The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

There are two Spoades in the novel, father and son, both of whom attend Harvard. This is the father, who according to Charles Mallison "had been at Harvard back in 1909 with Uncle Gavin" (229). In The Sound and the Fury, 1909 is also when Quentin Compson enrolled at Harvard, and in that novel Quentin knows a young man named Spoade who, like the pair in this novel, also came from South Carolina.

Not to be confused with his son, who in the novel is also called "Colonel Sartoris," "the original Colonel Sartoris" did serve as a Confederate officer during the Civil War, where he "commanded all the local boys" who fought in it (446), which is why in The Mansion Mack Lendon names the company of soldiers he raises to fight in World War I the Sartoris Rifles in his "honor" (204). The son's name is Bayard. This is John Sartoris, a legendary figure in Yoknapatawpha history and the most frequently recurring character in Faulkner's fictions.

Mack Lendon is "one of a big family of brothers in a big house" (205).

This is the older of Mink and Yettie Snopes' "two daughters" (10). She disappears after her father goes to prison and her mother dies.

V.K. Ratliff, an itinerant sewing machine and radio salesman, is unmarried, intelligent, observant, and highly articulate in his regional vernacular. He is portrayed as a down-to-earth intellectual, a "rural bucolic grassroots philosopher and Cincinnatus" (391). In Chapter 6, one of the three chapters in the novel that he narrates, he lets us know that "my childhood too come out of that same similar Frenchman's Bend background" that Flem is from (154).

Lon Quick is "the constable" (19) in Frenchman's Bend. In that role he intervenes in the dispute over the cow between Mink Snopes and Zack Houston. (In this novel there is also a reference to a "Solon Quick" who might have been the man who saw a bear "three years ago" [34]; it is possible that these are the same character, but we treat them as two different ones.)

Only one member of the KKK has any individual existence in the story: a "veteran ranking Klansman" who seems to accept defeat at the hands of the "schoolteachers and editors and Sunday School superintendents" who elected Clarence Snopes as their champion (131).

Ratliff wonders, facetiously, whether Linda has a daughter "stashed out somewhere" - because he knows that given Gavin's obsession with Eula Varner Snopes and her daughter Linda, another female Snopes would be too much for him to deal with (476).

The "youngish quite decent-looking" (464) car agent who brings Linda's new Jaguar down to Jefferson.

The group of people who admire the new Jaguar in which Linda Snopes Kohl will ride away from Yoknapatawpha consists of "men, boys, a Negro or so" (464); throughout the novel the people of Jefferson are often described as spectators, but the fact that this group explicitly includes blacks as well as whites makes it worth creating as a 'character' in itself.