The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

When Mrs. Nunnery can't find her five-year-old son Cedric, she enlists Eck Snopes in the search for him. She is so frantic about Cedric that she doesn't even hear the explosion in which Eck blows himself up during the search; "finally they made her sit down and somebody gave her a drink of whiskey and she quit screaming" (115).

Sheriff of Yoknapatawpha County, Hub Hampton is "a big man with a big belly and little hard pale eyes that didn't seem to need to blink at all" (168). He is involved in the arrest of Montgomery Ward Snopes and attempts to manage the children of Byron Snopes. He is also father of Hub Hampton II.

Jody Varner is "old Will's only son" (4), and the person who gives Flem Snopes his first salaried job. Quick-tempered and overbearing, Jody will remain a bachelor throughout the Snopes trilogy. By the end of The Mansion, he is described as "a balding man who had added another hundred pounds of jowl and belly to his father's long skeleton" (461).

The virtual owner of all of Frenchman's Bend, and Eula's father, Will Varner also "established" the Sartoris bank, along with Old Bayard and Major de Spain - according to this novel, or at least according to Ratliff in this novel (150). At the beginning of the story he is "a tall, gaunt, narrow-hipped heavily-moustached man" (18). Even in his old age he remains a spry and lusty man with a keen sense for business.

Hoke McCarron is "the only child of a well-to-do widowed maw up in Tennessee somewhere" (139) who, like so many other men, apparently fell in love with Eula Varner at first sight. He became one of the suitors vying for Eula's hand in The Hamlet. He ends up getting Eula pregnant and leaving the county. By the time Linda Snopes, his biological daughter, meets him, he has become a successful businessman somewhere "a thousand miles away" from New York (189). (In The Hamlet his first name is spelled "Hoake.")

The youngest daughter of Will Varner, Eula is the object of desire of "every man under eighty years old in Frenchman's Bend" (4-5) - and later, of many of the men in Jefferson as well, including Gavin Stevens. In The Hamlet, Eula is married off to Flem because she got pregnant by Hoake McCarron. By the end of The Town, Eula has committed suicide, and she never appears in the The Mansion, though she is mentioned often. Nevertheless, her daughter Linda Snopes Kohl will play a critical role in the unfolding of the Snopes saga.

The central character throughout the Snopes Trilogy, Flem represents the rise of the "poor white" in Yoknapatawpha and the consequent displacement of the aristocratic planter class. The son of Ab and Lennie Snopes (not mentioned in this novel), he has followed his father from tenant farm to tenant farm until that fateful day in The Hamlet when they arrive in Frenchman's Bend. Through cunning and shady dealing, Flem schemes his way from clerking in a country store to being President of the Sartoris bank in Jefferson.

The deputy who escorts Mink Snopes from the jail cell to the courthouse at the beginning of the novel is unnnamed, but we assume he is the same deputy, identified as Hunter Killegrew, who subsequently watches over Montgomery Ward Snopes.

Jack - or "Zack", as his name alternatively appears in The Town - is Mink's mortal enemy, at least in Mink's mind. Cast in The Hamlet as a high-spirited individualist who tragically loses his wife, the version of Zach Houston Faulkner creates in The Mansion is far less sympathetic. Wealthy enough to own land and hire servants, Houston uses his resources to bully Mink, when the latter hatches an ill-conceived plan to have Houston inadvertently winter his cow. Houston works Mink to the bone in order to pay to get his milk cow back.

The "Circuit Judge" (50) who presides over Mink Snopes's trial is described as "an old man" (51). He is referred to by name once, as "Judge Brummage" (48).