The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Melissa Meek is the "county librarian, a mouse-sized and -colored woman who had never married," and also a former classmate of Caddy Compson who sees a photo of her in occupied France (333). Attempting to "save" Caddy enables Meek to transcend the characterization of her name, her profession, and her lifelong habits (335).

The "matrons" are described as a link between the Jefferson of the past and that of the present (333). Though some of them had also been part of the "old highschool class" with Melissa Meek and Caddy Compson, they are now "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" of Jefferson (333). Their attention to respectability is evident in their attempts to keep their romance novels "carefully wrapped from view in sheets of Memphis and Jackson newspapers" (333).

The "highschool juniors and seniors" are described from the perspective of Melissa Meek, who emphasizes both their great height relative to her own petite stature and also their seemingly relentless desire to thwart her moderate attempts at book censure (333).

Thorne Smith wrote wildly popular fantasy novels that were known for their provocative illustrations and plotlines that include much drinking, sex, and humor. His most popular novel, Topper, was made into a very successful movie starring Cary Grant in 1937. Perhaps most notably for the "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" of Faulkner's Jefferson who borrow Smith's books from the library (333), Topper features a banker's wife who transforms from a social-climbing bore into a flashier and far more fun woman by the end of the novel.

These "overalled men" are customers at the farmers' supply store where Jason IV owns a business buying and selling cotton (334). Although the customers are explicitly male, since the store is a "gloomy cavern which only men ever entered" (333), their race is not so clearly defined; the narrative indicates that the store serves "Mississippi farmers or at least Negro Mississippi farmers" (334), indicating that many, if not most of the customers are African-American.

This man, presumably Caddy's lover during World War II, is "a handsome lean man of middleage in the ribbons and tabs of a German staffgeneral," and is further characterized through the luxury of his surroundings: "a Cannebiere backdrop of mountains and palms and cypresses and the sea, an open powerful expensive chromiumtrimmed sports car," all of which are featured in "a slick magazine - a picture filled with luxury and money and sunlight" (344).

This Allied aviator helps Sartoris take revenge on the German pilot who shot down his brother by flying an out-moded airplane as the bait in Sartoris' trap. The narrator says "we" never knew who this aviator was (414).