Character Keys

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).

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.

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).

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)

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.

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).

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.

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 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).

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 explains that one of his brothers was shot and killed by this resident of Berlin, presumably after the man discovered his wife's affair.

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

In "Spotted Horses," Ernest is one of the men standing around Mrs. Littlejohn's the evening of the auction. Since "he lives neighbors with" the Armstids, he is sent to tell Mrs. Armstid that her husband has been injured (177). He also is selected from the group of boarders by Mrs. Littlejohn to help Will Varner set Henry's leg.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. "The "folks," as Suratt calls the poor farmers and their families in "Spotted Horses" (165), congregate at Varner's store or the horse auction, and provide a kind of audience for Flem Snopes' rise from tenant farmer to the son-in-law of the hamlet's richest man.

Ernest Cotton is a bachelor and an unsuccessful farmer whose hapless attempt to avenge himself against a more prosperous neighbor is at the center of "The Hound." The narrator describes him as "a mild man in worn overalls, with a gaunt face and lack-luster eyes like a sick man" (157). He is also a murderer and would-be suicide, though unsuccessful at those as well. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he made Cotton's character a cousin of Flem named Mink Snopes.)

In "The Hound" the clerk named Snopes tells Cotton that the man who found his shotgun in the slough where he tried to hide it was "a nigger squirl hunter" (159). When Faulkner re-tells this story in The Hamlet, Cotton is named Mink Snopes, the clerk is named Lump Snopes, and the Negro who "found that durn gun" is fishing instead of hunting - actually, he is "grabbling," in which you try to catch the fish under water with your bare hands (257).

Sartoris calls the French woman who leaves him for Spoomer in "All the Dead Pilots" "'Toinette," which we assume is a contracted form of Antoinette. She is a barmaid in a lower-class bar in Amiens and the second woman who has left Sartoris for Spoomer.

Major Kaye is the commanding officer of the R.A.F. squadron in "All the Dead Pilots." His letter to Aunt Jenny about Sartoris' death reveals him to be a compassionate man but even more, a very military one. Calling Sartoris Jenny's son instead of her great-nephew, he writes that "The E.A. outnumbered your son and had more height and speed which is our misfortune but no fault of the Government which would give us better machines if they had them which is no satisfaction to you" (530). He takes it for granted that a woman in Mississippi would know what E.A.

In "All the Dead Pilots," this R.A.F. aviator was flying below Sartoris when the latter was "shot down while in pursuit of duty over enemy lines" and witnessed his death (530).

Spoomer's uncle in "All the Dead Pilots" is the "corps commander, the K.G." (513). "K.G." stands for Knight of the Order of the Garter, the most prestigious of Britain's chivalric honors. He is thus clearly a member of the upper class, and according to the narrator, a snob who predicts that the war "will be the making of the army" (513). The narrator seems to attribute his nephew's rank to his influence.

In "All the Dead Pilots" this "young man in spectacles" who "looked like a student" is "dead drunk" when Sartoris takes his ambulance to Amiens (522).

After Sartoris' trick in "All the Dead Pilots," "the brigadier and the Wing Commander" arrive at the squadron's aerodrome to investigate (527). Historically, brigadier generals were the second highest ranking in the R.A.F. That the high command would personally see to the Sartoris-Spoomer rivalry speaks to the influence of Spoomer's uncle, also a brigadier general.

In "All the Dead Pilots" this "Anzac major" sends the drunk ambulance driver back to his unit (527). (Anzac, sometimes written ANZAC, stands for 'Australian and New Zealand Army," to which many of the Allied troops fighting around Amiens belonged.)

This soldier with a "raised moustached face" in "All the Dead Pilots" (524) is "drinking from a bottle in a doorway" of the estaminet when Sartoris arrives there in search of Spoomer (522). Sartoris has to fight him in order to leave the place.

In Sartoris' memory of his training as an aviator in "All the Dead Pilots," this man, who seems like a figure in a tall tale, was injured when "a cadet crashed on top of him" during flying practice in Canada (526).

"Kit" is the nickname given by the soldiers and aviators in "All the Dead Pilots" to the "girl" Sartoris has in London (514). They derive it, derogatorily, from General Kitchener - "because she had such a mob of soldiers" (514). The narrator and Ffollansbye don't know whether Sartoris knew about her reputation, but they bear witness to Sartoris' rage and grief after she "goes off" with Spoomer (514).

In "All the Dead Pilots," these are the French soldiers in the Amiens estaminet who witness Sartoris' frustration about Spoomer's affair with Antoinette. Knowing no French, he imagines they are "Laughing at me about a woman. Me knowing that he was up there" in a bedroom with her, but being unable to do anything about it because of Spoomer's superior rank (519-20).

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris finds a "bill from [a] London tailor" in "his overalls in Amiens that day in the spring" (530-31). Although nothing more is said about the tailor, the sentence provides an interesting juxtaposition of the upper class clothing he wore when off duty and these "overalls." (The overalls aviators wore while flying, of course, send a very different signal than the overalls poor white and black farmers and farm hands wear in Yoknapatawpha.)

This woman runs and probably owns the "estaminet, a 'bit of a pub,'" in a back street of Amiens where 'Toinette works in "All the Dead Pilots" (516). She and the girl are not related to one another, which raises the question of the exact nature of their business arrangement; she apparently knows of 'Toinette's affairs with Sartoris and Spoomer but does not object to them.

This senior officer in the R.A.F. squadron in "All the Dead Pilots" seems like a by-the-book kind of soldier; he won't release Sartoris from duty just because Sartoris asks. He does have a sense of humor, though, and at least a working knowledge of history and geography: "the operations officer told him that La Fayette awaited him on the Santerre plateau" (522) - in other words, "get back to work."

These are the "dead pilots" that the title "All the Dead Pilots" refers to, and they are of two kinds: the aviators like Sartoris, who were killed in the First World War, and the ones who physically survived the war but now find themselves alienated from the contemporary society that has moved past their sacrifices. The survivors are said to have "died" psychologically on Armistice Day, living on only in "snapshots hurriedly made, a little dog-eared with the thirteen years" that have elapsed since November 11, 1918.

Near the end of the First World War, the assignment of the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" is to read letters going from the front back home to make sure they don't reveal any military information. He seems to have real sympathy for both the soldiers and the recipients of "the scrawled, brief pages of transparent and honorable lies to mothers and sweethearts" (512).

The narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" displays considerable sympathy for the impact of war on women who remain at home while the men in their lives are at the front, going so far as to say that they "died" on the day war was declared (514). This group includes the "mothers and sweethearts" to whom the soldiers write letters from the war (512), and the "three day wives and three-year widows" whom the soldiers marry hastily on their way to the war (514).

In "A Justice" David Callicoat pilots the steamboat that comes up the river near Doom's Plantation "four times a year" - or as the narrative puts it, he is "the white man who told the steamboat where to swim" (346). Doom's first step in his quest for power is to appropriate the name 'David Callicoat' for himself (347).

In "A Justice" Mr. Stokes is referred to as "the manager" (343) of the Compson family farm, overseeing the Negro workers who live in the farm's quarters.

In "A Justice" the tribe's doctor is mentioned only negatively, when he fails to arrive in time to "burn sticks" (349) when the Man falls ill and dies.

When this second child is born to Sam Fathers' mother, and her husband is its father, the story called "A Justice" seems to suggest that Doom's solution to the problems of race, slavery and sexual rivalry has provided at least a form of 'justice' in the end. He is, however, born into slavery, like his parents.

This "whisky-trader" in "A Justice" who visits Doom's plantation "each summer" is the only white man Sam Fathers sees until he is twelve years old (346.. Presumably he trades moonshine whiskey to the Indians, in exchange for animal skins or other commodities.