunt Rachel's" for safety, but that doesn't happen (306).

In Sanctuary, as Popeye and Temple drive along the street with Miss Reba's on it, they see on the "second storey gallery" of one of the "dingy" houses "a young negress in her underclothes" (142). Her undress and the location of the building suggest she is a prostitute, but that is not made definite.

While Temple is in the "washroom" of the Grotto club in Sanctuary, she and another woman "examine one another's clothes with brief, covert, cold, embracing glances" (233).

After describing the convincted "negro murderer" who sings spirituals from inside the jail and the "few negroes" who "gather along the fence" to sing with him (114), Sanctuary goes on to note the "white people" who "slow and stop" to listen (115).

Sanctuary provides a generic description of the male "students in the University" who date Temple on the weekends. They are characterized almost entirely in terms of their clothes - "hatless" even when outside, wearing "knickers and bright pull-overs," or at dances the formally clad "black collegiate arms" and pairs of "black sleeves" (29).

This man appears in Sanctuary in the story Ruby tells at two different times, to Temple and and then later to Horace, about how when Lee was stationed in the Philippines he "killed another soldier" in a brawl over a local woman (59).

In Sanctuary, as he tells the men at the Old Frenchman place about his troubles with Little Belle's behavior, Horace mentions a young man whom she apparently met on the train coming "home from school" four days before the novel begins (14). She defends her relationship with him by telling Horace that "he goes to Tulane" (14). Though Horace's objectivity on the subject of Little Belle is not to be trusted, this particular unnamed young man seems to be one of several or perhaps many whom she has brought home; Horace sums them up as "Louis or Paul or Whoever" (13).

In Sanctuary the only occupants of the waiting room at the train station when Horace gets there early in the morning are a couple. The man is characterized by the "overalls" he wears and the "rumpled coat" he carries (167). The woman wears a "calico dress," a "dingy shawl and a new hat" and carries both a parcel and "a straw suitcase" (167).

In Sanctuary there are "two temporary deputies" at the "entrance to the square" just before Lee is lynched, but although the implication is that they have been deputized to help keep order, they are nowhere to be seen when the lynching occurs (293).

In The Mansion the night telegraph operator lets Mink sleep in the station's waiting room.

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

In Sanctuary Horace refers to the various young men who have been calling on his step-daughter Little Belle as "Louis or Paul or Whoever" (13). Horace seems to believe there have been many such suitors, "alert and a little impatient," sharing the hammock in the grape arbor with her in ways he finds very disconcerting (13-14), but Horace's ideas about Belle's sexuality are hardly reliable.

The "negro with a broom" in Sanctuary whom Gowan encounters when he wakes up in the Oxford train station is astonished at the young white man's disheveled appearance (35).

In Sanctuary the "customers" in the "self-service" Pensacola grocery store are seen "moving slowly along a railing in single file" (306).

In Sanctuary, the woman who owns the limousine in which Popeye's grandmother leaves him becomes a kind of godmother to the child, making sure Popeye gets medical attention and often bringing him "to her home in afternoons and for holidays" (308). The narrative does not explain her motives in trying to help, but does show how they come to grief when her attempt to give him a birthday party is defeated by his violent antisocial behavior. Even after Popeye is sent to "a home for incorrigible children" (309), this woman continues to help Popeye's mother support herself (309).

Chapter 21 of Sanctuary describes the various people whom Virgil and Fonzo see in the train station and on the streets of Memphis when they arrive in the city. None are given any individuality, but they are identified as "a stream of people" who "jostle" the newcomers in the depot, where they are also beset by cabmen and a redcap, and, in the Hotel Gayoso and another, unnamed hotel, a porter, bellboys, and "people sitting among the potted plants" in hotel lobbies (188-90).

The man who works as a clerk in the university branch of the post office in Sanctuary is described as "young," with a "dull face," "horn[-rimmed] glasses" and "meticulous" hair (171). He tells Horace that Temple Drake has quit school. (Less than a decade before he wrote Sanctuary Faulkner himself had been the clerk in this post office.)

As Popeye and Temple approach the town of Dumfries in Sanctuary, they begin seeing other people on the road, though the narrative refers to them in a complex series of phrases. In some cases it cites the means of transportation rather than the people: "pleasure cars Sunday-bent," "Fords and Chevrolets," "now and then a wagon or a buggy" (139). The only occupants specifically mentioned are "swathed women" in the "occasional larger car" and "wooden-faced country people" in trucks (139).

The policeman in Sanctuary from whom Popeye's grandmother asks for a match thinks her irrational statements (including the ominous "I bring down the house") are a deliberate effort at humor (307). He tells her three times that she "ought to be in vaudeville."