Character Keys

In "Error in Chemistry," this unnamed deputy accompanies the sheriff to investigate the initial call from Joel Flint about his wife's death. He may or may not be the same as one of the named deputies in the story.

This unnamed deputy recounts the second and last section of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, although much of the language used to characterize him serves to undermine his authority as a narrator. He is "spent" and "a little hysterical too" after both the manhunt for Rider and the lynching (252), and his wife shows no sympathy at all for him or for the story he's trying to tell her. Instead, she offers the narrative’s only portrait of the deputy sheriff: "You sheriffs! Sitting around that courthouse all day long talking.

This is one of the two deputies mentioned in "Monk." This one is the officer who arrests Monk in the gas station. He may or may not be the same one who later transports him to the state penitentiary by train. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment.

In "Smoke," this deputy follows up the health officer's report about Old Anse's behavior in the cemetery, and discovers the old man's body. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

In The Reivers this unnamed deputy holds Ludus after Boon shoots at him, and then escorts Ludus to Judge Stevens' office. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

This is the first of the two deputy sheriffs who appear in The Mansion; he escorts Mink to Parchman Penitentiary. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

In The Town this deputy brings a suitcase to Montgomery Ward Snopes' studio, so Sheriff Hampton can lock up Snopes' "album" (174) of ""French postcards" (171). (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

This deputy sheriff escorts Lee Goodwin on his trips between the jail and the courthouse in Sanctuary. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

In Light in August "five or six deputies" from Jefferson and Mottstown help the sheriffs of these towns escort Joe from the jail in Mottstown to the car that will take him to Jefferson (356).

The "delinquent girls" who live in a Memphis institution do not appear in Light in August, except as the recipients of charity from Reverend Hightower (58).

In The Town Sheriff Hub Hampton's "office deputy," Miss Elma, is identified as the "widow of the sheriff Mr Hampton had succeeded last time" (183). This previous sheriff is not otherwise described.

In "A Rose for Emily," the unnamed Union soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson lie in "the cedar-bemused cemetery" in "ranked and anonymous graves" (119).

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.

This is the "daughter" who is born to the "girl whom [Zilphia] used to visit" when a teenager (374); the narrator of "Miss Zilphia Gant" notes that at least some of the dresses this child wears were made by Zilphia.

The unnamed narrator of "Hair" mentions his daughter in passing: when he says women "can't help it" if they "grow up too fast," he adds "I have a daughter of my own, and I say that" (133).

Mink has two actual daughters; this "daughter" who lives in "the Delta" is one he invents in The Mansion to keep the Negro cotton farmer from identifying him (439).

As an itinerant salesman, of sewing machines and anything else that he can swap or sell, Suratt regularly meets and does business with the lower class population of at least three counties, including Yoknapatawpha. The groups he talks with in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" include men "squatting . . . on the porch of a crossroads store," and "women surrounded by laden clotheslines and blackened wash pots" (138).

In Sanctuary Horace refers to Lee Goodwin's "good customers," the men of Yoknapatawpha who regularly bought whiskey illegally from him in the past but turned on him once he was arrested (127).

In The Town Charles naively - or perhaps coyly - describes the men from "the next towns" and elsewhere who visit Montgomery Ward's photographic studio at night this way: "going and coming through the side door in the alley; and them the kind of men you wouldn't hardly think it had ever occurred to them they might ever need to have their picture struck" (131).

When Dewey Dell goes into the Mottson drugstore in As I Lay Dying, there are "folks at the fountain" - that is, customers at the lunch counter (199). She doesn't want to talk to Moseley in front of them.

In his Easter sermon in The Sound and the Fury Rev. Shegog mentions the two men who were crucified on either side of Jesus. He refers to "de thief and de murderer" (296). The "thief" is presumably the man mentioned in the Gospels who rebukes the other criminal for mocking Jesus and asks Jesus to remember him when he reaches heaven.

The narrator of "Two Soldiers" is amazed at the number of people he sees in Memphis: the "folks from ever'where" and the "rushing cars and shoving folks" are clearly the most people that he has ever seen (93).

The crowd outside the Burden house in Light in August is, like so many crowds in the fictions, an audience in search of sensations. Although the white people of Yoknapatawpha had avoided Joanna's place for decades, within minutes after her corpse is discovered in the burning house a huge crowd gathers there. It is comprised mostly of white men (who, the narrator pointedly says, "would not have allowed their wives" to call on Joanna while she lived there, 291-92), although the crowd includes "the women" too (289).

In Go Down, Moses this pilot dusts the crops to kill insects on the fields that make up the Edmonds plantation - except for the plot farmed by Lucas Beauchamp.

In The Sound and the Fury these two men operate the schooner Quentin watches going under the drawbridge over the Charles: one is "naked to the waist . . . coiling down a line on the fo'c's'le head" and the other is "in a straw hat without any crown . . . at the wheel" (89).

At the head of the tribe in "Red Leaves" is a single chief, "the Man." But the narrative notes that the larger political structure includes "a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan," and who meet as a group to discuss tribal issues like "the Negro question" (319). The narrative refers to them in the "conclave" as "one," "a third," "a second," and so on, but does not give them names or individualities or distinguish between the two generations in any way (319).

In the short story names after her, Elly stays in her cousin's room during her visit to her uncle and aunt in Mills City. The cousin herself does not appear, but her bedroom is filled with "the frivolous impedimenta of a young girl" (217).

In The Hamlet it is the courthouse janitor who "opens the court-room" for Mink Snopes' trial and, according to the narrator, could have done as good a job defending Mink his court-appointed lawyer (367).

In "Tomorrow" this clerk reads the county's indictment against Bookwright.

While the clerk himself does not appear in Flags in the Dust, his office does: on rainy days, the narrator says, the "city fathers," the old men who hold various patronage jobs in the town or county government, "move inside [the courthouse] to the circuit clerk's office" (161).

In Absalom! this county recorder records "the deed, patent, to the land" which Sutpen acquires from the Chickasaws (25).

According to the narrator of The Hamlet, "county officers do not bother [the people of Frenchman's Bend] at all save in the heel of election years" (5). The reference is to 'peace officers,' i.e. policemen, though in Yoknapatawpha the term 'police' is rarely used to describe the county's sheriffs and deputies or the marshals in the town. The county sheriffs all are elected, which explains the last part of that quotation, but in fact the novel shows them doing their job in Frenchman's Bend, at least when Houston is murdered.

The "County Medical Officer" in Absalom! tells General Compson that Charles E. S-V. Bon and Judith Sutpen have yellow fever (170).

In both "A Point of Law" and Go Down, Moses the signature of this "nameless clerk" appears on the marriage license for George Wilkins and Nat Beauchamp (221, 70).

The anonymous hillman in Flags in the Dust who moves into Jefferson and builds the house Belle Mitchell lives in came to town with his unnamed and unenumerated "women-folks" (24). In their new lives these women obviously attempt to live like 'ladies': they spend the mornings sitting on the veranda and the afternoons riding about wearing "colored silks" (24). But after two years, they return to Frenchman's Bend and, the narrator speculates, their original 'poor white' identities.

The narrator of Sanctuary doesn't say how he knows this young woman carrying an infant on the train is a "countrywoman" (170), but he displays sympathy for the fact that she is forced to stand while the college students occupy the seats in the railway car.

In The Town, the potential customers asking for directions to the Snopes Hotel are "country men" - men from the countryside outside Jefferson - who "were told simply to walk in that direction until they came to a woman rocking, and that was it" (42). (The woman is I.O. Snopes' wife. Faulkner here spells "country men" as two words, but our name spells it as one word, which Faulkner himself did elsewhere; see Unnamed Countrymen 1, for example, in this index.)

Referred to in "Barn Burning" only as the "third man" along with Ab Snopes and the unnamed blacksmith, he "squat[s] on his heels" in rural fashion while taking part in their unnarrated, desultory conversation about "crops and animals" (19).

The day the Grand Jury meets to consider Christmas' case in Light in August is a Saturday, which as always means there are a lot of people from the surrounding county in Jefferson; according to the narrator, while the “countrymen in overalls” join the townsmen standing around the courthouse, their wives and daughters of move “in and out of the stores . . . in clumps, slowly and also aimlessly as cattle or clouds" (416).

In "The Tall Men" Mr. Pearson, who works for the federal government, lumps all country people together in the phrase "these people" (46). Pearson's work with various relief agencies has taught him to expect the worst from country people, and he assumes that they are all shiftless and untrustworthy. The encounter with the McCallum family and the story of their lives, as Gombault tells it, forces Pearson to revise his assumptions and abandon his prejudices.

"Three or four miles" outside the town that "The Hound" refers to only as "the countyseat" (162), the men in the Sheriff's car meet "wagons and cars . . . going home from market day in town" (163). The text does not actually mention any people in either kind of vehicle, but it does say that the "Sheriff greets them with a single gesture of his fat arm," and that "them" must be human (163), or at least potential voters.

After Linda Snopes stops going out with Matt Levitt in The Town, he replaces her with "a country girl he had found somewhere" (206).

In Light in August this "countryboy" is driving past the Burden place with his girlfriend when sees Joe Christmas, naked and waving a pistol; the gun explains why he stops and allows him into the car (297). He has the presence of mind to plan to carry Joe to his own house, while pretending to be taking a shortcut.

In The Hamlet this man serves customers "at the counter of a small side-street restaurant" in Jefferson (74).

The Jefferson couples who receive invitations to the Cotillion Dance in The Town represent the town's social elite. Charles describes their appearance as "crimped and frizzed in scarves and earrings and perfume and long white gloves like Mother or in claw-hammer coats and boiled shirts and white ties and yesterday's haircuts like Father and Uncle Gavin" (75-76).

The role of the coroner who appears in both "Pantaloon in Black" and Go Down, Moses is to pronounce Rider's cause of death and return the body to Rider's relatives. The script he follows is that of the Jim Crow system.

The man who is referred to simply as "the coroner" in Sanctuary man may also be the local undertaker, but all one can say for certain is that he "sits over" Tommy's body as it lays in the funeral parlor trying unsuccessfully to learn the corpse's last name (113).

These are the prisoners in The Hamlet who had been sentenced to "south Mississippi convict camp" (244) in The Hamlet. They are hired "from the State for the price of their board and keep" (262). As convicts, they are forced to work without pay. (Convict labor was once a common part of the penal system in the South.)

"Saxophone girls and boys" is the label that the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" uses for the generation that came of age in the 1920s, and so are too young to have experienced the Great War, as World War I was called (512). These modern young people know only modern aircraft and not the history of the unstable planes, like the Sopwith Camel, that the pilots flew thirteen years earlier in the war.