Character Keys

The group of people in The Mansion who admire the new Jaguar in which Linda Snopes Kohl will ride away from Yoknapatawpha consists of "men, boys, a Negro or so" (464); throughout the novel the people of Jefferson are often described as spectators, but the fact that this group explicitly includes blacks as well as whites makes it worth creating as a 'character' in itself.

As Popeye and Temple approach the town of Dumfries in Sanctuary, they begin seeing other people on the road, though the narrative refers to them in a complex series of phrases. In some cases it cites the means of transportation rather than the people: "pleasure cars Sunday-bent," "Fords and Chevrolets," "now and then a wagon or a buggy" (139). The only occupants specifically mentioned are "swathed women" in the "occasional larger car" and "wooden-faced country people" in trucks (139).

In The Hamlet Ratliff imagines how the people living in or near the Frenchman's house are drawn into the events of their time. Thus, Faulkner depicts the wealth of the antebellum plantation with the news of Sumter reaching "women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols" and "the men in broadcloth riding the good horses" (373). During the first three years of the Civil War, this group is comprised virtually of women, since the men have left to fight. After "the battle of Jefferson," "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).

Elements of the (white) population of Yoknapatawpha are referred to in several ways in "Knight's Gambit." Their most pervasive role is as a kind of audience: "the county watches" the actions of the main characters unfold "as the subscribers [to a magazine] read and wait and watch for the serial's next installment" (149). For example, the people whom Gavin Stevens calls "the Yoknapatawpha County spinster aunts of both sexes" share gossip and speculations about an unknown man who may have courted Mrs. Harris before her marriage to Mr.

The narrator of "Tomorrow" refers once to "all the people in our country - the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners" (91). He is explaining that, despite his Uncle Gavin's formal education at Harvard and Heidelberg, he knows how to talk to "all the people" so that they understand him. This is a rare passage in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which the population of the county is aggregated across racial and class lines, though the intent of the passage is apparently to praise Gavin rather than the county's shared community.

The group from the county that attends Granny's funeral in both "Vendee" and The Unvanquished consists of both blacks and whites. The whites are "hill people" as opposed to townspeople; the "hill men with crockersacks tied over their heads" to shelter them from the rain are contrasted with the "town men with umbrellas" (98, 156). In a passage added to the novel, most of the blacks are described as having returned to Yoknapatawpha after following the Union Army to seek freedom (155).

Many different people from Yoknapatawpha appear in The Sound and the Fury. This is a group that exists only in Jason Compson's head, the "you" he is arguing with as he sits alone in his car while chasing his niece through the county: he compares his family to this hypothetical "you," as in "you all were running little shirt tail country stores" and farming poor soil while his "people" owned slaves (239).

The Mansion represents the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha as a group in various passages. According to the text, for example, "not just the town but the county came too" to Flem Snopes's funeral (461). In these references readers get some idea of the average living conditions for Faulkner's rural characters.

In "By The People" the "People" are seen through several different lenses. For example, Gavin Stevens and his nephew, the narrator, divide them generationally: Gavin refers to "the ones of my age and generation" (133), and the narrator, to "the ones of my age and time" (134). In either case, however, the "people" evoked are white.

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin has vividly creates an image the diverse group of human beings that he thinks of as the "spawn" of the modern Delta, where the boundaries between races seem to have broken down (279, 346). It includes "white men" who own plantations and "commute every night to Memphis," "black men" who own plantations and even towns and "keep their town houses in Chicago," and is an amalgamation of "Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew" who "breed" together (279, 346).

The first time we see the town that the narrator of Light in August describes as a "railroad division point," the town's "whole air" is "masculine, transient" (173). On Christmas' last trip the narrator describes "the small, random, new, terrible little houses in which people who came yesterday from nowhere and tomorrow will be gone wherenot" live (211). In between the narrative refers specifically to only a few of these people, including some salesmen and the lawyer McEachern consults.

In a facetious passage connecting the lost lock in 1826 to the future of the U.S., the narrator of Requiem for a Nun makes "a glorious prophecy" about the when when the American "people" will identify federal money with the "manna" of a generous god (17). They are described as "a race of laborers" whose only labor it to consume government funds (17).

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. The Hamlet describes the group as the ironic inheritors of the Old Frenchman and his aristocratic "dream" (4). Faulkner emphasizes how the patriarch is virtually forgotten by those "who came after him," who have "nothing to do with any once-living man at all" (4).

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. "The "folks," as Suratt calls the poor farmers and their families in "Spotted Horses" (165), congregate at Varner's store or the horse auction, and provide a kind of audience for Flem Snopes' rise from tenant farmer to the son-in-law of the hamlet's richest man.

The people who live in the small hamlet of Division are one of the sources of information about the Starnes family that the narrator of "Hair" draws on. Once all the Starneses have died, these residents expect the Starnes' Alabama kin to claim the house. Division folks also note Hawkshaw's annual April visits to "clean up that empty house" (141), and in between they help themselves to the house's picket fence for firewood.

Looking for a figure of speech to describe Clytemnestra as an old woman in Absalom!, Shreve says that she "shrunk" - "like the Bornese do their captured heads" (175). After Borneo was colonized, the Dayak practice of "headhunting" was widely sensationalized in Europe and the U.S. In Faulkner's short story "Vendee," set during the Civil War, the Sartoris family library includes a "book about Borneo" that describes such practices.

The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" identifies a group of men who, "since the last year years, cannot find work" (64). The chronological reference probably points to the Great Depression of the 1930s, an era defined by mass unemployment and what the story calls "men among us now whose families are in want" (64).

These are the various inhabitants of the town in Flags in the Dust from which Young Bayard catches the train that takes him into exile. When he looks at them at the end of Christmas day, he sees various "cheerful groups," including children playing with new presents, youths exploding fireworks, and travelers waiting with friends in the racially segregated "waiting rooms" at the station (369).

Though their farms are "bigger, more prosperous, with tighter fences and painted houses and even barns" than those on the Mississippi side of Hell Creek, the Tennessee country people whom the travelers pass on the broad road that leads to Memphis in The Reivers are also "still in their Sunday clothes," sitting on their front porches ("galleries"), watching the world go by (91). And when they get closer to the city, "even the little children" who live along the road are no longer excited by the sight of a car (92).

Sanctuary refers generically to the various residents of Oxford who see Temple in the evenings, as she hurries to or from a date. The group includes "townspeople taking after-supper drives," "bemused faculty-members" and graduate students (28).

When they cross the Tallahatchie River in The Reivers, the adventurers are in what Lucius calls "foreign country, another county," the county that adjoins Yoknapatawpha to the north (78). Between Ballenbaugh's and Hell Creek bottom the countryside seems rural: along the road are "sprouting fields" (78). Lucius describes the residents they pass as "the people already in their Sunday clothes idle on the front galleries, the children and dogs . . . running toward the fence" to watch an automobile go by (78).

When the Hineses are waiting for the northbound train from Mottstown to Jefferson in Light in August, they are joined by "drummers and loafers and such" who buy tickets for the southbound train (359). 'Drummer' was a well-known term for traveling salesman at the time the novel was published.

In As I Lay Dying, according to Albert's report, the people of Mottson who react to the smell from the Bundrens' wagon include "ladies" rushing away "with handkerchiefs to their noses, and a "crowd of hard-nosed men and boys standing around the wagon" (203).

In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished Brother Fortinbride's eulogy for Rosa Millard expresses his faith that in heaven "there are men, women and children, black, white, yellow or red, waiting for her to tend and worry over" (98, 158). This unseen group is perhaps the most racially inclusive group in all the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

Chapter 21 of Sanctuary describes the various people whom Virgil and Fonzo see in the train station and on the streets of Memphis when they arrive in the city. None are given any individuality, but they are identified as "a stream of people" who "jostle" the newcomers in the depot, where they are also beset by cabmen and a redcap, and, in the Hotel Gayoso and another, unnamed hotel, a porter, bellboys, and "people sitting among the potted plants" in hotel lobbies (188-90).

"There were a few people going in and out of the office; a few inside, not many" on the day that Roth Edmonds takes Molly Beauchamp to seek a divorce from Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses (122).

The narrator of "Two Soldiers" notes that "more folks" arrive at the Jefferson bus depot and buy tickets for the bus to Memphis that he is waiting to take (92).

According to The Mansion, this group of "men and boys" come repeatedly each day to the shed by the depot to see the trains pass (38).

In Sanctuary the men lounging at the Taylor station who watch Temple as she gets off the train are "chewing slowly" (presumably tobacco) and wearing overalls (36).

The country people at what Bobbie calls "the clodhopper dance" in Light in August (218) are described as "girls in stiff offcolors and mailorder stockings and heels" and "young men in illcut and boardlike garments" (206). Among this group are the two men who restrain Bobbie after Joe strikes McEachern down.

In Light in August, when Doc Hines disrupts a prayer meeting by "yelling" for "white folks to turn out and kill" all the blacks, the "folks in the church" make him come down from the pulpit (378). When he threatens them with a pistol, they call the law.

In Intruder in the Dust, "every tenant and renter and freeholder white or black in the neighborhood" would find a reason to go to the crossroads store on Saturdays, "quite often to buy something" but also often just to visit with each other (18).

After Ballenbaugh takes over Wyott's store in The Reivers, it becomes a stop-over place for the "hard-mouthed hard-souled" men who carry merchandise to and from Memphis (72). But until the 1870s the people at Ballenbaugh's were "just tough men," i.e. no women (72). When the railroad took over the freight traffic in the 1880s, however, Ballenbaugh's becomes a destination point.

The policeman in Sanctuary from whom Popeye's grandmother asks for a match thinks her irrational statements (including the ominous "I bring down the house") are a deliberate effort at humor (307). He tells her three times that she "ought to be in vaudeville."

These two men run the pawn shop that sells Mink a gun in The Mansion. They are described as being "blue-jowled as pirates" (320).

The patronne in "Ad Astra" is the manager and owner of the Cloche-Clos. An old woman who wears steel spectacles and knits, she thoroughly understands the threat posed to her business by the Allied aviators and their German prisoner. She loudly expresses her outrage that this German - whom she calls a "Boche!" (422) - has been brought into her bistro: "Eight months since the obus I have kept them in a box against this day: plates, cups, saucers, glasses, all that I have had since thirty years, all gone, broken at one time!

In The Unvanquished, when Buck and Buddy McCaslin allow their slaves to live in the plantation big house and leave the place at night by the back door, the white inhabitants of the area share stories or rumors of "McCaslin slaves dodging the moonlit roads and the Patrol-riders to visit other plantations" (249).

As part of the description of Doctor Peabody in Flags in the Dust, the narrative mentions his willingness to travel any distance "to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him" (95). Later in the description a few of his patients are particularized when a "countryman" - that is, someone from outside the town of Jefferson - visits Peabody in his office to pay the doctor's bill "incurred by his father or grandfather" (95).

This entry represents the "passers" - i.e. people passing by - in "three different parts of town" whom Mrs. Gant questions in "Miss Zilphia Gant" about the families of the girls that Zilphia told her she "would like to visit" (373).

In The Mansion this man on the Square is mistaken by Linda for Willy Christian, but "old man Christian" had died while she was away (224).

This waitress works at the "joint" in Pascagoula where Linda takes Gavin in The Mansion (276).

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this woman becomes Zilphia's "partner" in the dressmaking shop less than a year after Mrs. Gant's death (378).

In "Centaur in Brass" the man who owned the other half of the "small back-street restaurant" in Jefferson that Flem Snopes acquired from Suratt is not named (149). Soon after moving to town, Flem "eliminated" him, presumably by buying him out (150). In The Hamlet Suratt's partner is named Aaron Rideout, Suratt's brother-in law, whereas in the The Town he's Grover Cleveland Winbush. Whether Faulkner had either in mind when he created this "partner" the first time in this story cannot be determined.

In The Reivers the driver of the Stanley Steamer that arrives in Parsham to carry Boon and the others back to jail in Hardwick is driven by "another deputy," or at least someone "in a badge" (253).

Sanctuary's final scene "in the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris includes a brief reference to "men playing croquet . . . in coats and capes" (316).

During Horace's first conversation with Lee Goodwin in his jail cell, the child that Ruby is holding is compared by the narrator of Sanctuary to "the children which beggars on Paris streets carry" (116). Horace has been to France, and is carrying a French novel when the novel begins. The novel's final scene is set in Paris. Still, in the immediate context of the narrow cell that confines Goodwin, the narrative's sudden evocation of life half a world away from Yoknapatawpha comes as a surprise.

The "folks" whom Vera is visiting in The Reivers are presumably her parents (99).

When Charles Mallison passes through Jefferson at the start of World War II in "Knight's Gambit," he has a kind of prevision of the local young men who will soon be killed in the fighting, and the grief of "those who had created" them, without realizing that the day would come when their child "might die in agony" in a foreign place they "had never even heard of before" and didn't even know how to pronounce (251).