General Compson

General Compson is the oldest member of Major de Spain’s hunting parties, and the Compson who appears most frequently in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. His age, his social status, and his experience in the Civil War and at the hunt lend him an air of authority in Go Down, Moses, and no one argues with his pronouncement that Ike McCaslin, though still a boy, "is a better woodsman" that almost everyone else in the group that goes after Old Ben (224). As an old man, one of Ike's very few possessions is the hunting horn which "General Compson had left him in his will" (345).