Character Keys

The woman with whom Roth Edmonds has an affair and a child in Go Down, Moses is part of the extended McCaslin family: she is the granddaughter of James Beauchamp and so related to both Roth and Ike McCaslin. She is 'white' enough to pass as 'white' - until the fact that her aunt "took in washing" makes Ike realize that she is a Negro (though Ike uses a more offensive term, 343). She was born and educated in the North, and has taught school in Mississippi. Roth refuses to marry her, and even her "Uncle Isaac" tells her to take her child and "Go back North.

In Requiem for a Nun an unspecified group of Indians, identified only as "old Mohataha's forty-year-old grandchildren," charge candy to Ratcliffe's trading post (28-29).

The foreman of the grand jury in "Smoke" listens to, objects to, but ultimately pays heed to county attorney Gavin Steven’s conjectures.

Referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "one" of the Governor's "lieutenants," this man was taken to court in a paternity suit (196).

This is not the Governor in Requiem who appears onstage in Act III but a "Governor of the State" who was once held in the Jefferson jail for thirty days after being sentenced for contempt of court (196). This episode is based on the real experience of former Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo, a native of Oxford, who in 1922 spent the same thirty days in jail. (The Governor who does appear onstage has his own entry in the index: see Governor Henry.)

No name is mentioned when Temple tells Ruby that the "gu-governor comes to our house" for dinner (56). The real Governor of Mississippi when Sanctuary was published was Theodore G. Bilbo, an outspoken white supremacist - but it's not necessary to believe that Faulkner intended readers to think of specifically of him. Temple's intention seems to be simply to assert her caste status as a shield.

"Them" - this is one of the more ambiguous elements in As I Lay Dying. "Them," "they" - these are the only terms that that Anse uses to describe the people who come to his house and use "the law" to "talk me out of" Darl (37, 36). The most likely explanation of this event is the Selective Service Act of 1917, which required men between the ages of 21 and 31 to register for the draft (in 1918, it was expanded to include men between 18 and 21). That would mean Darl has been drafted and "they" are agents of the federal government.

In The Sound and the Fury on both Saturday and Sunday (the first and fourth sections of the novel) various groups of golfers are described playing on the course beside the Compson place. Consistent with the severe conceptual limitations of Benjy's mind, his descriptions of them are very confusing: "they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit" (3). When the third person narrator describes the same actions in the fourth section, it becomes easy to see who is there and what they are doing: Benjy and Luster "watched the foursome . . . move to the tee and drive" (315).

In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" all we are told about the man who is "establishing a ranch to breed native goats" in Yoknapatawpha is that he is "a Northerner" (139). The Hamlet is a little more specific: there Ratliff identifies him as a man from "Massachusetts or Boston or Ohio" (87). The novel is also a little more judgmental: as Ratliff explains to his friends that "You got to keep in mind he is a northerner. They does things different from us" (88).

In The Hamlet Eula associates with a small group of Frenchman's Bend girls who act as foils for her.

In The Sound and the Fury Shreve's account of Quentin's fight with Bland includes the "wench that he made a date with to meet at a dance hall in Atlantic city" (166); Bland boasts about standing her up, so she doesn't appear even in his story, and Shreve's account seems skeptical about Bland's whole story - but in his own mind Quentin's attack on Bland seems to be an attempt to defend this young woman's honor

In Requiem for a Nun Temple compares her own experience overcoming trauma to this fictional character. Although Faulkner blurs the details, saying that the book in which this woman appears was written by "somebody - Hemingway, wasn't it?" (121), it's very likely that Temple is thinking of Maria, a character in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. According to Temple's account, this character freed herself from the past by "refusing to accept it" (121).

In a kind of mock-Homeric simile, the narrator of Intruder in the Dust compares the "apostate sons of Beat Four" in Yoknapatawpha who move into Jefferson and marry "a town girl" to the "petty Germanic princelings [who] would come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones" (133). It's not clear if Faulkner is thinking of any specific German noblemen. (Brandenburg was a province of Prussia until Prussia was abolished after World War II, when Brandenburg became a separate German state.)

These soldiers in "All the Dead Pilots" include the forces that take Cambrai (520) as well as the pilots of the "E.A." (enemy aircraft) that shoot down Sartoris in July 1918 (530).

According to the captured German pilot in "Ad Astra," this unnamed soldier assassinates his brother Franz, a General serving on the army's general staff, in the revolutionary fighting that breaks out in Berlin at the end of World War I.

The gun with which Vinson Gowrie was shot in Intruder in the Dust was "an automatic pistol" taken from a German officer captured by Buddy McCallum during World War I (161).

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 "handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral" who is seen in a photograph in "Appendix Compson" is presumably Caddy's lover during World War II (334). He and that relationship are further characterized by the photo's luxurious background: "a Cannebiere backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromiumtrimmed sports car," all of which are featured in "a slick magazine - a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight" (334).

Among the first settlers in Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun is a man referred to as "the German blacksmith"; all that is known about him, however, is that he is one of the few white men in the original settlement who owns a slave (24).

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.

This group is more like a casualty statistic than a character. The World War I aviators in "Ad Astra" keep track of their successes by counting each enemy plane they shoot down as a "Hun": thus Sartoris shoots down "three Huns" in his quest to avenge his brother's death (414), and Monaghan refers to the "thirteen Huns" he "got" (416). ("Hun" was the derogatory term the Allies used for their German opponents.)

The narrator of Sanctuary calls the man who fills Popeye's car up in Dumfries a "mechanic"; he indicates which way Temple went when she got out of the car (140).

In an odd aside, Sanctuary notes that the "suit of gray" worn by the "old man" in Kinston who drives the taxi was "made by Jews in the New York tenement district" (298). Many different ethnicities worked in the city's garment industry and belonged to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (founded in 1900), but the stereotype of the Jewish garment worker was widespread in the 1920s.

Although Sanctuary refers to them at one point as "the garage men" (127), the "white men sitting in titled chairs along the oil-foul wall of the garage across the street" from the jail during the day are associated with only two activities: listening to the convicted murderer sing and chewing, presumably tobacco (115).

These generic game wardens - the state officers who supervise the start and ending of the deer hunting season in Mississippi - are noted briefly, only once, by the unnamed narrator of "Race at Morning."

This is the woman whom The Hamlet refers to as the "curl-papered landlady" in El Paso who tries to prevent Jack Houston from taking the woman who becomes his common law wife away from her house - but since the woman is a prostitute and the place the landlady runs is a brothel, it seems clear that "landlady" is a euphemism for 'madam' (234).

This man "from the eastern part of the state" narrates the last chapter of Light in August, telling his wife the story of his encounter with Lena and Byron during his trip to Tennessee (494). He and his wife are in bed, and both seem comfortable with each other and with sex.

Describing her married life in Requiem for a Nun, Temple refers to the "country club younger set" of friends with whom she and Gowan socialize (124). Apparently assuming it is a progressive gesture, these friends "applaud" when Temple hires the black "ex-dope-fiend" Nancy as a nurse for her children (124).

In The Reivers these people from elsewhere would accompany the wealthy businessman and hunter Paul Rainey on his trips to hunt "bear and deer and panther" in Mississippi (163).

These are the "five or six girls" in "Knight's Gambit" who "attended the female half of the Academy" with Mrs. Harriss and "who had been the nearest thing she had to friends" (152). These girlhood friends are the women who would receive seasonal cards from Mrs. Harriss "postmarked from Rome or London or Paris or Vienna or Cairo" (166). Maggie Mallison is one of these women, but none of the others are named.

Gavin counts on these friends who live in New York to help Linda during her move to Greenwich Village. Ratliff says, "Lawyer had it all arranged, friends he knowed in Harvard to meet the train at the depot and take care of her, get her settled and ever thing" (367).

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)

Elly's unnamed friend entertains Paul de Montigny in her home, but is quick to judge Elly for the latter's interest in him. Elly's friend smokes, furtively, in her home, presumably hoping to escape detection by her parents. But if she too is rebellious, it is within very fixed limits. When Elly defends her behavior with Paul by reminding this girl that "you invited him into your house," she replies "I wasn't hid in the cloak closet, kissing him, though" (210). And despite entertaining Paul, she takes the signs of his mixed racial identity as proof of Elly's "queer taste" (209).

In The Hamlet Flem boards with this family, who live "about a mile from the store," after securing his position at Varner's (64).

In "All the Dead Pilots," this soldier, wearing "a peasant's smock" rather than a uniform (519), drives Sartoris back to the squadron after he finds and takes Spoomer's clothes from 'Toinette's room in Amiens.

As Ratliff explains to Charles in The Town, during World War I Montgomery Ward Snopes ran brothels in France. He began in a little town with "a young French lady he happened to know" (120; since Charles is only five at the time, Ratliff resorts to evasive terms), then set up a bigger brothel in Paris, "adding more and more entertaining ladies to that-ere new canteen he set up in Paris" (121). The ladies themselves are not described in any more detail. (Prostitution was legal in France at this time, though it was illegal to run a brothel.)

The residents of Amiens who gather in the Cloche-Clos to celebrate the end of the War in "Ad Astra" had to endure great destruction and loss of life. They are "astonished" and "outraged" by the presence of a German aviator, even as a prisoner, in the bistro, and their resentment eventually boils over into violence (411).

The architect who designs the mansion and grounds at Sutpen's Hundred is identified in Absalom! as "French," but in this novel he comes to Yoknapatawpha from the French Caribbean: "all the way from Martinique" (26). When he is mentioned again in Requiem for a Nun he is identified as the "tame Parisian architect" (30).

This is the woman in "Red Leaves" who is "dressing a fowl" while listening to the unnamed old man tell the stories of the olden days (323).

In The Town this girl is discovered in an "empty cotton house" having sex with "schoolmaster" Snopes (43). (See also the Unnamed Eleven-Year-Old Girl who appears in The Mansion, and may be the same character.)

In "Red Leaves" this group of Indians meets Doom's West Indian wife and accompanies her from the steamboat to his plantation.

The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" mentions "an old lady born and raised in Jefferson who died rich somewhere in the North and left some money to the town to build a museum with" (110). Faulkner likely based this character upon the historical figure Mary Buie, an artist who died in 1937 and left her estate to Oxford. The town opened the Buie Museum in 1939, four years before the publication of "Shall Not Perish."

This former World War I R.A.F. pilot is described by the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" as "ack emma, warrant officer pilot, captain and M.C. in turn" (512). This list seems to summarize his rise through the ranks during the War, though not every term is clear. "Ack emma" was a common abbreviation during the War among British troops for "a.m." - morning - though what it means in reference to a young pilot is obscure.

The foreman at the convict camp in The Hamlet gives Mink Snopes a job cutting timber.

According to the mother that the Judge meets in Beyond, the "old gentleman" who gave the toy soldiers to her son "has a footman to carry his umbrella and overcoat and steamer rug" (793). Typically, a 'footman' is a liveried servant - and not usually found in an American, much less a Southern context. Domestic servants in Yoknapatawpha are black, but given the British locutions here - including "umbrella" and "steamer rug" - there's no reason to assume this footman is.

In The Hamlet Labove joins the university's football team; none of his teammates are individualized.

The coach of the football team in The Hamlet offers Labove housing and tuition to play on the University team.

In "Uncle Willy" these "folks in wagons and walking" on the road in Renfro stop to watch when they reach the pasture where Secretary is trying to teach Willy how to fly the plane (244). Since Secretary is black and Willy is white, the spectators' own race presumably affects the way they see this unusual sight, but the story says nothing to indicate what that is.

'Fish grabbling' means catching fish underwater with one's bare hands. That's what these men in The Town are doing when they find Mink Snopes' shotgun in the slough where he had thrown it. (See also Unnamed Negro Who Finds Gun in this index.)