The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Unnamed men who came to the narrator's grandfather's house (Gavin Stevens' father's house) to socialize and drink cold toddies.

Gavin Stevens' father is also the grandfather of the narrator of "An Error in Chemistry." Gavin Stevens' father liked to drink cold toddies with friends who would come over to his house.

The unnamed wife of Wesley Pritchel was the mother of four children. She is already dead when "An Error in Chemistry" begins.

A "stranger" in "neat city clothes" (126), Mr. Workman is an insurance adjuster from the Memphis office of the company that wrote a life insurance policy on Ellie. He speaks with a "cold" voice, yet is described as being in "a sort of seething boil" about the shooting (126). Suspecting something after meeting with "Old Man Pritchel" in person (126), he goes out of his way to tell the sheriff about the imminent sale of the Pritchel farm.

Ben Berry is a Deputy Sheriff. Sheriff Hub sends him to keep an eye on the Flints' house in case Joel Flint returns there after escaping from the local jail cell. He loses his "spectacles in the woods" during the pursuit, and so can't read an important clue to the killer's identity (123).

These three men from an unidentified place in the North want to buy Wesley Pritchel's farm in order to use the clay from the clay-pit to "manufacture some kind of road material" (119).

"Generations" of these "random boys" dug into the clay-pit on Wesley Pritchel's farm, where they found "Indian and even aboriginal relics - flint arrow-heads, axes and dishes ad skulls and thigh-bones and pipes" (119).

This entry represents the various unnamed neighbors of Wesley Pritchel, the "people in the adjacent countryside" (119). It is safe to assume that they are all, like Pritchel himself, farming families. They play several different roles in the story. They gossip about Wesley's relationship with his "son-in-law" (114). Until Pritchel's drives them off, they take clay from his clay-pit to make "serviceable though crude pottery" (119). The "man and his wife" who are Pritchel's "nearest neighbors" are summoned to his house by the sheriff to stay with the old man after Ellie's murder (118).

The story never gives a name to the person who narrates it, though we can say for sure that he is a nephew of Gavin Stevens, whom he repeatedly calls "Uncle Gavin" (115, etc.). In the context of Faulkner's other fictions, this is enough to identify him as Charles "Chick" Mallison, Gavin's only nephew and a narrator in a number of other texts, including two other tales in Knight's Gambit. The narrator says little about himself; he lives in the house his grandfather and father lived in, though both men have died, and he clearly thinks of Gavin as a kind of surrogate father.

Wesley Pritchel owns a small farm. He is unhappy when his "dim-witted spinster" daughter, Ellie, marries Joel Flint, a carnival pitch man (113). Pritchel is irascible and likes to be left alone. He is murdered by Joel Flint.