The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In this novel Jason Compson is Mrs. Compson's son and the owner of "the McCaslin Hardware Company" (355); the father after whom, in other texts, he is named is mentioned in The Mansion but not by name. In some respects Jason is as underhanded and unscrupulous as Flem Snopes, whom he tries, unsuccessfully, to out-maneuver in a real estate deal.

A major figure in The Sound and the Fury (1929), Candace Compson is the only daughter of Caroline and Jason Compson. After her "marriage blew up," "she disappeared, nobody knew where" (354).

A major figure in Faulkner's Sound and the Fury (1929), Benjy Compson is born into one of Yoknapatawpha's most prominent old families. He has severe cognitive disabilities, which result in his being sent to the Mississippi State Insane Asylum in Faulkner's later "Appendix: Compson" (1946). But this novel brings him back to Jefferson, where he destroys both his decaying family mansion and himself in a fire.

A major figure in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction, Quentin Compson is the first born son of Caroline and Jason Compson. As this novel mentions in its very passing account of him, he "drowned himself at Harvard" (354).

Introduced late in the novel as "a new Snopes living in Jefferson" (354), Res Snopes is kin to Flem Snopes, though the exact relationship is never made clear. Flem establishes him in the converted carriage house on the Compson place, which Flem now owns, where the hog farm Res operates becomes a source of increasingly violent friction with his neighbor.

"Somebody" gets a car and "somebody" drives Snopes "home" to get "dry britches" after the dogs urinate on the pants he was wearing (349). We assume it's the same person.

This is the second of the "fellers" - i.e. fellows - whom Ratliff invents, in this instance as someone behind whom he tries to hide his role in Clarence Snopes's political demise. Ratliff refers to him as an "anonymous underhanded son-of-a-gun" and an "underhanded feller" (349), but does not fool either his listeners in the novel - or the reader.

Will Varner's picnic is attended by "every voter and candidate in forty miles that owned a pickup or could bum a ride in one or even a span of mules" (348). The novel takes for granted the fact that "every voter" is white.

Though no other information is given, this novel's "Eck Grier" (348) is probably the result of Faulkner's forgetting that the name of the man who trades his "half-interest" in a hunting dog when he originally told the story in "Shingles for the Lord" (1943) was Res Grier.

Devries's sister has twin boys who collaborate with Ratliff to bring Clarence Snopes' political career to an end.