Character Keys
Code |
title![]() |
biography | |
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753 | Nathaniel Burrington I |
In Light in August the first Nathaniel Burrington stands at the head of the ancestral line that reaches an end with Joanna Burden. He is a Unitarian minister in New England who fathers ten children, the youngest of whom is Calvin, who changes his last name from Burrington to Burden. |
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754 | Nathaniel Burrington II |
The relatives of Joanna Burden who remain in New Hampshire in Light in August are named Burrington. Her nephew Nathaniel - he has the same name as her great-grandfather - offers a $1000 reward for her killer after he is informed about her murder. |
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177 | Ned McCaslin |
Introduced into The Reivers as "Grandfather's coachman" (31), Ned McCaslin plays a major role in the narrative, and becomes, at times at least, one of Faulkner's most complex African American characters. The novel's narrator, Lucius Priest, calls him "our family skeleton" (31). He was "born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860," at which time he would have been enslaved (31). His grandfather is Lucius McCaslin, the white man who owned his mother - and after whom Lucius himself is named. In 1905 he is married to the Priest family's cook (one of his four wives). |
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3267 | Nelly Ratcliffe |
She is the wife of the original Vladimir Kyrilytch and mother of the second. She is the daughter of a Virginia farmer who hid and fed the Russian-born mercenary soldier when he escaped from an American prison during the Revolutionary War. At some point they married, and began the line of "V.K."s that culminates in the character readers meet frequently in the fictions. As her story is told in The Townand repeated in The Mansion, her maiden name was Ratcliffe, and the couple adopted it as their married name. Over time, the "c" and "e" were dropped from the spelling. |
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185 | Net Snopes |
While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. Only one sister - Net, this one - is named. In "Barn Burning" both are described as "big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons" (9), and very lazy: they do very little to help with household chores, leaving most of the work to their mother and aunt. |
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1649 | New York Yankees |
In Faulkner's fictions "Yankees" typically refers to the Union soldiers during the Civil War or people from the North in general; in The Sound and the Fury, however, it refers to the New York Yankees baseball team. The 1927 Yankees, which featured Babe Ruth as part of a lineup called 'Murderers' Row,' is often cited as the greatest team in baseball history. Despite this, in his April 1928 conversation with Mac, Jason Compson insists "They're shot" (252), adding that he'd never bet on them. |
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3460 | Norman Thomas |
Norman Thomas was a Presbyterian minister by training, one of the country's most famous pacifists during the First World War, and the six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, 1928-1948. According to the character named Dad in The Mansion, the members of Goodyhay's unorthodox congregation "like as not would have voted for Norman Thomas even ahead of [Franklin] Roosevelt" (300). |
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451 | Nub Gowrie |
Nub Lowrie's appearance in Intruder in the Dust is memorable. His name - Nathan Bedford Forrest Gowrie - comes from a former slave-dealer who was also one of the Confederacy's most effective generals and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan; his nickname - "Nub" - combines the initials of his first names with the fact of his missing left arm. How he became handicapped is not explained, but the loss doesn't diminish the force of his character. He is "a short lean old man with [pale] eyes . . . and a red weathered face"; his voice is "high thin strong [and] uncracked" (156). |
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2478 | Odlethrop |
The man who is Mrs. Odlethrop's son in "Monk" and also, presumably, the title character's biological father, is described as "too much even for that country and people" (43). He returns to his mother's home with a woman, presumably Monk's mother, after a ten year absence. He initially left (or was driven out of Yoknapatawpha) after killing someone, and after his return his own mother is said to have "driven" him out of town again at gunpoint (43). |
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452 | Odum Bookwright |
Described in The Hamlet as "sturdy short-legged black-browed ready-faced man" (63), Bookwright is one of several characters in Frenchman's Bend who keep Ratliff apprised of the goings on about the hamlet when he is gone. At the end of that novel, he and Ratliff and Armstid are swindled by Flem Snopes into purchasing the Old Frenchman’s Place - an event that is referred to again in The Mansion. |
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772 | Odum Tull |
Odum Tull appears only once in the fictions, in "Fool About a Horse," when he gives his neighbor Vynie Snopes and her milk separator a ride back home from Jefferson in his wagon. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he is essentially replaced by a farmer named Cliff Odum.) |
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261 | Old Bayard's Aunt |
At the start of Flags in the Dust, in Will Falls' re-telling about the time the Yankee patrol chased Colonel Sartoris away from his plantation, he reminds the Colonel's son Bayard that among the people living there was "yo' aunt, the one 'fo' Miss Jenny come" (22). According to Falls' story, she is "a full-blood Sartoris," but this is the only time Faulkner's fiction mentions her existence. |
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2535 | Old Frenchman, Family of |
The Frenchman's Bend planter who appears in The Hamlet is elsewhere identified as Louis Grenier. His family is distinguished by the way it has disappeared completely in the years after the South lost the Civil War: "he was gone now, . . . the Frenchman, with his family" (4). In one scene late in the novel the life of the white ladies and gentlemen on the old plantation is conjured up, but there too the novel notes that "there is nothing to show of that now" (373). |
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2536 | Old Frenchman, Son of |
In The Hamlet the Old Frenchman's son has disappeared from the scene along with the rest of his family, except for a single detail: this heir to the Old Frenchman plantation - possibly accompanied by his father - rode into Jefferson in the early days of the Civil War to recruit men to the Confederate army (373). |
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453 | Old Het |
The black woman who serves in "Mule in the Yard" and The Town as both partner in and witness to Mannie Hait's ongoing feud against mules and a man named I.O. Snopes remains a kind of enigma. No one in the town knows how old she is: as the story puts it, "she was about seventy probably, though by her own counting . . . she would have to be around a hundred" (249). Even at the younger age, she would have been born into slavery, though that story remains untold. |
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507 | Old Lady Wyatt |
Miss Wyatt is Emily Grierson's great-aunt in "A Rose for Emily," and reputed to have been insane: she went "completely crazy at last" (123), the narrator says, but provides no further details, about either her or her illness. Emily's father and her other "kin in Alabama" have a falling out "over the estate of old lady Wyatt" after she dies (125). (There are six other characters named Wyatt in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but whether or how this woman is related to any of them is not established.) |
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302 | Old Maid Snopes |
This particular Snopes is identified in The Town only as the "old maid daughter" of the man (either Flem's father Ab or Flem's unnamed uncle) who lives in a house just close enough to Jefferson to see the town clock (136). Also in the household are two of I.O. Snopes' children, but her relationship to them is not defined at all. She may be Flem's sister, but more likely is another of Flem's many cousins. |
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306 | Old Man Killegrew |
Old Man Killgrew is a farmer who lives near the Griers in Frenchman's Bend. Although he never appears in person, he is mentioned in all three of the World War II stories about the Grier family. Killigrew is seventy years old, and prosperous enough to have a cook. He hunts foxes the old-fashioned way, which in Faulkner's Mississippi means "squatting on a hill" rather than riding to the hounds (27). His and his wife's deafness means that the Grier sons can stand outside his house and hear his radio reporting on the progress of the war. |
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3283 | Old Mr. Stone |
The "old" lawyer Stone (as Eula refers to him in The Town) is likely "the nice" Mr. Stone's father (342). |
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278 | Orestes Snopes |
Orestes is one of the last Snopeses added to the family tree. He appears late in The Mansion as "a new Snopes living in Jefferson" (354). Also called Res, his exact relationship to Flem is never made clear. Flem establishes him in the converted carriage house on the Compson place, which Flem now owns, where the hog farm Res operates becomes a source of increasingly violent friction with his neighbor. |
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454 | Oscar |
In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, Oscar works for Roth Edmonds as a stableman, and along with Dan, the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds place, he helps Edmonds search for the missing mule. Like Dan, he recognizes the human as well as the animal footprints they are following; the fact that Edmonds doesn't "realise" until "later" that "both the negroes" withheld the name of the man, another Negro, subtly calls attention to the racial dynamics in play in Faulkner's world (229, 81). |
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3689 | Otis |
In The Reivers Otis is Corrie's nephew, visiting Memphis from his home in Arkansas in order to acquire "refinement" (97). Although he has his fifteenth birthday in the course of the story, he is smaller than the 11-year-old Lucius. As Lucius says the first time he sees Otis, "there is something wrong about him" (104). By the time Lucius calls him a "demon child" (154), most readers are likely to agree. |
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2051 | Otis Harker |
In The Town Otis is "nephew or cousin or something" of the Harker who is the engineer at the town's power plant. Although he has "inherited the saw mill" that the older Harker originally ran, Otis fills in at the power plant "whenever Mr. Harker wanted a night off" (26). By the end of the novel he has become Jefferson's "night marshal"; Gavin Stevens calls him one of Yoknapatawpha's "minor clowns" (334). |
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3440 | Otis Meadowfill |
Otis Meadow fill is the irascible neighbor of Orestes Snopes in The Mansion, and is "so mean [i.e. miserly] as to be solvent and retired even from the savings on a sawmill" (361). |
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3631 | Owl-at-Night |
Though called "Owl-by-Night" the first time he is mentioned (363), this Chickasaw is more often referred to in "A Courtship" as "Owl-at-Night" (364). He is one of the young men who were interested in Herman Basket's sister - until they realized that Ikkemotubbe wanted her. After that, he willingly helps Ikkemotubbe with his efforts to win the young woman. |
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2979 | Paoli |
In "Knight's Gambit" Paoli is the "famous Italian fencing-master" who taught Max Harriss (169). According to Harriss' unnamed sister, Max was "the best pupil Paoli had had in years" (190). |
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455 | Pap 1 |
"Blind and deaf," with eyes that "look like two clots of phlegm" and apparently voiceless and toothless as well (12), Pap is one of the most grotesque characters in Faulkner's fiction. Lee and Ruby make sure he gets fed, but despite his name, Sanctuary gives no hint about "who he was kin to," as Horace puts it (110), or how he came to be at the Old Frenchman place. Horace facetiously speculates that he may have been there as long as the house itself. In his grotesqueness he does fit the Gothic atmosphere of the place. |
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883 | Pap 2 |
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. |
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2323 | Papa George |
Georgie, the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" calls his father "Papa," but his actual name is also George. He is "in the livery-stable business" (268), and has no illusions about the dynamics of his wife's family or the character of its black sheep, his wife's brother Rodney. When his wife's sister Louisa, for example, rationalizes Rodney's promiscuous behavior by pointing to his lack of opportunities "to meet a nice girl and marry her," George says: "Marry? Rodney marry? |
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1496 | Pappy |
In Flags in the Dust "Pappy" is the "older negro" (213) of the two who rescue Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge and carry him home; he is suspicious both of meddling with a white man and of the automobile. The "younger negro" is his son, John Henry (213). |
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3049 | Pappy Thompson |
In Light in August he is the seventy-year-old deacon of an Negro church in Yoknapatawpha whom Joe Christmas knocks down in the middle of a service. |
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732 | Paralee|Guster |
The mother of Aleck Sander - named Paralee in Intruder in the Dust and Guster in The Town - has been a servant in the Stevens-Mallison household for a long time, perhaps her entire life. She lives in a cabin behind the white family's house. Like her employer, Maggie Mallison, she is protective about her own child, but she is also a kind of 'mammy' to Chick Mallison. She is never given a last name, but the earlier novel mentions her father Ephriam, and the later novel gives her a husband (Big Top) and another son (Top, or Little Top). |
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1658 | Parson Walthall |
The minister of the Methodist Church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury is named Parson Walthall; he protests the slaughter of the town's pigeons to prevent them from fouling the town clock. |
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456 | Pat Stamper |
The legendary Pat Stamper, master of "the science and pastime of horse trading in Yoknapatawph county," makes a fool of Pap, who tries to trade with him in "Fool about a Horse," and of Ab Snopes, when that story is revised and interpolated into The Hamlet. With the help of his Negro hostler, he can even get not only the better of each trade but "actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars" - as it's put in the novel (37) - out of the farmers who try to take him on. |
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1650 | Patterson Boy |
In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons' house is adjacent to the Compsons'. Quentin remembers that when Jason was younger, he and "the Patterson boy . . . made kites on the back porch and sold them for a nickel a piece" (94). Jason parted ways with him, apparently when the boy complained about not getting his share of the profits. |
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2257 | Paul de Montigny |
There is a lot that "Elly" never explains about Paul's character - where he lives, for example, and what he does - but the one mystery that matters most is his racial identity. Paul visits Jefferson as a white man, but the friend who introduces him to Elly insists he is really black. As part of her proof, she recounts a story in which Paul's "uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209). |
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3696 | Paul Rainey |
The "Paul Rainey" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers was a real Northern millionaire famous for his love of hunting (163). As Lucius notes, he "liked our country enough to use some of [his] Wall Street money" to purchase 11,000 acres of Mississippi land as a hunting preserve (163). Faulkner's father Murry knew him personally. |
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2736 | Percival Brownlee |
In Go Down, Moses Buck McCaslin purchases Percival Brownlee from Bedford Forrest, and quickly learns that Percival is unable to perform any of the tasks to which he and his brother Buddy assign the slave. When Percival is emancipated as a result of the McCaslins' frustrations with him, he refuses to leave the plantation. He disappears during the Civil War, but reappears during Reconstruction as a preacher, "leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano voice," and again in the "entourage" of an Army paymaster (278). |
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27 | Percy Benbow |
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, the Benbows are among the county's oldest and most prominent families, but the reference in Absalom! to Judge Benbow's son is "Percy" is the only mention of this character in the canon (172). Chronologically it is possible that Percy is brother of Will Benbow, the Benbow who is the father of Horace and Narcissa Benbow, major figures in Flags in the Dust (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), but that is speculation. |
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3025 | Percy Grimm |
Introduced into Light in August in Chapter 19, twenty-five year old Grimm brings Joe Christmas' life to a violent end. A captain in the state national guard, he organizes American Legion members to patrol Jefferson even though both the Legion commander and the sheriff refuse to give him permission. When he insists on carrying a gun, the sheriff makes him a special deputy (455). Like Christmas, Grimm's life seems strangely determined. |
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3137 | Pete |
Pete is "the man" who was "there that night" when Nancy committed the murder in Requiem for a Nun (50). The younger brother of Alabama Red, the sexual partner of Temple Drake whom Popeye murdered in Sanctuary, Pete comes to Jefferson after finding the salacious letters Temple wrote eight years earlier to his brother. When he brings them back into Temple's life, he becomes both her blackmailer and her lover, the "next one" she falls in love with (132). |
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460 | Pete Grier |
In "Two Soldiers" Pete Grier, the oldest of the two Grier sons, enlists in the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "I got to go," he says; "I jest ain't going to put up with no folks treating the United States that way" (83). Before December 7, 1941, he worked on his family's farm in Frenchman's Bend. The "ten acres" of land he himself owns was given to him by his father "when he graduated from the Consolidated" (82). According to his younger brother, who idolizes him, Pete was a very hard worker: "He never got behind like Pap, let alone stayed behind" (82). |
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2379 | Pettibone |
Pettibone is the only one of the characters, black or white, who appear in the Tidewater section of Absalom! who is named, and in his case the name is an adjective rather than a noun: Sutpen's father comes home one night boasting that "we" - he and other poor white men - "whupped one of Pettibone's niggers tonight" (187). The whole passage suggests that "Pettibone" himself is the owner of a plantation near the one that Sutpen works on. |
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937 | Pettigrew |
The "Pettigrew" in the short story "Beyond" is Judge Allison's attorney and the executor of his will, responsible for making sure that the Judge's last wishes are implemented - though he doesn't seem to do so. In Requiem for a Nun - published almost two decades after "Beyond" - a man named 'Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew' is the source of the name of the town that is the seat of Yoknapatawpha county, but it's not likely Faulkner is consciously thinking of a connection between the characters. |
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42 | Philadelphy |
Philadelphy - almost certainly a corruption of "Philadelphia," the name she has in "My Grandmother Millard" (668) - is, like her husband Loosh, a slave on the Sartoris plantation. She is what is sometimes called a 'house slave,' i.e. one of the slaves who work inside the white family's mansion rather than in the cotton fields. We see her serving as a maid in "My Grandmother Millard," which Faulkner wrote half a dozen years after The Unvanquished was published. |
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2259 | Philip |
Philip is "a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits" who courts the title character of "Elly" with clock-like regularity (213). As a Jefferson boy whom she has known "from childhood," Philip is the epitome of a suitable husband for Elly (213). His draw as a suitor is indicated in the same breath as his current occupation: "an assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day" (213). |
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2808 | Philip St-Just Backhouse |
"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in "My Grandmother Millard," is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). Born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - he explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner. |
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2738 | Phoebe |
In Go Down, Moses Phoebe (or "Fibby," as her name is written by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin" inherited and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). She is the wife of Roscius (spelled "Roskus" in the ledger, 252), and like him manumitted when Old Carothers dies in 1837; also like him, according to the ledger, she "Dont want to leave" (252) and remains on the plantation until her death in 1849. |
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1499 | Ploeckner |
According to what Bayard tells his family in Flags in the Dust, the German pilot who shot down Johnny Sartoris in combat was named Ploeckner; "one of the best they had," Bayard says (43), adding that he is one of the proteges of Manfred von Richthofen, the pilot known as the "Red Baron." Ploeckner in turn shot down by Bayard. |
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3725 | Poleymus, Children of Constable |
"All" of Mr. and Mrs. Poleymus' children "are married and gone"; The Reivers does not say how many they had, or where they went (251). |
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3045 | Pomp |
In Light in August Pomp (presumably short for 'Pompey') is Cinthy's husband and the first Gail Hightower's slave. Though called "boy," he is older than his master, and is completely bald (471). He follows his master to war and refuses to believe that he could have been killed in the cavalry raid in Jefferson. Pomp himself is reportedly killed after attacking "a Yankee officer with a shovel" in an attempt to see or perhaps rescue "Marse Gail" (476-77). |
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1778 | Popeye Vitelli |
The narrator of Sanctuary describes Popeye as someone with "that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin" (4). Although Temple once calls him "that black man" (49), and Horace refers to "Popeye's black presence" (121), Popeye is white. A modern psychologist would label him a sociopath. Horace calls him one of "those Memphis folks" (21), the gangsters who buy homemade whiskey from Lee to sell in the speakeasies of the city. He was born on Christmas, in Pensacola, Florida. |
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2516 | Pose |
One of the four men - the others are Ike, Matthew, and Jim Blake - who load Lonnie Grinnup’s body onto a wagon for transfer to Tyler Ballenbaugh’s truck in "Hand upon the Waters." |
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3240 | Preacher Birdsong |
Preacher Birdsong is a World War I veteran who "learned to box in France in the war" (192). He "lives out in the country," and likely is connected to the Birdsong family in Frenchman's Bend that appears in two other texts - but that's not made explicit. "Preacher" is his name, not a job title. Charles Mallison has seen him boxing with Matt Levitt. |
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2699 | President Franklin Roosevelt |
Franklin Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, re-elected to four terms in between 1932 and his death in 1945. He is mentioned in three later texts. In "Two Soldiers" he appears only in Res Grier's reference to "Our President in Washington, D.C." (85). He is included in a list of contemporary political figures in the "Delta Autumn" chapter of Go Down, Moses - but curiously isn't on the similar list in the earlier magazine version of "Delta Autumn" (322). |
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2538 | Prince of Darkness |
The "Prince of Darkness" that Faulkner describes trying to deal with Flem Snopes in Hell is apparently the son of the original Satan, "the Prince's pa" (168). Flem gets the better of him - or maybe we mean the worse. |
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2537 | Prince of Darkness, Father of |
In The Hamlet Faulkner's imagination takes one of its most amazing flights (or perhaps descents) when he describes Flem Snopes meeting the fallen angels in Hell. Among them is this "pa" of the Prince of Darkness, and so presumably Satan himself - though Faulkner's cosmology is by no means clear (168). |
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2864 | Pritchel, Children of Wesley |
In "An Error in Chemistry," Joel Flint says during his impersonation of Wesley Pritchel that 'he' had "four children," all of whom have died (130); Joel is just mean enough to include the one he killed, Ellie, in this count. As Ellie Flint (nee Pritchel) she has her own entry in the database. |
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1641 | Professor Junkin |
In The Sound and the Fury Mrs. Compson names "Professor Junkin" as the person at the Jefferson school who called to tell her that her granddaughter Quentin has been truant. He is either Quentin's teacher or the school principal or, since it is a fairly small school, perhaps both. |
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1471 | Professor Wilkins |
In The Unvanquished Professor Wilkins is teaching and boarding Bayard Sartoris while Bayard pursues a law degree. He seems to have grown fond of Bayard and calls him "my son" when he has to deliver the sad news about Bayard's father's murder (212). Professor and student have had conversations about the principles of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, particularly "Thou shalt not kill." He is afraid that Bayard is contemplating breaking it as he "believed he was touching [Bayard's] flesh which might not be alive tomorrow" (216). Bayard refers to him as "Judge Wilkins" (212). |
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2278 | Provine, Brother of Lucius |
The dead brother of Luke Provine. According to the narrator of "A Bear Hunt," it has been "years now" since he, Luke, and another man, Jack Bonds, "were known as the Provine gang and terrorized our quiet town after the unimaginative fashion of wild youth" (63-64). |
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2279 | Provine, Children of Lucius |
The unnamed children of Lucius Provine. The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" makes only one direct reference to them, saying their father "makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64). |
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434 | Pruitt 1 |
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 Pruitt and his wife appear in "That Will Be Fine." He is President of the Compress Association and a recent arrival in Mottstown. |
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872 | Pruitt 2 |
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 Pruitt appears in "Tomorrow," where his widow tells Gavin Stevens how poor she and her husband were when they married: "we didn't even own a roof over our heads. We moved into a rented house, on rented land" (96-97). |
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3458 | Q'Milla Strutterbuck |
Q'Milla sends Strutterbuck a money order for two dollars in The Mansion. Reba and Minnie discuss whether she is "his sister or his daughter" or "his wife" (90-91); according to Minnie, "nobody but his wife" would send him two dollars (91). She lives in Lonoke, Arkansas. |
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44 | Quentin Compson I |
When Faulkner creates four earlier generations of Compsons in the "Appendix" he wrote in 1945, Quentin MacLachan Compson - the great-great-great grandfather of the Quentin Compson who appears in The Sound and the Fury - is the first one who is given a first name. This Quentin I is the "son of a Glasgow printer, orphaned and raised by his mother's people" (326) in the Perth Highlands. |
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47 | Quentin Compson II |
There are a few references to Quentin's great-grandfather in the early fictions about the family. In The Sound and The Fury Mr. Compson mentions him when he gives Quentin his grandfather's watch (76). In "A Justice" Sam Fathers tells Quentin the "your great-grandpappy" bought him and his mother as slaves (344). |
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50 | Quentin Compson III |
Quentin Compson is a major character in two of Faulkner's greatest novels, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and the narrator of four early short stories. He is also the oldest son in one of the most prominent Yoknapatawpha families but born after the South's defeat in the Civil War and at the end of the 19th century, and so has to try to grow up in a modern world that that has no place for him. |
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263 | Quentin Compson's Aunt |
Like the enigmatic aunt of (Old) Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust, this aunt of Quentin Compson is hard to place on the family tree. She appears only, abruptly, in Absalom, Absalom! when Mr. Compson uses her to explain to his son Quentin something about the nature of women: this aunt - whom apparently neither of these males ever saw - is locked in what Mr. Compson calls one of those "inexplicable (to the man mind) amicable enmities" with "her nearest female kin" (156). |
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2002 | R. Kyerling |
In "All the Dead Pilots," this R.A.F. aviator was flying below Sartoris when the latter was "shot down while in pursuit of duty over enemy lines" and witnessed his death (530). |
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694 | Rachel Samson |
In As I Lay Dying Rachel Samson is the wife of one of the farmers in Frenchman’s Bend. She is upset by the Bundrens' treatment of Addie's body but heaps all her displeasure onto Samson. |
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74 | Rafe MacCallum |
One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," and the twin brother of Stuart, Rafe appears in more texts - five - than any of his brothers. In Flags he is an old friend of the Sartoris twins, John and Bayard, and tries to help Bayard with his pain by offering homemade whiskey and a chance to talk about the war. He is only mentioned in As I Lay Dying as the twin brother of the MacCallum (Stuart) whose first name Samson can't remember (119). |
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3582 | Ratcliffe Family |
According to The Mansion's account of how a Russian fighting for the British as a German mercenary during the Revolutionary War became the founder of the Ratliff family in Yoknapatawpha, the name first belonged to a farm family in Virginia. Some time after Nelly Ratcliffe begins secretly feeding Vladimir Kyrilytch, she "brings him out where her folks could see him" (184). Some time after that, her "ma or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbor," noticed that she was pregnant, "and so" Nelly and this first V.K. were married, using her last name (184). |
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3639 | Ratlif, Descendants of Ratcliffe |
Requiem for a Nun refers to three generations of descendants from the "Ratcliffe" who first arrived in the settlement that became Jefferson, and notes how over that time the name "lost the 'c' and the final 'fe' too" (13). Although he is not singled out in this text, the latest descendant is V.K. Ratliff, one of Faulkner's favorite characters - although in the Requiem passage Faulkner seems to have forgotten that his name still has both "f"s. |
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2539 | Ratliff, Father of V.K. |
In The Hamlet Ratliff's father was a tenant farmer who at one time worked on land owned by "old man Anse Holland" next to parcel that Ab Snopes was sharecropping on (29). |
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464 | Reba Rivers |
"Miss Reba" Rivers - whom Temple in Requiem for a Nun calls "the madam of [a] cat house" in Memphis (111) - appears by name in Sanctuary, The Mansion and The Reivers. She is a colorful character: fat, asthmatic, church-going and hard-drinking, with some pretensions to gentility but no illusions about life. When readers first meet her she is carrying a "rosary" in one hand and a "tankard" of beer in the other (144). In Sanctuary the great love of her life, someone named Mr. |
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1780 | Red |
Popeye, who is himself impotent, brings Red into Temple's life as a surrogate sexual partner for her - turning Reba's "respectable" brothel, as she indignantly puts it in Sanctuary, "into a peep-show" (255). Red "looked like a college boy" (235), but is part of the Memphis underworld. When Temple tries to run away with Red, however, Popeye kills him. His death is not narrated, but at the raucous funeral service that is held for him in the same speakeasy where he and Temple danced we see the hole Popeye's bullet made in "the center of his forehead" (249). |
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465 | Redlaw|Redmond |
Named Redlaw in Flags in the Dust and Redmond in The Unvanquished, this man was Colonel Sartoris' partner in building the railroad through Yoknapatawpha until the two men fell out; after Sartoris defeated him in an election, Redlaw shot and killed him. His name changes to "Ben Redmond" in The Unvanquished, where he also plays a larger role. The second novel adds the detail that he did not fight in the Civil War, one of the things Sartoris taunts him about during the political campaign - though many people in Jefferson know that "he aint no coward" (226). |
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1503 | Reno |
The only named one among the three black musicians who accompany Young Bayard, Hub and Mitch on their trip to the neighboring college town to serenade young women in Flags in the Dust, Reno plays the clarinet. He loses his hat when Bayard steps on the gas of his roadster. |
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1502 | Res |
"A rotund man with bristling hair and lapping jowls like a Berkshire hog" (102), Res is the cashier at Old Bayard's bank in Flags in the Dust. |
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353 | Res Grier |
Res, the farmer at the head of the Grier family, appears very differently in each of the three stories Faulkner wrote about the family during the early 1940s. |
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3037 | Reverend Gail Hightower |
Reverend Gail Hightower's story is one of the three principal plot lines in Light in August. After seminary, he worked hard to secure the position of minister to the Presbyterian church in Jefferson, the site where his grandfather had died in a Civil War raid twenty years before his own birth. His obsession with that grandfather results in his loss of his wife, his pulpit and his vocation. For most of the twenty-five years he has lived in Jefferson, he has been treated as a pariah: the narrative describes him as a "fifty-year-old outcast" (49), "tall, with thin . . . |
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2334 | Reverend Schultz |
Reverend Schultz is "the minister" of the Protestant church that both the narrator and title character of "Uncle Willy" attend (227). Along with Mrs. Merridew, he leads the campaign to "cure" Willy of his addictions (232). The narrator, who admires Willy Christian but not the town's 'Christians,' describes Schultz in the Sunday school class for adult men this way: "sitting in the middle of them . . . like he was just a plain man like the rest of them yet kind of bulging out from among the others like he didn't have to move or speak them reminded that he wasn't a plain man" (228). |
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1654 | Reverend Shegog |
In The Sound and the Fury Shegog is the visiting clergyman from St. Louis who gives the Easter sermon at the Negro church in Jefferson. Physically he is unimpressive: "The visitor was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat. He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey" (293). But he possesses a powerful voice: the congregation soon forgets "his insignificant appearance in the virtuosity" of his voice (293). |
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467 | Reverend Whitfield |
Reverend Whitfield is the local preacher in Frenchman's Bend, and in four of the fictions set there. His character varies dramatically across those texts. He appears first in As I Lay Dying, in the part of a minister who has had an unconfessed affair with a married woman and is the father of an illegitimate child; many readers are reminded of Hawthorne's Dimmesdale, Hester and Pearl, not least because Addie Bundren, Whitfield's lover, names her son Jewel. |
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1504 | Richard |
This is the named man among the "two negro men" and the boy in the MacCallum kitchen in Flags in the Dust (336). Mandy calls him "Richud" (337). Buddy calls him "Dick" (338). So it seems likely that his full name is Richard, though neither that nor his role in the household or on the family's land is spelled out. |
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1512 | Richthofen |
Manfred von Richthofen, better known as "The Red Baron," shot down more planes than any other aviator in World War I. Young Bayard tells his grandfather and great-great-aunt that the German pilot who shot down Johnny was a "pupil of Richthofen's" (43). |
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3313 | Riddell, Boy |
In The Town, this second-grade boy moves to Jefferson with his parents. When it is discovered that he has polio, the school that he and Chick attend is closed. He is hospitalized in Memphis, and Eula says to Chick, "Let's hope they got him to Memphis in time" (324). |
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2540 | Rideout, Brother of Aaron |
At the end of The Hamlet among the men watching Flem's wagon heading out from Varner's store toward Jefferson and speculating on what Flem's next move will be is a man who is identified only as Aaron Rideout's brother and also V.K. Ratliff's cousin (403). |
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468 | Rider |
Rider, the protagonist of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, is one of Faulkner's most memorable black characters. We never learn his real name; "Rider" is a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken" before he became the devoted husband of Mannie (249, 144). He is depicted from two different perspectives in both texts. |
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36 | Ringo |
Ringo - short for Marengo, the name of Napoleon's horse - was born into slavery as a member of the black family that has served the Sartorises for several generations. He appears in all the stories that Bayard Sartoris narrates, as a major character in the seven that were collected in The Unvanquished and a somewhat reduced one in the later "My Grandmother Millard." Even as a slave he occupies an intimate place in the Sartoris family, as both Bayard's personal servant and his friend. |
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2231 | Robert Ingersoll |
Historically, Robert Ingersoll was a late 19th-century orator and philosopher nicknamed "The Great Agnostic," whose rejection of Christianity was widely discussed in his day and in Faulkner's. In "Beyond," Faulkner locates Ingersoll in the story's version of heaven, and gives him the role of interlocutor to the protagonist's doubts about God and the afterlife; Ingersoll listens to what Judge Allison says about his life and ideas, but he doesn't offer any solutions or answers. |
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2977 | Robert Markey |
In "Knight's Gambit" Robert Markey is "a lawyer" and a man in Memphis "city politics . . . who had been at Heidelberg" with Gavin Stevens and now lives in the city (201). Gavin contacts him for assistance in keeping track of Max Harriss when he goes to Memphis. |
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2311 | Rodney |
The "Uncle Rodney" (266) of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is the youngest of three children. He is also guilty of theft, fraud, and embezzlement. He is also a serial philanderer. Rodney manages the latter "business" by manipulating his nephew, Georgie, with promises of future monetary rewards. "By God," he tells Georgie, "some day you will be as good a businessman as I am" (280). His attempted elopement with a married woman on Christmas Eve goes horribly wrong, and Rodney winds up "wrapped in a quilt" and carried back to his family like a "side of beef" (286). |
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2376 | Rosa Coldfield |
Of all the storytellers in Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield is the one with the most firsthand knowledge of the Sutpen family. She is Ellen's sister, Judith and Henry's aunt, and was even, for a few weeks right after the Civil War, Thomas' fiancee - until he spoke the words that caused her to begin wearing the "eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years" when the novel opens (3). And it is her version of the story, of Sutpen in particular, that is expressed first. |
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15 | Rosa Millard |
Rosa Millard - "Granny" to two boys, one white and one black - is one of Faulkner's most formidable old women. As John Sartoris' mother-in-law, she runs his plantation while he's away fighting in the Civil War. |
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2859 | Roscius |
In Go Down, Moses Roscius (spelled "Roskus" by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin inherited" and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). He is the husband of Phoebe (spelled "Fibby" in the ledger, 252), and was like her manumitted when Old Carothers died in 1837. According to the ledger, despite being free he "Dont want to leave," and he remains on the plantation until his death four years later (252). |
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2315 | Rosie |
Rosie, a servant working for the family of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine," seems to have a clear understanding of her employers' characters. In particular, she chastises young Georgie: "You and money! If you ain't rich time you twenty-one, hit will be because the law done abolished money or done abolished you" (265). Rosie, like Emmeline, has to do some of the cooking due to the absence of Grandma and Grandpa's servant, Mandy. Although she grumbles about her work, she performs it conscientiously. |
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62 | Roskus Gibson |
In The Sound and the Fury Roskus is husband to Dilsey and father to Versh, T.P., and Frony. He drives for the Compsons while also caring for the farm animals, although over the years his rheumatism makes that increasingly hard. He is slightly less loyal than his wife to the white family he works for, complaining that there "aint no luck on this place" (29). Dilsey reproaches him for giving their son Versh "them Memphis notions" - that is, presumably, encouraging Versh to leave Yoknapatawpha (31). |
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172 | Roth Edmonds' Child |
The end of the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family line in Go Down, Moses appears essentially as a "blanket-swaddled bundle" (340) being carried by his mother; he is the illegitimate child of Roth Edmonds and Edmonds's mistress, the granddaughter of James Beauchamp. Roth and the young mother are distantly related, making their child the multi-racial product of incest; this an echo of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin's impregnation of Tomey, the slave girl who was also his daughter. |