"Bystanders" is the term the narrator of Light in August uses for the people who watch Percy Grimm lose a fist fight with an "exsoldier" and, despite the veteran's request, refuse to break it up (450). These same people later remember the fight when they see Grimm wearing "his captain's uniform" as a member of the National Guard (451).
In "Centaur in Brass" an unnamed local butcher gives Tom-Tom one of last year's watermelons that has been in cold storage for a year; he is afraid to eat it himself. In giving it to a black man, he joins other white folks in Faulkner's fiction who give black people castoffs with no regard for what happens next.
These are the British officers whom Chick refers to in Intruder in the Dust when he reminds his uncle Gavin what he once told him, "about the English boys not much older than me leading troops and flying scout aeroplanes in France in 1918" (200).
These are the British officers mentioned in "Ad Astra" who were placed in charge of the Indian soldiers serving in World War I. According to the subadar, when they ordered their troops to "'Go there and do this,' they would not stir" (415). A particularly dreadful consequence of their lack of responsible procedure is the death of almost an entire Indian battalion which advances on the enemy without loaded rifles.
In Go Down, Moses this character is Ike McCaslin, the novel's central figure, but in both "The Old People" and "The Bear," originally published as magazine stories before being revised and incorporated into the novel, he is a lot harder to name. In all three texts, he's a child of white privilege who has been taught how to conduct oneself as a hunter - which is to say, how to be the right kind of man - by Sam Fathers, mixed race son of a Chickasaw chief.
In The Town, as the meeting of aldermen breaks up, this boy "come burrowing through and up to the table and handed Lawyer something and Lawyer taken it" (92). "Laywer" is Ratliff's name for Gavin Stevens. The note is from Eula Varner Snopes.
In The Hamlet this fourteen-year-old boy has a "habit" of spying on Will Varner's affair with a tenant's wife; he reveals that "Varner would not even remove his hat" during their trysts (157).
In Light in August, this is the friend who upsets Christmas when he tells him and the other boys who hunt and fish together on Saturday afternoons about sexual intercourse, female desire, and menstruation. He also arranges the meeting in the shed with the Negro girl.
