The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Shreve MacKenzie is Quentin Compson's Harvard University roommate. He is Canadian, and Quentin thinks other students speculate that the two have a homosexual relationship. There is no clear evidence of that in the text, but he is very concerned about Quentin's well-being, for example offering to return to the campus with Quentin after the fight with Gerald Bland. He does not, however, suspect that Quentin is planning to commit suicide. As Quentin's roommate he is a major character in the later novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

Herbert is from South Bend, Indiana. He meets Caddy Compson when Mrs. Compson takes her to the fashionable resort of French Lick specifically to find a husband for her. In April 1910 he and Caddy are married. Mrs. Compson calls Herbert "My Harvard boy" (93). Herbert flirts with her, promises Jason a job in the family bank, and tries to bribe Quentin to keep him from telling Caddy about his expulsion from Harvard for cheating. Quentin describes him with the adjectives "hearty" and "celluloid," and notes a "face full of teeth white but not smiling" (93).

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 . . .

Although the white people of Jefferson shun Joanna Burden, the people of the local black community have close ties with her, as indicated by the footpaths which "radiate from her house like wheelspokes" (257). She "visits them when they are sick," Byron tells Lena, "like they was white" (53). And living at the Burden place Joe notes "the negro women who came to the house from both directions up and down the road," "usually singly though sometimes in twos and threes," and wearing the "aprons and headrags" that are the costume of their caste (257).

The (white) people of Jefferson as a group play a number of roles in Light in August, from watching the stories of Joe and Joanna and Hightower unfold to helping to tell them.

Joanna Burden is a middle-aged spinster who has lived in the “old colonial plantation house” (36) outside Jefferson since she was born, yet “she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction” (46). Byron Bunch tells Lena Grove that Joanna is "a Yankee" (53).

He may be the owner of Jefferson's planing mill; he is definitely the man in charge of it. He hires Christmas and Brown (aka Burch) at the planing mill.

Mooney is the foreman at the planing mill where, for varying lengths of time, Bryon Bunch, Joe Christmas and 'Joe Brown' (i.e. Lucas Burch) all work.