Character Keys

At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne and Humphries are mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created.

In The Reivers Lucius briefly describes his Grandfather's father as a Confederate "color sergeant" who was shot and killed during the fighting in Virginia in 1862 (285). The fact that he was a sergeant rather than a commissioned officer complicates the question of the family's class status. When, for example, Lucius earlier discusses how his great-grandmother, this man's wife, taught his grandfather how to behave as a gentleman, it seems to imply an upper class background (cf.

Ffollansbye, a British officer who also appears in Faulkner's non-Yoknapatawpha short story "Thrift," is the source of much of what the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" tells us about Sartoris and Spoomer. He doesn't seem to be a malicious gossip so much as a sardonic one. For example, commenting on Spoomer's Mons Star, an honor awarded for service in France or Belgium, he says, "it was one decoration you had to be on hand to get" (513), implying that Spoomer's uncle is responsible for his other honors.

There's no question that the Stevenses are one of the oldest families in Yoknapatawpha, but they may or may not be among the very first. When the most famous Stevens - Gavin - appears in Light in August, the narrator simply says his "ancestors" "owned slaves in Jefferson (444). In "Hand upon the Waters," however, one of the Knight's Gambit stories in which Gavin becomes a kind of detective, the narrator identifies the earliest "Stevens" as one of the first three white men to settle in what became Jefferson.

In the beginning was Flem Snopes. He is the very first character who appears in the very first fiction about Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner sat down to write. He is the "Father Abraham" in the title of that unfinished text, which was going to tell the story of Flem's rise from tenant farmer's son in Frenchman's Bend to bank president in Jefferson, from a sharecropper's cabin to The Mansion - as the final volume of the Snopes trilogy that Faulkner finished over three decades later is titled.

In The Hamlet Mink Snopes tells Ratliff that "our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece" (84). The three Snopeses here are Mink himself, Flem and Isaac. This earlier generation of the Snopes family is never clearly brought into focus, but since we know that Flem has more than two 'cousins,' the implication of this bequest is that his grandfather - Ab's father, who is not mentioned in this novel - married twice, and that this grandmother is one of his two wives.

The oldest of Nub Gowrie's six sons in Intruder in the Dust. Twenty years ago he "wrenched himself free" of his father, got married and became the manager of a cotton plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi (160).

Francis Benbow is the father of Will Benbow, and grandfather of Horace and Narcissa. He is only mentioned in Flags in the Dust, where the narrative notes that he brought back a lantana tree "from Barbados in a tophat-box in '71 [i.e. 1871]" (164). When he went to the island, however, or what he did there, is not explained.

First mentioned in The Mansion as "that one in Spain" on a list that includes "Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany" (183), included by name on the later "Hitler and Mussolini and Franco" (214), General Francisco Franco led the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, coming to power afterward as the country's right-wing dictator. He remained in power until the 1970s.

"Frank" is mentioned in Sanctuary by Ruby in the bitter conversation she has with Temple. He was a young suitor who wanted to elope with her, but when he insisted on going back to her house to tell her father about their intentions, "father shot him" (58). As Ruby says, Frank "wasn't a coward" (58). To Ruby's brother, who also wants to kill him, Frank is "the goddam son of a bitch in his yellow buggy" (58) - a detail that suggests Frank might be more prosperous than her family.

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.

Mr. Fraser is the "childless widower" who takes Monk in after his grandmother's death and teaches him how to make whiskey as well as he made it himself (45). They live together for ten years, until Fraser's death. The narrator of "Monk" speculates that "it was probably Fraser who gave [Monk his] name," and the citizens of "the county got to know [Monk] or become familiar with him, at least" through his association with Fraser (45).

In "That Will Be Fine" this is the Fred who is the young son of Aunt Louisa and Uncle Fred.

Frony Gibson is a member of the black family that lives on the Compson place as servants, and the daughter of Roskus and Dilsey. In The Sound and the Fury she appears in Benjy's memories as a child about the same age as Quentin and Caddy Compson, and in the last section as an adult who still lives close enough to Dilsey to walk to church with her mother on Easter Sunday. She is also Luster's mother, though the novel does not indicate if she has a husband or if, like Caddy's daughter, Luster was conceived out of wedlock.

Gabe is identified in The Reivers as "the blacksmith" at Priest's livery stable (6). "Though short, he was a tremendously big man," one of whose knees is "terrifically twisted from an old injury in his trade" (9).

In The Town Mr. Garraway inherits his general store and its "worn counter" from his father (328).

Gavin Stevens appears altogether in seventeen fictions, making him one of Faulkner's most frequently recurring characters. Details about his past vary from text to text between "Hair" (1931) and The Mansion (1960) - "Hand Upon the Waters" describes him as the last remaining descendant of the original settlers of Yoknapatawpha; "Knight's Gambit" and The Mansion are the only texts to describe his service as a non-combatant in World War I. And in those two later texts he abruptly marries a former sweetheart, though elsewhere he appears to be a confirmed bachelor.

Born James Joseph Tunney, "Gene" Tunney was an American professional boxer who became heavyweight champion by defeating Jack Dempsey in 1926, and again in 1927. In "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses, his name is used along with three other famous heavyweight boxers to measure how highly the hunters of Yoknapatawpha regard the dog Lion and the bear Old Ben as heavyweights and champions too.

"Bee" (Bernard Elliott Bee, Jr.) was a newly appointed general from South Carolina when the battle of "First Manassas" was fought (36); although Requiem for a Nun does not mention it, he was mortally wounded during the fighting there.

General Burgoyne was a British commander who, as Eula puts it in The Town, "surrendered in the Revolution" after his forces were surrounded by a superior force of colonial soldiers (338). Historically his defeat had important results for the cause of American independence; in the novel, his surrender made V.K. Ratliff's ancestor the family's first American.

In "Two Soldiers" the "General MacArthur" who was "holding" the Japanese invaders at bay in the Philipines in the nightly radio reports that the narrator and Pete listen to (82) was General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Army Forces in the Far East when the U.S. entered World War II. After the Japanese invasion forced him to withdraw from the Philippines, he spoke the parting words - "I shall return" - that were becoming famous at the time "Two Soldiers" was written.

The "Garnett" referred to by Gavin in Intruder in the Dust in his nostalgic reference to the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg is General Richard Garnett, whose Confederate brigade led Pickett's disastrous charge against the center of the Union lines (190). He was trying to compensate for a stain on his military record when, feverish and injured, he insisted on leading his men from the front, on horseback. He was killed just before reaching the enemy lines.

Ulysses Grant ended the Civil War as the Commander-in-Chief of all Union forces, and soon afterward became the nation's 18th President. He never appears directly in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but is mentioned in ten of them, always in connection with his leadership of the Union Army of Tennessee during and after the Vicksburg Campaign of 1862-1863. The reference to him in Sanctuary says he "came through the county" of Yoknapatawpha during that period (8; see also "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 136).

James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart was one of the most famous and flamboyant Confederate officers, in command of Lee's cavalry for most of the Civil War. In Flags in the Dust he and "Carolina" Bayard Sartoris, Stuart's friend and aide-de-camp, embody the spirit of chivalry and romantic daring that the narrative identifies with pre-Modern life. Aunt Jenny, who tells the highly-colored story about him and Bayard as mythic heroes, says she danced with Stuart once, before the war, in Baltimore.

General Wheeler fought for the Confederacy as a cavalry general in the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. Three decades later he fought for the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. Bayard Sartoris in "My Grandmother Millard" says that "Father would have called [him an] apostate" for fighting under the American flag, and the story quotes another Confederate general, Jubal Early, as saying Wheeler will go to hell for that betrayal of the Lost Cause (673).

The Confederate General whom Ringo and Bayard take turns playing in "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, John Pemberton, was a historical figure. A career Army officer born in the North, Pemberton decided at the start of the Civil War to serve in the Confederate army - in part because he had married a southerner and in part because he had lived in the South for many years. He was in command of Vicksburg during Grant's 1862-1863 campaign against that river town, and surrendered it to the Union forces on the Fourth of July, 1863.

The historical figure General Joseph Johnston - often referred to as Joe - is mentioned in seven Yoknapatawpha fictions, though he doesn't appear in any of them. For much of the Civil War he was in charge of Confederate forces in the western theater, which included Mississippi.

A Confederate general in the Civil War who fought in the war's eastern theater. The essays he wrote for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s contributed to the myth of the Lost Cause. But he died in 1894, and so could not have made the comment about General Wheeler serving the U.S. in the Spanish-American War that "My Grandmother Millard" attributes to him (673).

While James Longstreet is not nearly as mythic a Confederate figure as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or J.E.B. Stuart (only one character in the fictions, for example, is named after him, and even then the character's full name is "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry"), as a general and corps commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia Longstreet probably understood and practiced the more modern warfare that emerged on the battlefields better than any other Confederate commander.

After serving in the Civil War's western theater, the Union general Philip Sheridan came east when Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to command the cavalry forces in the Army of the Potomac. What Gumbault tells Pearson in "The Tall Men" about how "Sheridan's calvary blocked the road from Appomattox to the Valley" at the very end of the war is accurate (54).

Robert E. Lee, the most famous of the generals who led the Confederate forces during the Civil War, is mentioned in 11 different Yoknapatawpha fictions. For most of the war he was in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, where the Confederate regiment mustered in Jefferson was fighting, but at the beginning of 1865, the last year of the war, he was appointed General-in-Chief of the Confederate States Army. He never appears in person.

A Union general named Smith is mentioned in four of the Yoknapatawpha fictions. His first name never appears. There were two Union Generals named Smith who fought Confederate Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mississippi at various times after the fall of Vicksburg. General William Sooy Smith was defeated by Forrest on February 22, 1864 in the Battle of Okolona, and did in fact fight Forrest "up and down the road to Memphis" - as Faulkner's General Smith does in "The Unvanquished" and again in the novel with that name (79, 128).

General Thomas Jackson - better known as Stonewall Jackson, a nickname he earned in the first major battle of the Civil War - was a corps commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He is mentioned in eight of the fictions. What Mr. Compson in Absalom! calls Jackson's "ruthless tactical skill" was demonstrated in a number of battles (223), including the 1862 campaign "in the [Shenandoah] Valley" referred to in Go Down, Moses (274), when he successfully thwarted three Union armies. His high status among the whites in Yoknapatawpha is attested to in several ways.

The "Wilcox" that Gavin refers to in Intruder in the Dust is General Cadmus Wilcox, commander of a Confederate brigade that took part in Pickett's Charge during the battle of Gettysburg (190).

The George who appears in Sanctuary seems to be the regular porter on the train between Oxford and Holly Springs. Clarence Snopes invariably tips him with a cigar instead of cash, but when Horace asks George what he is going to do with it, he replies "I wouldn't give it to nobody I know" (177).

Among the well-known sportsmen who come to Parsham every winter for the "National Trials" of pedigree bird dogs, Lucius mentions four names. Two are identifiable as real men (Horace Lytle and Paul Rainey). Lucius, the narrator of The Reivers, compares "George Peyton" to Lytle: the two are "as magical among bird dog people" as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb are to baseball fans (189).

George Washington Carver was an early 20th century Negro scientist and inventor who promoted crops, especially peanuts and sweet potatoes, as alternatives to cotton. The principal of Jefferson's Negro school mentions him in The Mansion when talking with Gavin about Linda Snopes' efforts to reform education for the country's black children (248).

In "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in the chapter with that name in The Unvanquished, George Wyatt is a former member of Colonel John Sartoris' "troop" (58, 187) and a key ally in his campaign to keep freed blacks from either voting or being elected. The Wyatts whom Faulkner had written about in his earlier fictions, Flags in the Dust and "A Rose for Emily," belong to the town's upper class, but there is no overt indication that George is a member of that family or (other than the fact that he is literate) about his own rank, in society or in the army.

The only son of Kentucky aristocrats, Gerald Bland is a Harvard University classmate of Quentin Compson. In The Sound and the Fury they come to blows, violently but anti-climatically, when Quentin projects his rage against Caddy's suitors onto him. In many ways Bland is Quentin's polar opposite, the Fortinbras to Quentin Compson's Hamlet-like character: Gerald is adored by his mother, an accomplished lady's man, athletic and decisive.

In "Death Drag" Ginsfarb is the barnstorming wing walker who performs the aerobatic stunts suggested by the story's title. His characterization emphasizes his Jewish ethnicity, sometimes in very stereotypical ways. Although he is a "short man," his "nose" would "have fitted a six-foot body" (187); he is so greedy for money that he can't be trusted to negotiate with the small towns the team performs in: "he'd stick out for his price too long" and so might well attract the attention of "anybody that might catch them" running the illegal show (195, 194).

In Absalom!, the man who is Rosa Coldfield's "papa" and Thomas Sutpen's father-in-law is "a Methodist steward, [and] a merchant" (11). He arrived in Jefferson from Tennessee half a decade before Sutpen, with a single wagonload of merchandise as the basis for his business. Mr. Compson calls him a "queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience" (47), though apparently he compromises that when he and Sutpen work a mysterious deal that provides the rich furnishings for Sutpen's mansion. When he acquires two slaves "though a debt . . .

Referred to in the script as "GOVERNOR" and addressed, by Gavin, only by his first name - "Henry" (90) - the man who meets with Gavin and Temple in Act II of Requiem for a Nun to hear an informal appeal on behalf of Nancy is referred to as "the last, the ultimate seat of judgment" (89). In the stage directions he is identified not with Mississippi but with a "mythical" State, "the State of which Yoknapatawpha County is a unit" (89) - though elsewhere in the novel there is no ambiguity about the literary 'fact' that Yoknapatawpha is in Mississippi.

The Stevenses are an old Jefferson family that becomes a very big part of the story of Yoknapatawpha by way of Faulkner's fondness for Gavin. The first member of the family to appear in the fictions is "Judge Stevens" in "A Rose for Emily," but in Sanctuary Gavin's second cousin Gowan becomes the first Stevens to play a significant role. And in Sanctuary Faulkner's treatment of Gowan is scathing. He's a recent graduate of the University of Virginia who likes to claim that he learned there both how to hold his liquor and how to be a gentleman.

We know Gowan Stevens had a grandfather, because in The Town Charles Mallison mentions that Gowan's grandfather was his own grandfather's brother, but that doesn't tell us if Faulkner - or Temple Drake - actually has this man in mind when in Requiem for a Nun she tries to cover up what she was actually saying by telling Gowan that "I was telling Uncle Gavin he had something of Virginia or some sort of gentleman in him too that he must have inherited from you through your grandfather" (51-52). These are the only two mentions of this grandfather in the fictions.

In "Smoke" Granby Dodge is the son of a remote kinsman of Cornelia Mardis. The narrator describes him as "some kind of an itinerant preacher" as well as a trader of "scrubby horses and mules" (20). According to his description, "we" - the people of Yoknapatawpha - "pitied him," but adds that reportedly as a preacher "he became a different man," his diffidence and shyness transformed into eloquence and power (20). He also turns out to be someone who can scheme patiently for years to get the Mardis-Holland estate. His ultimate 'confession' to the story's murders is made without words.

In "That Will Be Fine," Grandma is married to Grandpa and is mother to Aunt Louisa, Sarah, and Uncle Rodney. She is Georgie's maternal grandmother, but Georgie pays little attention to her.

The "grandpa" of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is married to grandma, and the father of Louisa, Sarah, and Rodney. He knows his son is a criminal but covers for him as long as possible, apparently taking refuge or solace in anger and his "tonic," which he keeps in a bottle in his desk - a desk which Rodney knows how to "prize open" in order to sneak his own (alcoholic) "dose" (266).

Weddel is pursuing Sally Priest, a married woman, and sends her a corsage. His first name, Grenier, comes from one of the founding Yoknapatawpha families - but The Town, where he appears, says nothing about a genealogical connection to that family.

The man the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" calls "Grandpap" is actually his father's grandfather. Sounding like the boy he is, the narrator says he is "old, so old you just wouldn't believe it" (111). In his dotage all he talks about is "the Confederate war," though the narrative does not say how he was involved in the Civil War (112). (The narrator's mother's grandfather also served in the Civil War, but his last name wouldn't have been Grier.)