Character Keys

"Monk" includes two separate visits to the state penitentiary, but the only specific reference it makes to the inmate population is when, during an "abortive jailbreak," Monk shoots the warden. "Fifty men" see him do that, and "some of the other convicts" overpower him afterwards (50). One of these men is later identified as Bill Terrel, and some of them, like Bill Terrel, are considered by the Governor's Pardon Board for release.

After Mrs. Odlethrop dies in "Monk," these neighbors try and fail to catch the young Monk. The story describes the people of this part of the county as violent towards strangers, but in this instance it shows that they can treat their own with kindness: they bury Mrs. Odlethrop and leave food for Monk at the "deserted house" even though they don't see him (44).

According to the narrator of "Monk," the murder victim at the gas station where Monk works and lives is "no loss to anyone" (46). And that is all the story says about him.

In "Monk" there are two unnamed men present when Monk is found holding a pistol beside a man who has been shot. This is the man who did not do the killing - though of course he becomes an accomplice when he refuses to tell the truth about who did do the killing.

Referred to only as "the Court" in "Monk," the Jefferson judge who presides over Monk's murder trial plays a significant role in determining its outcome (41): he appoints the lawyer who does such a perfunctory job defending Monk; he may even have directed the lawyer to plead Monk "guilty" (42).

The grandfather of the man who is the Governor of the state in "Monk" seems to have been a man of the lower classes with a chip on his shoulder similar to the one Bill Terrel carries. As the Governor says of him to Gavin Stevens, "Mr. Stevens, you are what my grandpap would have called a gentleman. He would have snarled it at you, hating you and your kind; he might very probably have shot your horse from under you someday from behind a fence - for a principle" (57).

In The Mansion the member of Goodyhay's sect who gives Mink a ride into Memphis (and whom the narrative only refers to as "the driver," and does not describe at all, 312) knows his way around the city.

In both the short story "Go Down, Moses" and the novel of the same name, this driver is hired by Gavin Stevens to carry Belle Worsham and Molly Beauchamp in Stevens' car from the train station to the McCaslin plantation.

In "Tomorrow," the District Attorney of Yoknapatawpha apparently feels so certain that Bookwright will be found not guilty that he "conducts the case through an assistant" (91), and does not otherwise appear in the story.

The young district attorney who prosecutes Monk at his murder trial in "Monk" cares more about his conviction rate than justice. The narrator calls attention to his ambitiousness, stating that he "had his eye on Congress" (41).

Although the only examples in "Monk" of the political hacks whom the state's new Governor is elevating to positions of power are the men on the Parole Board, Stevens sees that group as representative of the "battalions and battalions of factory-made colonels" now running the government (63).

This "woman with hard, bright, metallic city hair and a hard, blonde, city face" comes to Yoknapatawpha in "Monk" when Mrs. Odlethrop's son returns home after a long absence (43). The word "city" in that description suggests she is from Memphis, or someplace similar, but that is not made clear in the story. Nor can we say for sure that she is Monk's mother, though the fact that the infant Monk is seen at the Odlethrops' shortly after she and the son leave - for unknown reasons, though perhaps because Mrs.

At Bill Terrel's murder trial in "Monk," in a small but telling moment, his daughter denies her father's story that the man he killed had seduced her.

Presumably Monk's grandmother, Mrs. Odlethrop lives like a hermit with Monk and seems fiercely protective of him. People tell of how she chased her son and Monk's mother "out of the house and out of the country" with a shotgun because that son was "too much even for that country and people" (43).

The man who is Mrs. Odlethrop's son in "Monk" and also, presumably, the title character's biological father, is described as "too much even for that country and people" (43). He returns to his mother's home with a woman, presumably Monk's mother, after a ten year absence. He initially left (or was driven out of Yoknapatawpha) after killing someone, and after his return his own mother is said to have "driven" him out of town again at gunpoint (43).

In "Monk," C.L. Gambrell is the warden at the penitentiary. He seems to be a fair, kind man in many respects. He makes Monk a "trusty" (trustee, 49), and Monk follows him with "doglike devotion" (49). However, he also displays a cruel streak when he goads Bill Terrel concerning his pardon. He shows his judgment to be even more questionable when he has an unnamed Negro cook "severely beaten" in an effort to extract information about his missing pistol. Monk later finds the pistol where the warden then "recalls having hid it himself" (53).

These "town officers" in Absalom! take Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon away if he is drunk and violent in Jefferson (170).

In Absalom! these are the twenty "wild blacks" whom Sutpen brings as slaves to Yoknaptawpha in 1833 (4), from a French colony in the Caribbean; the "civilized language" which they speak (44) is "a sort of French" (27). Sutpen has a child - Clytemnestra - with one of the two slaves in this group who are women (48). The narrative repeatedly calls them "wild" (13, 16, etc.), and distinguishes them as a group from the "tame" slaves that Sutpen later acquires, through birth or purchase (17). Rosa characterizes them as being "like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men" (4).

According to Absalom!, when Bon and Henry enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1859, the entire student body "numbered in two figures" (81). Included in that number are the "five or six" students, all like Henry "planters' sons," with whom Bon associates (76). It is also this small clique, presumably, who follow Bon's example and switch to the Law School.

In her account in Absalom! of the men who begin returning home from the Civil War during its final winter, Rosa refers to the men's "beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped" (126). She does not say by whom.

During the last winter of the Civil War, Rosa says in Absalom!, "stragglers" frequently passed by the Sutpen plantation where she, Judith and Clytemnestra lived. Some she says were "tramps, ruffians," but others were "soldiers beginning to come back" from the war, "men who had risked and lost everything" (126). Right after the passage mentions the "wife or mistress" of such men "who in [their] absence has been raped," Rosa adds: "We were afraid," but "we fed them" (126).

"The justice's court" in which Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned in Absalom! is described as "crowded" (163); "every face in the room" looks at the prisoner at the moment when the justice himself asks him "What are you?" (165).

In Absalom! Henry and Bon enlist and serve in the Confederate company organized at the start of the Civil War by "their classmates at the University" (69). According to Mr. Compson, its men come from across the entire class spectrum: "rich and poor, aristocrat and redneck" (97), and the flag they carry toward the fighting was sewn a few stitches at a time by "the sweetheart of each man in the company" (98).

As the proprietor of the largest plantation in Yoknapatawpha, Sutpen owned a much larger group of slaves than his original twenty slaves from the Caribbean and the additional several slaves whom the narrator specifically refers to. Absalom! notes, for example, that over the years the "wild" Negroes whom Sutpen "had brought into the country" mix with other enslaved Negroes - "the tame which was already there" (67).

When Absalom! says that Coldfield's two women servants are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66), it indirectly refers to the other enslaved men and women in Jefferson who, like almost all the slaves at Sutpen's Hundred, emancipate themselves as soon as the Union army arrives.

The teacher at the Tidewater school Sutpen attends in Absalom! is described, tautologically, as "the kind of teacher that would be teaching a one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations" (195). Sutpen tells General Compson that the man "always looked dusty, as if he had been born and lived all his life in attics and store rooms" (195).

A "consul" was the highest elected official in the Roman Republic. In Absalom! the "youthful Roman consul" traveling among "barbarian hordes which his grandfather conquered" is the symbolic figure with whom Mr. Compson compares Charles Bon, the urban sophisticate visiting the "isolated Puritan country household" of Thomas Sutpen (74).

In the immediate aftermath of the South's surrender, according to Rosa's account in Absalom!, "men with pistols in their pockets gathered daily at secret meeting places in the towns"; a deputation from this group unsuccessfully demands that Sutpen join them (130). Rosa never gives the group a name, but when she later describes their "sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses" it seems obvious that the Ku Klux Klan is being evoked (134). (There are entries for Klansmen in other texts in this index.)

In "the justice's court" in Absalom!, General Compson sees Charles E. S-V. Bon "handcuffed to an officer" (163); this officer may be "the sheriff" (164), or one of his deputies.

In Mr. Compson's account of the city in Absalom!, Bon's initiation of Henry into the sophisticated world of New Orleans begins with his exposure to the elegant people riding in the city streets: "women, enthroned . . . like painted portraits" and "men in linen a little finer and diamonds a little brighter" than anything Henry had seen before (88).

In Chapter 5 of Absalom! Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin about the time immediately following the South's defeat in the Civil War.

The "overseer" Sutpen hires in Absalom! is credited with helping the plantation "run smoothly" (57). He is identified only as the son of the county sheriff.

Absalom! mentions the (presumably authoritarian) tone of voice in which Sutpen "used to address his orderly or even his house servants" (149). In this context an "orderly" is a soldier who serves a commanding officer as a kind of servant. Sutpen's "house servants," like nearly all the servants in Faulkner's world, are black, and during the Civil War many Confederate officers took slaves with them to the war, but these are called "body servants" in the fictions, and explicitly racialized as black.

In Absalom! these are the "Northern people" who, at least in Miss Rosa's mind, have destroyed "the South" (5).

When Clytemnestra and Charles E. S-V. Bon take a steamboat from New Orleans in Absalom!, they travel "on the freight deck, eating and sleeping with negroes" (160).

These are the "negroes" at the "ball" in Absalom! where Charles E. S-V. Bon starts a fight (164). Before the fight they are described as "dancing" and having a "dice game in the kitchen"; in the fight they are described as "a moiling clump of negro backs and heads and black arms and hands clutching sticks of stove wood and cooking implements and razors" (164).

In Absalom! Rosa Coldfield orders "casual negro boys who happened to pass the house" to "rake her yard" (171-72); they understand that they will be paid later by Judge Benbow.

In Absalom! Sutpen tells General Compson that his first father-in-law's wife "had been a Spaniard" (203); much later in the novel he tells his son Henry that in fact, as he discovered after marrying, she "was part negro" (283). The Chronology at the end of the novel treats her mixed racial identity as a fact - "Sutpen learns his wife has negro blood" (305) - but the actual novel does not independently confirm it. This woman never appears in the novel herself, apparently having died before Sutpen gets involved with her husband and daughter.

When in Absalom! Sutpen realizes that the French architect has run away, he sends word to General Compson "and some others" in town; these "others" are the "guests" who are invited to witness or take part in the "race" to recapture the runaway, as if it were an entertainment (177, 178, 206). Compson brings champagne, "and some of the others brought whiskey" (178). They are wealthy enough to ride horses. In Sutpen's mind, these men will expect him to track the man with dogs (178).

Also called "a posse" (35), the "vigilance committee" in Absalom! that accompanies the county sheriff when he confronts Sutpen on suspicion of theft originally consists of "eight or ten" men (34). In an essentially comic scene, this group follows Sutpen on his courtship errand as their numbers grow (according to General Compson) to "almost fifty" men (35) - including "other horsemen [who] rode into the square" and "others who did not happen to have horses" (35) as well as some of the men who were lounging "on the gallery of the Holston House" when Sutpen reached town (34).

The "band [that] plays Dixie" which Shreve imagines in Absalom! is part of a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262). "Decoration Day" is better known as "Confederate Memorial Day," out of which the U.S. Memorial Day holiday eventually came. It was first observed soon after the Civil War ended, and in fact is still unofficially observed in some places in the South - in April, however, not "June" (262).

In Absalom!, Judith Sutpen finds a buyer for the crossroads store about a year after her father's death. The man himself never appears in the novel, but the money he pays her is used to buy at least one and possibly two of the tombstones in the Sutpen's graveyard.

In Absalom!, this man - whom Rosa calls a "fool" (17) - tries to stop Sutpen's coachman from beating the horses.

In Sutpen's account of life in the mountains of western Virginia in Absalom!, "the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your rifle sights" (179).

In Absalom! Sutpen negotiates his acquisition of land "with or through" the "Chickasaw Indian agent" (25). The adjective is ambiguous, but it's unlikely the agent was a Chickasaw himself. Historically, Indian agents were white men who worked for the U.S. government as the official intermediary between white America and Native Americans.

In Absalom!, Rosa has a moment of fantasy while standing in the hallway of "rotting" Sutpen mansion where Bon's body lies; in this never-to-be version of the Sutpen story, all is well, and Rosa can hear "the children" of Judith and Charles Bon in "the nursery" (113).

At the New Orleans dueling establishment Bon takes Henry to in Absalom!, the door is opened by "a swarthy man resembling a creature out of an old woodcut of the French Revolution" (89); he speaks with Bon in French.

In Absalom!, after Rosa Coldfield returns to her house in Jefferson in 1866, "the town - farmers passing, negro servants going to work in white kitchens" - see her raiding the neighbors' gardens "before sunup" (138). "The town" is often a kind of character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but the way this passage identifies the town with "farmers" (who are from the country) and "servants" (who are not white) is exceptional.

In Absalom! the "first black man, slave," that Sutpen ever sees is this "huge bull" of a man who throws his drunken father out of a "doggery," a rough tavern, in the middle of the family's journey across Virginia (182). The man's description focuses on his "mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones" (182).