Character Keys

The narrator of "Mule in the Yard" singles out from 'the town' as a group this one "town wag" who sends I.O. Snopes a printed train schedule, his wry commentary on all the mules that Snopes loses in "accidents" with freight trains on the "blind curve" on the railroad tracks (252).

This is the local humorist in "Knight's Gambit" who comments on Sebastian Gualdres and Gualdres’s mare: “teaching it what, nobody knew, unless as a barber-shop wit said, since it was going to be blind, how to dodge traffic on the way to town to collect its pension” (178).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about the kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for the Civil War. This entry refers to the group he calls "the narrow fringe of traders and ship-owners still looking backward across the Atlantic and attached to the [American] continent only by their-counting houses" (273). He means the business men who made money from the slave and cotton trade with Africa and Europe.

In "Monk," the conductor of the train that takes Monk to prison is described by Monk himself as the "fellow in the cap" (51). Monk tells Gavin how this man called out each stop as they reached it.

The conductor on the train carrying Byron Snopes's children in The Town gets off so quickly when it arrives in Jefferson that it seems something is amiss.

In The Mansion Monk watches the conductor with curiosity and envy as he does his job of helping passengers off and on the train.

These are the people who ride on the passenger trains that several of the major characters in Flags in the Dust travel on: for example, the train that brings Horace back to Jefferson or the one that takes Jenny and Old Bayard to Memphis. In the second instance we are told that some of the people "in the car" knew the Sartorises, but otherwise they are not individuated (245). (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)

In Sanctuary the only occupants of the waiting room at the train station when Horace gets there early in the morning are a couple. The man is characterized by the "overalls" he wears and the "rumpled coat" he carries (167). The woman wears a "calico dress," a "dingy shawl and a new hat" and carries both a parcel and "a straw suitcase" (167).

In Sanctuary Horace sees Clarence Snopes talking with "four men" in the smoker car on the train from Oxford to Holly Springs (175).

In both "Lion" and Go Down, Moses, the passengers on the train from Memphis to Hoke’s are “buttonholed” by Boon (188, 222), forced to listen to him talk about Lion, and too intimidated to tell him that he is not allowed to drink on the train. (Under the Jim Crow laws, railroad cars were racially segregated, so all these passengers would have been white.)

In The Reivers Lucius describes the (white) passengers who ride on the "Special," the major train that runs between Memphis and New York, as "the rich women in diamonds and the men with dollar cigars" (194). He also mentions the "Negroes" in the "Jimcrow" half of the train's smoking car (194); see Unnamed Negro Train Passengers 1. ("Jimcrow," usually written Jim Crow, is a synonym for the Southern system of racial segregation.)

In The Reivers Lucius notes that "two other men" are standing with Sam and "the conductor" of the train that is taking them to Parsham (161). One of them, he says, "must have been the engineer" (161). This is the other one. As part of "a functioning train crew," he could be a fireman or a brakeman (161).

In Absalom! a "wagon full of strangers moving from Arkansas" to someplace else tries to spend the night in the "rotting shell" of old Sutpen mansion, but flee when "something happened before they could begin to unload the wagon even" (172-73).

Throughout The Hamlet there is a steady flow of tradesmen, drummers, farmers, and other wayfarers who stay at Mrs. Littlejohn's. This entry represents the majority of them, who are not individualized in any way.

According to "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard": "For sixty years three generations of sons and grandsons" have snuck onto the abandoned Frenchman's place at night, digging into its dirt in search of "the gold and the silver, the money and the plate" that was reputedly hidden there during the Civil War (136). Nothing has ever been found.

These are "the invisible spectators" in the courtroom who "gasp" at Nancy's response upon being given the death sentence at the start of Act I in Requiem for a Nun (41). The play's second scene makes it clear that Temple and Gowan Stevens are among those present, but from the text's only description of the spectators - they are "invisible" - we cannot say that for sure.

When Quentin boards the first of the Boston streetcars he rides during the day in The Sound and the Fury, he notes that it full of "mostly prosperous looking people reading newspapers" (86). Specific passengers in the car include a Negro who is wearing "a derby and shined shoes" and holding "a dead cigar stub" - having to sit next to him prompts Quentin to reflect on the relationship between blacks and whites (86). Other passengers are "women with market baskets" and a man in "a stained hat with a pipe stuck in the band" (89).

In Intruder in the Dust one of the "long-haul" truck drivers who patronize the all-night cafe in Jefferson can, at least hypothetically, let the the town's night marshal know whenever his phone is ringing (206).

In Sanctuary, as he tells the men at the Old Frenchman place about his troubles with Little Belle's behavior, Horace mentions a young man whom she apparently met on the train coming "home from school" four days before the novel begins (14). She defends her relationship with him by telling Horace that "he goes to Tulane" (14). Though Horace's objectivity on the subject of Little Belle is not to be trusted, this particular unnamed young man seems to be one of several or perhaps many whom she has brought home; Horace sums them up as "Louis or Paul or Whoever" (13).

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.

During his childhood, as Judge Allison describes it in "Beyond," these "two house servants" (790) would supervise his infrequent trips to play outside barefoot in the garden.

These are the two young men, among the larger group of young men in The Hamlet who court Eula Varner, who flee when it is discovered that she is pregnant. The narrative confers on them a particularly Faulknerian - which is to say, negatively defined - distinction: "By fleeing too [along with McCarron, who actually had sex with Eula], they put in a final and despairing bid for . . . the glorious shame of the ruin they did not do" (156).

After Doc Hines tries to incite the people of Mottstown to kill Christmas in Light in August, these "two men" bring him "home in a car"; one drives while the other "holds Hines up in the back seat" (345). At his house they "lift him" from the car and "carry him through the gate" (345). They would have carried him into the house, but after they tell Mrs. Hines about the capture of Christmas, she insists on taking her husband inside herself.

In The Town these two men attempt to help Gavin Stevens stand up after Manfred de Spain strikes him down (79).

The "two officers" mentioned in The Hamlet as accompanying Mink in his courtroom appearances are probably deputy sheriffs, but the novel uses the term "officers" to name them (287, 367).

"The U.D.C. ladies" who "instigated and bought" the Confederate statue that stands at the center of Jefferson in Requiem for a Nun are members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization of Southern women that was founded in 1894 in Nashville, Tennessee (188). Members actively served the 'Lost Cause' of the Old South and the Confederacy by sponsoring the construction of monuments, lobbying boards of education, and so on.

In Faulkner's first two stories about the Indians who inhabit Yoknapatawpha in its early history, he does not name the man who is "The Man," the hereditary chief of the tribe. His sister is the mother of Doom. In "Red Leaves," The Man and his son both die shortly after Doom returns from a sojourn in New Orleans - presumably at Doom's hands, but that part of the story is left untold here.

"Dead" before "A Courtship" begins, this man is mentioned as the original owner of the "shotgun" that Herman Basket's aunt threatens to use on her niece's suitors (368).

In The Reivers Sam Caldwell's uncle is a "division superintendent" on the railroad line Same works for (130). A typical division superintendent is in charge of a fairly large section of a railroad company's track.

One of the hypothetical characters in Light in August, this "undercover man" does not actually appear in Jefferson, but he is fairly vividly conjured up in the imagination of "the town," which is "just waiting" this man to arrest Brown for selling moonshine whiskey (46). At the time the novel takes place, Prohibition made it illegal to sell alcohol anywhere in the U.S. But Yoknapatawpha is 'dry' throughout its imaginative history, meaning that it was always illegal to sell alcohol there. The federal agents who enforced this law were colloquially called 'revenuers.'

In Intruder in the Dust these "four or five men" take Jake Montgomery's body from the truck that brings it into town and through the back door into the funeral parlor (178).

In Go Down, Moses, as part of the Federal force occupying Mississippi after the South surrendered in 1865, this "travelling Army paymaster" passes through Jefferson with Percival Brownlee as part of his "encourage" (278).

In both Flags in the Dust and "Retreat" as a short story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union cavalry rides up to the Sartoris plantation hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris. In all three texts he is able to fool them long enough to escape, but in the last two the Yankees then dig up the family's buried silver and set fire to the mansion.

These are the Union troops, identified by Drusilla as "a brigade of cavalry" (45, 91), whom Bayard describes at the bridge over the river in "Raid" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished. Some of them are holding the crowd of self-emancipated slaves away from the bridge, others are preparing to blow it up, still others are described as "riding up and down the cliff" above the water or bivouacked "down at the water" (51, 108).

In "Raid" and again in the chapter titled "Raid" in The Unvanquished, this is the outfit of Union soldiers who are riding through the countryside in Alabama when Ringo stops them in order to requisition additional property.

In Go Down, Moses, this is the "body of raiding Federal horse" - i.e. a Union cavalry unit - that arrives at the McCaslin plantation sometime in 1862, causing the flight of Percival Brownlee (278).

In the story Will Falls tells Old Bayard in Flags in the Dust about the Yankees arriving at Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John, this is "that 'ere other Yankee" who goes around the house looking for him at the barn (21); John fools him long enough to get around the corner before the man starts shooting at him. When this story is told again in "Retreat" and The Unvanquished this Union soldier, perhaps frustrated by not capturing John Sartoris in the barn, points his "carbine" directly at the two boys, Bayard and Ringo, "and shot at us pointblank" (34, 73).

In Flags in the Dust this cook is hiding inside General Pope's "wrecked commissary tent" when Carolina Bayard returns for the anchovies (18); the derringer shot he fires into Sartoris' back from his hiding place into Sartoris' back is fatal.

In Requiem for a Nun the carpetbagger named Redmond associates himself with this general, "the brigadier commanding the force which occupied Jefferson" (183). (Historically, the Union forces who burned (but did not occupy) Oxford in 1863 were under the command of General Andrew Jackson Smith, who is mentioned as "General Smith" in other Yoknapatawpha fictions.)

In Go Down, Moses Faulkner (or Cass) invents this "Yankee Intelligence officer" who finds Lee's "battle-order . . . on the floor of a saloon" (272). (The losing and finding of Lee's order actually happened during the Civil War, but in fact it was found by a Union corporal lying in the grass.)

As Rosa Millard and her group return through Alabama in "Raid" and The Unvanquished, they encounter a Union cavalry unit led by this lieutenant who, Bayard says, "didn't look much older than Ringo and me," sounds "like a girl" when he swears, and looks as if he's "fixing to cry" when forced to turn over his troop's horses to her (56, 116-17).

The "fat staff-major" in Flags in the Dust whom Jeb Stuart and Carolina Bayard capture when they raid General Pope's headquarters (13). He takes his bad fortune stoically, but it is his assertion that "there is no place" for a gentleman in the war that provokes Sartoris into the act of bravado that results in his death (17).

The commander of the Union troop that comes to Sartoris hoping to capture Colonel John Sartoris appears first in Will Falls' account of the event in Flags in the Dust, and then again in Louvinia's slightly different account of the same event in both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished.

This is the leader of the sixty Yankees whom Sartoris captures in "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished. The officer ruefully says, "Colonel, by God I believe you have fooled us" (31, 68).

The officer in command of the cavalry troop Rosa Millard encounters at the river ford in "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished is not named, but is clearly identified as "a heavy-built man with a red face" (54, 113). We get a good idea why he looks choleric when he reads the Rosa's requisition order and swears - behavior that suggests a lower class origin than the officers, Yankee as well as Confederate, elsewhere in the fictions.

According to "the tale told" in Go Down, Moses, this group of Union officers were sitting "in the leather chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors" in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis when they were surprised by a party of Confederate cavalry (221). (See Unnamed Union General 3 elsewhere in this index.)

In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished, this is the Union soldier who was captured by the Confederate unit camped outside Jefferson; according to its captain, this prisoner was sure that Sartoris had more than a thousand men in his troop.

In "Raid" and again in the chapter with that title in The Unvanquished this sentry stands outside the tent to which Rosa Millard, Bayard and Ringo are taken after they cross the river.

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished this sergeant is in charge of the depot at the Union camp where the confiscated silver and mules, along with the self-emancipated Negroes who managed to cross the river, are held.