Character Keys

Both "A Point of Law" and the revised version of that story Faulkner wrote for Go Down, Moses include a "deputy marshal" who sits inside the courthouse chewing a toothpick (221, 70). The novel version identifies him as an "oldish white man" whom Lucas knows from another context (70). In both texts the Judge calls him "Henry" (222, 72).

In Go Down, Moses, Hoke is presumably the owner of the sawmill and commissary where the log-train stops to take Boon and Ike to and from Memphis. (There is also a character named only "Hoke" in "Fool about a Horse" who owns a pasture 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 Hamlet, Jack Houston's mother spoiled him before her untimely death. She "had taught him to write his name before she died at last and so gave up trying to compel his father to send him to the school" (236).

In The Hamlet Jack Houston lives with this woman for four years in El Paso, after taking her out of a Galveston brothel seven years before. Although they are never married, she is recognized among the El Paso townsfolk as his wife. He renounces their common law marriage to return to Yoknapatawpha. His wife offers to accompany him to Mississippi and to tolerate the woman he expects to marry, but she curses him repeatedly when he abandons her and leaves her half of his savings.

The wife of Sheriff Hope Hampton in Intruder in the Dust is in Memphis, where the couple's expectant daughter lives.

The narrator of Intruder in the Dust presumably refers to both of Hope Hampton's parents in the phrase identifying him as "the son of farmers" (105).

The unnamed jailer in "An Error in Chemistry" who discovers that Flint has somehow escaped from his cell without leaving a trace himself leaves no trace as a character - i.e. this jailer is not described in any way. (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," "An Error in Chemistry" and Intruder in the Dust with an 'o' in "Monk," Requiem for a Nun and The Reivers.

In "Monk," this "jailor" is there along with the "other prisoners" in the county jail when Monk attempts to "make a speech" after his arrest (42). (According to the "Corrected Texts" that Noel Polk edited for Vintage International, Faulkner spelled "jailer" with an 'e' in "That Evening Sun," "An Error in Chemistry" and Intruder in the Dust with an 'o' in "Monk," Requiem for a Nun and The Reivers.

In Requiem for a Nun Cecilia Farmer's mother, who is married to the Yoknapatawpha County "jailor," apparently performs all domestic duties such as washing or drying dishes with her husband's assistance, because Cecilia's "frail hands" are not capable of the tasks (180).

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.

There are five characters in the fictions identified only as "Joe." This one is the deputy who drives the sheriff's car back to town after Cotton has been captured in "The Hound" (163). Presumably the same deputy is the one driving the car earlier, when it picks up the sheriff at Varner's store. No other details about him are given.

There are five characters identified only as Joe in the fictions. This one appears in Intruder in the Dust, where both Edmunds and the narrator call him a "boy"; he is even referred to at one point as "Edmunds' boy," a loaded phrase in the cultural context of Faulkner's world, but in the immediate narrative context this means 'the boy that Edmunds mentioned' rather than defining a family relationship or the dynamic of an interracial relationship. Joe is the son of one of the tenant farmers on Edmunds' plantation (4, 5, etc.). The name Lucas calls him by is Joe (7).

The radical abolitionist John Brown fought against slavery in the West before carrying out the raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 that was intended to inspire a slave rebellion in the South. He is not mentioned in Light in August, but Joanna Burden's grandfather is clearly one of his partisans during the pro- and anti-slavery fighting that made Kansas 'Bleeding' or 'Bloody Kansas' in the early 1850s.

In "Miss Zilphia Gant" this local officer officiates at the marriage between Zilphia and her husband. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.

The second "Justice of the Peace" who appears in "Barn Burning" also holds court in a general store (17). He too is a "man in spectacles" (17). In the civil case he presides over, brought by Ab Snopes against Major de Spain, he decides how much Ab must pay for ruining Mrs. de Spain's rug. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.

In The Hamlet this is the justice of the peace in Jefferson who marries Flem Snopes and Eula Varner. (The office of justice of the peace derives from traditional British legal practice, where justices belonged to the landed gentry. In Mississippi the office is an elected one.

A major character in The Reivers. "Miss Corrie," as she is called when Lucius first meets her (99) - or "Everbe," as he calls her after learning later in the narrative that her given names are "Everbe Corinthia" (153) - was born in Kiblett, Arkansas. After her mother's death, her foster-mother put her to work as a prostitute "as soon as she was big enough" (154). She is, Lucius notes when he first meets her at Miss Reba's, "a big girl," "still a girl, young too, with dark hair and blue eyes and at first I thought her face was plain" (99).

In "Shall Not Perish," the son of Major de Spain is an aviator and officer who is killed fighting in the Pacific, the second World War II casualty from Yoknapatawpha County.

In Light in August the police in Memphis arrest the drunken man in Mrs. Hightower's hotel room after her death and also find the pieces of paper on which she wrote and tore up her "rightful name" (67).

In The Mansion Miss Reba and her pimp have to "pay off" the "cops" in order to stay in business (80, 81).

Varner's store is a gathering place for the people who live in Frenchman's Bend. In The Town there are two references to the groups of men, specifically, who are found there. Gavin's hypothetical account of Mrs. Varner's visit to the store refers to the "few loungers" whom she chases out - these men "should have been in the field," since it's "planting time" (307). Later "the men squatting along the gallery" (388) - whom Ratliff also describes as a "few neighbors" (384) - rush off to rescue Clarence Snopes from Byron's children (388).

This "Binford" (no first name) is one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend who are courting Eula Varner in The Mansion. He is probably related to the Dewitt Binford who marries one of Flem's sisters. It's also possible but very unlikely that he is related to Lucius Binford, the man of the house in a Memphis brothel.

All we know about the Mr. Harris who appears in Sanctuary is that he owns the livery stable, and is suspicious enough of Eustace Graham to fold a hand during a poker game - because Graham had dealt the cards.

The "only son" of the Mr. Holland in The Mansion was "a Navy pilot who had been killed in one of the first Pacific battles" (361).

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This is the Mrs. Pruitt in "Tomorrow": the widow who is the Fentry's closest neighbor. Along with her son, she tells part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin solve the mystery of why Fentry voted to convict Bookwright in the killing of Buck Thorpe.

In Flags in the Dust Will Beard is a "mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size" (104), Will Beard owns a grist mill in Jefferson and probably owns the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives - though that is run by his wife. He is identified by the "evil reek" of his "black evil pipe" (104, 105).

The Mrs. Bland mentioned in "Ad Astra" probably doesn't exist. Bland has apparently invented an imaginary wife for his own neurotic reasons. The narrator reports "when [Bland] was tight he would talk about his wife, though we all knew that he was not married" (408). In the story's last line, he refers to her as his "poor little wife" (429).

According to the narrator of "A Bear Hunt," Mrs. Luke Provine receives no financial support from her ne'er-do-well husband. It seems that she is the principal breadwinner in the family, with money she "earned by sewing and such" (64).

The Myrtle in The Sound and the Fury is the daughter of the sheriff and the wife of Vernon. The sheriff introduces Myrtle and Vernon to Jason when he comes to get the police to chase his niece. (Chronologically it's possible that this is the same Myrtle who, younger, worked as a receptionist in Flags in the Dust, but the novel provides no evidence for that connection.)

In "Fool about a Horse," Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, but as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). His attempt to best Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region, ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his ineptitude.

In The Town, this is the first member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family in the U.S. Eula Snopes calls him V.K. Ratliff's "six or eight or ten times grandfather"(338) - but that's exaggerated. Originally from Russia, he arrives in the new world during the Revolution as an ensign in the British army. After being captured, he escapes and is rescued by "a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him" (338). He marries and takes the last name of the woman who saved him: Nelly Ratcliffe. After the Revolution he becomes "a Virginia farmer" (338).

The Chickasaw tribe occupied much of the area that became Yoknapatawpha County in the decades before 1830, when white settlers began to move onto the land. By the time of "The Bear" they are long gone, though "Sam Fathers' Chickasaw predecessors" are referred to at one point (285), and at another the boy's prowess as a hunter and woodsman is measured by his ability to ambush a buck as "the old Chickasaw fathers did" (290).

In Faulkner's last book, The Reivers, the Chickasaws who once lived in Yoknapatawpha appear only in Lucius Priest's thoughts, as he lays in a bed at Ballenbaugh's and thinks about the history of the land around him, which includes "the old Chickasaws who named the land before the white men ever saw it" (77).

As Lucas Beauchamp notes in Go Down, Moses, the land that would have been Ike's McCaslin's inheritance was originally acquired from "the Indians back in the old time" (36). In "The Old People" the Indians are specifically identified as Chickasaws. Sam Fathers, himself half-Chickasaw and the son of a chief, refers to the tribe as "the People" (158).

According to Charles Mallison in The Town, Yoknapatawpha's Chickasaw Indians "departed for Oklahoma in 1820" (11). Historically, the Chickasaw were the Indians who inhabited northern Mississippi when the white settlers arrived, and they were 'removed' by government policy to Oklahoma, but not until the 1830s and 1840s.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. The "Carolina boys" whom Gombault refers to in "The Tall Men" are based on a historical fact: on the night after the first day's fighting at Chancellorsville, while reconnoitering for a possible attack, General Stonewall Jackson was fatally shot by his own troops in the 33rd North Carolina regiment (54).

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. One that appears, with a few differences, in two different texts is the "battered remnant of a Confederate brigade" that retreated through Jefferson after losing a battle in 1864 (Intruder, 49); the "body" of troops who fight Union troops at the Sartoris plantation and retreat through Jefferson, where "a rear-guard action of cavalry" enables the unit to withdraw still further southward (Requiem, 182).

There are over a dozen different groups of Confederate soldiers referred to in the fictions. This is company of soldiers in both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished who are "bivouacked" just outside of Jefferson; their uniforms are the color of "dead leaves" (20, 46). Since one of them hollers out "Hooraw for Arkansas!" when Bayard and Ringo drive by their camp, it seems likely that they are a unit that was raised from men in that state.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. Four different units appear in the short story "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek." This entry represents the "two soldiers in one of General Forrest's forage wagons" who bring Lucius back to Sartoris (690). As foragers, these men were charged with finding food for the troops in the surrounding countryside - a common practice in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. The narrator of "Hair" refers to the people of Jefferson several times, usually in connection with rumors and gossip about Susan Reed.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. In "Miss Zilphia Gant" the commentary provided by "people in our town" on the story of Mrs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. Various anonymous groups bear witness to the events of The Mansion.

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. When the narrator of Sanctuary first introduces the Old Frenchman's ruined mansion house, he identifies "the people of the neighborhood" around it as the ones who have been using its lumber for firewood and despoiling its grounds by digging for treasure (8).

Throughout The Hamlet, Faulkner frequently focalizes the narrative through the collective third-person "the people" in much the same way he uses "we" in "A Rose for Emily." The people of Yoknapatawpha's "countryside" are described as a self-organizing social body, which can be compared to a "swarm of bees" (128), a "hive" or "a cloud of pink-and-white bees" (349).

Although the crowd in The Reivers that witnesses Boon firing his gun is in the Square in Jefferson, it is explicitly described as made up of people from outside Jefferson, from Yoknapatawpha county, who are in town for a "First Saturday," a traditional "trade day": "they were all there, black and white" (14).

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).