Character Keys

John Doe is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but a name Gavin Stevens uses to represent the shared experience of the veterans of World War I. Talking about these survivors Gavin says: "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi," than the other vets from around the country (243).

In "A Bear Hunt," John Basket is a Chickasaw who lives in the settlement near the Indian mound, and well-known as moonshiner who makes what Major de Spain describes as "bust-skull whiskey" (75). Basket unwittingly becomes an accomplice in Ash's act of revenge against Luke Provine when Ratliff offhandedly suggests Luke visit the Chickasaws to get a cure for his hiccups. (There are two other Indians named 'Basket' in three other stories, but there's no indication of a relationship among them.)

Joe Ginotta is not a character in "Knight's Gambit" but one of the three hypothetical men whom Gavin Stevens uses to represent the veterans of the First World War: according to Gavin, "I am no more just John Doe of Jefferson, Mississippi; I am also Joe Ginotta of East Orange, New Jersey" (243).

The local man who built Yoknapatawpha's first automobile in his "back yard on the edge of town" appears in Faulkner's last four novels. That quotation is from Requiem for a Nun, where he is unnamed but described vividly as "a grease-covered man with the eyes of a visionary monk" (190). In the last two novels of the Snopes trilogy he is named Buffaloe. The Town identifies him as the "city electrician" and a "genius" who "in 1904 . . . drove out of his backyard into the street in the first automobile we had ever seen, made by hand completely" (12).

There are five characters in the fictions identified only as "Joe." This one has the most significant role to play as the unlikely agent of justice in "Hand upon the Waters." He is “a man not large, but with tremendous arms and shoulders; an adult, yet with something childlike about him” (68). Like Lonnie Grinnup, Joe has severe mental disabilities, being “deaf and dumb” (68). Joe, an “orphan” (70, 71), was “adopted” by Lonnie Grinnup, and he remains fiercely loyal to Lonnie after Lonnie's death.

There are five characters in the fictions identified only as "Joe." This one lives in Memphis, where he is the proprietor of the Grotto club in Sanctuary (247); he is bald, and lacks culture (he thinks "The Blue Danube" is a blues song, for example, 244), but he does his best to keep Red's funeral as dignified as possible.

Jody Varner appears in seven different fictions, as the manager of Varner's Store and the brother of Eula Varner. In both those roles he is not a prepossessing figure. It's always clear that his father Will is the owner of the store; the most original thing Jody does during his tenure is to hire Flem Snopes as a clerk - though that turns out to be his biggest mistake. The narrator of "Spotted Horses" predicts at the time that in ten years, "it would be Jody clerking for Flem Snopes" (166); it doesn't take Flem nearly that long to displace him, though Jody remains the nominal manager.

In "Death Drag" Jock is one of Faulkner's aviators who cannot stay away from airplanes: a former pilot in the Royal Flying Corps who has lost his civilian pilot's license but continues to fly nonetheless. He is a tall, dashing figure whose stained clothing and unruly hair indicate that he doesn't care about his physical appearance; insomniac and perennially thirsty, he is emotionally tense and self-contained and won't accept offers of help from his former comrade-in-arms, Captain Warren.

Joby is the oldest among the family of enslaved people who serve as the 'house slaves' of the Sartoris family in two novels and more than half a dozen short stories. He first appears, very briefly, in Flags in the Dust, in the stories Jenny tells about the old days on the plantation; there he is "Simon's grandfather" who helped bury the white family's silver under "the ammoniac barn floor" to hide it from Yankees during the Civil War (37).

Job Wylie was probably born a slave, owned by the man he still calls "Marse Hoke Christian" (233). He has worked in the Christian family drugstore ever since it opened "in eighteen-fifty-something," and in the present also works as Willy Christian's cook and housekeeper (226). Job is very loyal to the Christian family, though according to the narrator of "Uncle Willy" he also embodies Jefferson's "timid clinging to dull and rule-ridden-breathing" (239).

In Flags in the Dust, Joan is Belle Mitchell's younger sister who comes to Jefferson while Belle is away getting a divorce, to see what Horace Benbow is like; during the week she spends in town she and Horace have an affair. By the time she gets to Jefferson she has had a wide experience, both of the world (having lived in Hawaii, Australia and India, among other unnamed "random points half the world apart," 322) and of men (having been married a least twice and lived with at least one other man).

In "The Old People," Jimbo is a servant of Major de Spain's who accompanies the white men on their yearly hunting trips into the big woods. He helps Uncle Ash with the cooking and with the dogs. (When Faulkner re-tells the events of the short story in Go Down, Moses, Jimbo's character is replaced by "Tennie's Jim," who has a place on the McCaslin family tree.)

In other Yoknapatawpha fictions Gavin Stevens is the elected "County Attorney" who prosecutes even murder cases, but in Intruder in the Dust Gavin says that Lucas' trial will be handled by a "District Attorney": "it's the District Attorney that'll hang you or send you to [prison]," he warns Lucas (58), and this D.A. doesn't live "within fifty miles of Yoknapatawpha" (63). He is presumably referring to the man he later identifies by name as Jim Halladay, who works out of a town or city called Harrisburg, which is "sixty miles" from Jefferson (107).

In Absalom! Jim Bond is the child of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and the "inescapably negro" woman he married (168). He is also the great-grandson and last living descendant of Thomas Sutpen, "the scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" (296). He is described as "hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored" (173) and again as "a hulking young light-colored negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle-colored and slack-mouthed idiot face" (296).

"Mr Jim Avant from Hickory Flat,” one of the four well-known dog breeders and trainers mentioned in The Reivers, is almost certainly intended to be J.M. (James Monroe) Avent was a well-known owner and trainer of pedigreed bird dogs. He co-established the National Bird Dog Championship and in 1930. Time magazine called him the "most celebrated of contemporary handlers," citing too his nickname the "Fox of Hickory Valley," his home in Tennessee. Faulkner either misremembered or misspelled his name in this novel, and he also relocated hi m - perhaps on purpose.

In "Fool about a Horse," this Jim is Pat Stamper's assistant in the horse- and mule-trading business. We hear him called "Jim" only once, by Stamper (130); the narrator refers to him instead with variations of "that nigger" (127, etc.) But it's important to note that the narrator's vocabulary tells us a lot about the racist world in which the narrator has grown up, but nothing about the man named Jim. In addition to that word, the narrator calls him a "magician" and "a artist" (123, 127). Jim displays a genius for "doctoring" horses and mules to disguise their flaws.

There are two characters named "Jesus" in the fictions. This Jesus, Nancy's husband, is described in "That Evening Sun" as "a short black man, with a razor scar down his face." He has been missing since he threatened Nancy in the kitchen of the Compson house, saying that he might kill the white man responsible for her pregnancy ("I can cut down the vine it did come off of," 292). Nancy believes that Jesus went to Memphis but has returned to do her harm. While Jesus directly appears only once, the story is haunted by the possibility of his return.

Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America for the duration of the Civil War. Although he was born in Kentucky and lived briefly in Louisiana, at the time he was elected to lead the South he had spent almost forty years in Mississippi, and had represented the state in Washington in both the House and the Senate for many years. Despite this Mississippi connection, however, he is mentioned only four times in the fictions, and curiously, mostly by non-Southerners.

General Jason Compson, the grandfather of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy, appears in thirteen different texts, the most of any Compson. Given Faulkner's willingness to sacrifice consistency to the needs of a particular story, it's not surprising that it's hard to pull all his appearances into one cumulative biography.

The third Compson named Jason and the father of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy was born around the time the South was defeated in the Civil War and as a result, his story suggests, grew up to become what Faulkner's "Appendix Compson" calls a "cultured dipsomaniac" (335). His story, however, is never directly told. Instead, his character is defined chiefly by his role in the life and death of his oldest son, Quentin. "Father said" is a phrase that sounds again and again from the first to the penultimate page of Quentin's section in The Sound and the Fury (76, 178).

"Vardaman" is mentioned twice in Flags in the Dust, once by Aunt Jenny and once by Deacon Rogers (62, 122). Both of them express admiration for his character and politics. Known as "The Great White Chief," James K. Vardaman served one term as Governor of Mississippi (1904-1908) and one term in the United States Senate (1913-1919). A militant segregationist, he vowed to lynch every African American in the state if that ever became necessary. He opposed U.S.

In The Mansion Wattleg is a moonshiner who sells his whisky out of a "little unpainted store" near Wylie's Crossing that he can take apart and move to avoid the law (244).

Born John Joseph Killion in Greenpoint, New York, he took the professional name of "Jake Kilrain" to protect his parents from the embarrassment of his questionable career as a prize fighter. He lost the heavy-weight championship to John L. Sullivan in a bare-knuckle fight that went 75 rounds in Richbourg, Mississippi, on August 7, 1889.

The character named Jake in "Beyond" mows the Judge's lawn and during the Judge's life leaves a flower "in its season, . . . fresh and recent and unblemished, on the morning coffee tray" for the Judge's lapel (783).

Ironically, the "turnkey" or "jailor" in Jefferson during the Civil War in Requiem for a Nun is "a failed farmer," who secures the position through political influence (179).

The eldest of the sons in the MacCallum|McCallum family, Jackson is named for the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson, under whom his father served in the Civil War. He appears as a minor character in two texts. In Flags in the Dust he is described as "a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus" (337). Much to his father's disgust, he is attempting to transform hunting by interbreeding a fox and a hound.

Born William Harrison Dempsey, "Jack" Dempsey was World Heavyweight boxing champion form 1921 to 1926 when he lost his title to Gene Tunney. His name is used in "Lion" and again in Go Down, Moses 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.

In "A Bear Hunt" Bonds is a "dead and forgotten contemporary" of Luke Provine when he was a young man. According to the narrator, it has been "years now" since Bonds, along with Luke and Luke's unnamed brother, "were known as the Provine gang and terrorized our quiet town after the unimaginative fashion of wild youth" (63-64).

Hoover was a founder and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; he ran the agency from its founding in 1924 until his death in 1972. In The Mansion someone - Gavin is sure it is Flem - calling himself "Patriotic Citizen" sends Hoover a letter warning him about Linda as a "commonist" (269).

Isom is Elnora's only child in Flags in the Dust, "a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound" (20). He is responsible for a number of chores around the Sartoris household, but most enjoys wearing Caspey's military uniform and taking the wheel of Bayard's car. There is no hint of how, if at all, he is being educated. He is at the wheel of a car again ten years later in Sanctuary, where he is "the negro driver" who works for Narcissa Sartoris (110) - and the only member of the Strother family who is included in the novel.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in Go Down, Moses, Isham is "the oldest Negro" on the hunting expedition (273, 337). He attends to the needs of the white hunters in the camp. He takes particular care of Ike McCaslin, both physically by preparing his bed and emotionally by "warning" him about the young woman who visits the camp (277, 340).

Few characters in the Yoknapatawpha canon are as protean as Isaac (Uncle Ike) McCaslin. If you only read "A Bear Hunt" (1934), "Lion" (1935), "The Old People" (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948) and "Race at Morning" (1955), Uncle Ike is one of the men who are part of the annual hunting parties into the big woods.

In "Spotted Horses" the oldest child of the Armstids is named Ina May. She is "about twelve" (178), and takes care of her younger siblings while her mother is shuttling back and forth to Mrs. Littlejohn's. According to Mrs. Armstid "Ina May bars the door" and keeps "the axe in bed with her" while her mother is away (179). When The Hamlet retells this story the Armstids' twelve-year-old daughter is not named, but she plays the same offstage role, guarding over the "littlest ones" with an axe through the nights her mother is away (347).

These unnamed children of Ike McCaslin appear only briefly, and enigmatically, in the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," where it says that Ike "had had a wife and children once though no more" (274). Go Down, Moses begins by saying that Ike McCaslin was childless, and when Faulkner revised this story for that novel these children disappear.

I.O. Snopes' career as a character begins with the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, and after six more appearances ends three decades later in The Mansion. In those eight texts his various jobs include restaurant manager, cotton speculator, mule trader, blacksmith and schoolteacher. In all of these contexts he is both comically out of place and nonetheless vaguely alarming - and impossible to get into a single focus, as Faulkner re-invents him more than once.

The character in "Ad Astra" named Hume is probably another Allied aviator, but in the story his role is to narrate the way Sartoris managed to avenge his brother's death.

In The Hamlet this Mitchell is one of the men hanging out on the gallery in front of the Whiteleaf store.

Huey Pierce Long Jr. served as the governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and was a member of the United States Senate from 1932 until his assassination in 1935. The narrator of "Knight's Gambit" compares Harriss to him for wanting to build an expensive concrete road that he himself would never use "just as Huey Long in Louisiana had made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere, without ever once looking in-side it probably nor even caring what the people who wrote and edited it thought of him" (241).

The full name of Ike McCaslin's "Uncle Hubert" in Go Down, Moses, as readers learn when he signs the i.o.u.'s he leaves his nephew instead of a golden treasure, is Hubert Fitz-Hubert Beauchamp. The son of the man who built it, he owns the "Warwick" plantation that is half-a-day’s ride from the McCaslin plantation. After the Civil War he takes a black mistress for a while, and then lives with an aged black servant "in one single room" in the decaying mansion (290) until it burns down.

Judge Howard Allison's only son and namesake in "Beyond" is, as the Judge puts it, "the last of my name and race" (789). Young Howard loved riding his pony: "they were inseparable," the Judge says, and he carries a picture of the two of them (790). They boy was killed at the age of ten, found "dragging from the stirrup" of the pony (789). Although he does not appear in the story, one of the inhabitants of Beyond reports seeing him ride by on his pony "every day" (794).

A "fierce thin wiry man" in The Hamlet (233), Jack Houston's father is a farmer of some wealth with a large section of land that is worked by sharecroppers. He has a somewhat strained relationship with his son, whom he teaches to farm. His eventual death causes Jack to return home after thirteen years away.

The "younger of the two negroes" who work in the restaurant that occupies the back half of Rogers' store in Flags in the Dust. He has a "broad untroubled" and "reliable sort of face" (120). In return for serving setups to Young Bayard and Rafe MacCallum, they share some of Henry MacCallum's moonshine whisky with him. (He is not related to the Houston who appears in the Snopes trilogy.)

In the larger narrative of Yoknapatawpha Horace Benbow's place is a curious one. One of the two central characters in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, Horace becomes the first major recurring character in the canon when Faulkner casts him as the protagonist of Sanctuary. After that second appearance he essentially disappears.

Homer Bookwright (spelled without the "w" in "By the People") is a farmer and church member in Frenchman's Bend and a minor figure in four Yoknapatawpha texts. He does, however, have a memorable line in The Mansion, when he explains the jailor's wife's interest in Montgomery Ward Snopes' career as a pornographer by asking, rhetorically, "aint she human too, even if she is a woman?" (70).

Homer is the classic Greek epic poet to whom The Iliad and The Odyssey are attributed. His blindness is part of his mythic status. To Gavin Stevens, Homer is proof of what mankind can achieve: despite his disability, he "charted the ultimate frontiers of passion and defeat and glory and ambition and courage and hope and fear" (200).

The Mansion's cast of characters includes the "last descendants" of Alexander Holston, one of the first white settlers in Yoknapatawpha and the man who established the oldest hotel in Jefferson. These two women are described as "maiden sisters," though the narrator adds, parenthetically, that "one of them, the younger, had been married once but so long ago and so briefly that it no longer counted" (421). They now own the Holston House, and run it with "cold and inflexible indomitability" (421).

In "Uncle Willy" Hoke Christian first opened the drugstore that his son Willy still owns before the Civil War. He seems to have been a much more exemplary member of the community than Willy, but it's hard to determine his class. In addition to his business, he owned at least one slave, Job, and slave-owning is a characteristic of Yoknapatawpha's upper class families. Talking about Willy, Mrs. Merridew refers to "that position in the world which his family's name entitled him to" (232). But Mrs.

In "Fool about a Horse" Hoke is an offstage character who owns the pasture on the road between Frenchman's Bend and Jefferson where Pat Stamper sets up his camp. (There is also a character named only "Hoke" in Go Down, Moses who owns a sawmill in a different part of the county. Neither of these appears in their texts, and they might be the same Hoke, but it seems more likely that Faulkner is thinking of different characters.)

According to The Reivers Boon's grandfather was "a white whiskey trader" who married a Chickasaw Indian (18).