Character Keys

The people in the "good crowd" (198) watching the barnstorming show in "Death Drag" react variously to what happens, especially at its aborted climax: some express disbelief and shock; some of the women faint. Children are also present, and there's a mix of town and country people. One "countrywoman" is repeatedly and vocally skeptical about the authenticity of the show: "You can't tell me" this or that, she says, but is last heard demanding to be taken "right home this minute" when the show's final stunt goes wrong (199-200).

In Go Down, Moses these "men women and children come at some time during the day and look quietly on" as the archaeologists investigate the Indian mound (37).

These are the various "watchers - the black and the white, the old men, the children, the women who would not know for months yet if they were widows or childless or not" (96) - who assemble near Hawkhurst to witness the contest between a Confederate and a Union locomotive described by Drusilla Hawk. Drusilla implies that many of these spectators were part of a "grapevine" of oppressed and deprived people who knew of the raid before it happened (97).

"The justice's court" in which Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned in Absalom! is described as "crowded" (163); "every face in the room" looks at the prisoner at the moment when the justice himself asks him "What are you?" (165).

In The Mansion Ratliff speculates that Flem has "spies" that watch Montgomery Ward's business. He imagines them as children, moreover, "since any little child hired with a ice cream cone" would suit Flem's needs (62).

This "old lady, dead now" is called a "spinster" by the narrator of Intruder in the Dust. She was "a neighbor" of Chick Mallison, who baked treats for "all the children on the street" and taught them to play a card game that she made sure she won (58).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of people who, according to him, brought about the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the Boston-bred (even when not born in Boston) spinster descendants of long lines of similarly-bred and likewise spinster aunts and uncles whose hands knew no callus except that of the indicting pen" - by which he means northern abolitionist writers (273).

In one of the fantasies he has while driving to Mottson Jason in The Sound and the Fury imagines leading "a file of soldiers" to capture the sheriff who would not help him (306). While Jason's grandfather was a General in the Confederate Army, he himself never led troops, or served in any army.

Very little can be said definitively about the two men in As I Lay Dying who apprehend Darl (which help from Jewel and Dewey Dell) and then, the next morning, take him in custody on the train to the state mental hospital in Jackson. Though they never speak, they are presumably state employees. They both carry guns, and have new, crisp haircuts.

In Light in August the railroad agent in Mottstown tries to talk Mrs. Hines into renting a car rather than waiting for the "two oclock in the morning" train to Jefferson (360).

The history of Jackson in Requiem for a Nun includes a mention of "the captain" of a riverboat who puts a "gambler" off his ship (83). Steamboats began traveling on the Mississippi River and its tributaries around 1811.

In both the 1940 magazine version of "The Old People" and the revised version of it that Faulkner published in Go Down, Moses, the step-father of Had-Two-Fathers is "one of the slaves which [Doom] inherited" from Moketubbe (the story, 203). After impregnating a slave woman from New Orleans, Doom "pronounces a marriage" between her and "one of the slave men he has just inherited" upon becoming "The Man" (the novel, 158). But this man's place on the family tree is ambiguous.

In Requiem for a Nun the "masons who erect" the Confederate statue in Courthouse Square are mentioned, but not described (189). They should not be confused with the "Masons" - the members of the secret society who are mentioned in The Town.

In Sanctuary, in order to try to find out where Narcissa went after he sees her in "disappear into a door" in town, Horace asks all the clerks "within the radius of where she must have turned" if they've seen her (261).

"The proprietor" of the "small tight neatly-cluttered store" where Mink buys his first food after leaving prison in The Mansion takes advantage of Mink's ignorance about prices (286-86).

Over the course of several pages in one of the chapters he narrates in The Mansion, Ratliff imagines how the unconventionally triangular relationship among Charles Mallison as an adolescent, Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes might look to "a stranger that never happened to be living in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County ten or twelve years ago" (123).

During the last winter of the Civil War, Rosa says in Absalom!, "stragglers" frequently passed by the Sutpen plantation where she, Judith and Clytemnestra lived. Some she says were "tramps, ruffians," but others were "soldiers beginning to come back" from the war, "men who had risked and lost everything" (126). Right after the passage mentions the "wife or mistress" of such men "who in [their] absence has been raped," Rosa adds: "We were afraid," but "we fed them" (126).

In The Reivers the motorman the travelers see as they enter Memphis is turning the "front trolley" around at the end of the line with the help of the conductor (93).

In The Hamlet this Frenchman's Bend boy chants a "playground doggerel" insult at Jack Houston (230).

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 "Elly" the various men whom the title character kisses in the shadows on her veranda are described as "youths and young men of the town at first, but later . . . almost anyone, any transient in the small town whom she met by either convention or by chance, provided his appearance was decent" (208).

These are the "young men" in The Town who do or someday might court Linda Snopes (297). They exist both in fact - "half the football and baseball teams escort her home from school in the afternoon and squire her in gangs to the picture show during her junior and senior high school years" (299) - and in Flem's mind, as the threat to his control over his daughter and her potential inheritance.

In The Mansion this man provides "the beer and the laundry" for Miss Reba's brothel, but continuously tries to cheat her (81).

Gavin Stevens mentions "the Swiss" in passing during his lengthy monologue about race in Chapter 7 of Intruder in the Dust: after telling his nephew that the white South, "alone in the United States," is "a homogeneous people," he compares them to the "the Swiss" - they too are homogeneous, but there are not "enough" of them to matter, adding that they "are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business" (150).

Sanctuary provides the "old" Kinston man who drives Horace home from the train with a fairly intricate story. "In the old days" he was at the head of local society, "a planter, a landholder, son of one of the first settlers." But when the town "boomed" into sudden prosperity, he lost his property "through greed and gullibility" and for the last several decades has made a living as a taxi driver. With his "gray moustache with waxed ends" and his "suit of grey striped with red," however, he still gives off an air of gentility (297-98).

In "Knight's Gambit" Gavin Stevens learns that Max Harriss is "well known" to the "taxi-drivers" in the area of Memphis around the Greenbury Hotel (208).

In The Sound and the Fury this telegram delivery boy brings Jason news of about his investment on the commodities market.

This "boy" delivers Markey's telegram to Gavin Stevens in "Knight's Gambit" (208). Most delivery boys and men in the fictions are black, which would give additional possible meaning to the term "boy," but since Faulkner does not specify this character's race - and based on the character who delivers telegrams to Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury - we assume this one is white.

This is the diffident "young man" (according to Miss Jenny, at least) works as the Jefferson telegraph operator in Flags in the Dust (392). Because he knows, as Jenny does not, that Bayard has died, he doesn't know what to do after she hands him a telegram to send to Bayard.

In The Mansion the night telegraph operator lets Mink sleep in the station's waiting room.

This telephone operator is heard in Sanctuary as "a detached Delsarte-ish voice" that informs Horace his call to Miss Reba has ended (268). (Francois Delsarte was a Frenchman whose instructions for proper pronunciation became famous at the end of the 19th century.)

The central office telephone operator - hence called "Central" in The Mansion, at one time a familiar way of referring to telephone operators (413) - who connects Ratliff's long-distance call from Parchman to Gavin Stevens in Jefferson.

In "A Courtship," before Ikkemotubbe and David Hogganbeck's eating contest begins, this "ten-year-old boy" runs around the race-track once, to give the contestants a chance to recover their breath (372).

In "Smoke," Old Anse is known to be "a ruthless man" in part because of the "tales told about him by both white and negro tenants" (3). These "tenants" are share-croppers who farm parcels of land on the Mardis-Holland property for a portion of the money when the crop is sold.

After the Civil War slave labor on Yoknapatawpha's large plantations was often replaced by tenant labor. Two generations of sharecroppers are mentioned in Requiem for a Nun: the "men and women, Negro and white both, who were born to and who passed all their lives in denim overalls and calico," and their "sons and daughters," who wear "the installment-plan garments" advertised in national magazines (192). According to the novel's exaggerated account, the first group, "an entire generation of farmers," has vanished (193).

Many if not most of the farmers in Frenchman's Bend are tenants of Will Varner, working land he owns as sharecroppers. This particular cropper only appears in The Hamlet in the phrase describing the woman with whom Will Varner is having an affair as the "wife of one of his own tenants" (156).

Describing his family history in "My Grandmother Millard," Philip Backhouse refers to the group that prevented his uncle from being elected Governor of Tennessee as "a corrupt and traitorous cabal of tavern-keepers and Republican Abolitionists" (682). Although Tennessee did secede from the Union and join the Confederacy (the last state to do so), it was deeply divided between secessionists and Unionists.

This lawman appears in the account of Nathaniel Burden's adventures on the frontier before the Civil War in Light in August. Some men have him "treed in a dance hall" in Texas (247).

All the narrator of "Uncle Willy" says about the Texan whom Willy's sister married is that he is "an oil millionaire" (225).

Suratt does not bother going to see the third man who he heard owns goats, because he assumes this man too - whom "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" calls "the other goat owner" - has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes as well (140).

In The Unvanquished just enough is said about the third partner in the railroad owned by John Sartoris and Ben Redmond to make him mysterious: "he and his name both had vanished," Bayard says, "in the fury of the conflict" between the other two partners (224).

This figure in The Mansion is a hypothetical character: the stereotypical prosecuting attorney whom a convicted criminal is going to get even with whenever he's released from prison.

One of the "three Frenchmen" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun traveling down the Mississippi River in "a Chippeway canoe" is almost certainly René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the 17th-century French explorer credited with discovering the river and claiming it and all the territory it drained for France (81). But it's not clear why Faulkner associates him specifically with two other Frenchmen. The actual party of Frenchmen and French-Canadians who, along with a group of Canadian Indians, traveled downriver to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682-1683 was much larger.

In Go Down, Moses, these three men help Tennie's Jim hold the "Texas paint pony" still for Ike and Boon (220).

In "Two Soldiers" the ticket salesman in the Jefferson bus depot gives the Grier boy "a ticket out of my own pocket," considering the gesture something of a civic matter (92). He seems understandably anxious to get rid of the boy, who pulls a knife on him earlier. The boy notes that "he could move quicker than any grown man I ever see" (90).

In Absalom!, after moving to Virginia Sutpen's father works for this planter, whom the "thirteen or fourteen"-year-old Thomas (185) thinks of as "the man who owned all the land and the niggers and apparently the white men who superintended the work" on the plantation (184). Thomas spies on him as he spends his afternoons lying in a hammock being waiting on by a slave. Later Thomas will re-enact this scene in the arbor in Yoknapatawpha with Wash Jones as his servant.

Grandfather Priest hires this tinsmith in The Reivers to make both a toolbox and a "smell-tight" gasoline can for his new automobile (65).

In The Town these undescribed Northern tourists admire Jefferson's Episcopal church and photograph it. Charles wonders at their attitude toward the church, "since they themselves had burned it and blown it up with dynamite in 1863" (321). As a Southerner, he's using a generic idea of 'Yankees' - whether Union troops in the Civil War or Northern tourists in the mid-20th century.

In Sanctuary only one of the three town boys - young men from Oxford instead of the university - who spend time with Gowan is named. This entry represents the one whom the narrative refers to as "the first," because he speaks first. He wants to know who "that son bitch" driving Temple away from the dance is (30). We hear the class resentments in that voice he tells his friend Doc things like "you're not good enough to go to a college dance" (30).