Character Keys

In Flags in the Dust the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha appear in town in various ways.

The residents of Yoknapatawpha county are referred as a group to in "A Bear Hunt" in several passages. In particular, they are the folks that Ratliff encounters in his travels as a sewing machine salesman; specifically mentioned are "farmers' wives" at bazaars and sewing bees and "men and women at all-day singings at country churches" (63).

Although the crowd in The Reivers that witnesses Boon firing his gun is in the Square in Jefferson, it is explicitly described as made up of people from outside Jefferson, from Yoknapatawpha county, who are in town for a "First Saturday," a traditional "trade day": "they were all there, black and white" (14).

Throughout The Hamlet, Faulkner frequently focalizes the narrative through the collective third-person "the people" in much the same way he uses "we" in "A Rose for Emily." The people of Yoknapatawpha's "countryside" are described as a self-organizing social body, which can be compared to a "swarm of bees" (128), a "hive" or "a cloud of pink-and-white bees" (349).

Faulkner's "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury refers at different moments to the "whole town and county" (329), the "living fellowtownsmen" during Jason's time (330), and "the town" (340) - terms which almost always refer exclusively to Jefferson's white population. This generic group and the Compsons seem to have an estranged, at times even antagonistic relationship to each other.

The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. The Hamlet describes the group as the ironic inheritors of the Old Frenchman and his aristocratic "dream" (4). Faulkner emphasizes how the patriarch is virtually forgotten by those "who came after him," who have "nothing to do with any once-living man at all" (4).

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. Various anonymous groups bear witness to the events of The Mansion.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. In Absalom! the inhabitants of Jefferson span several generations.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. In "Miss Zilphia Gant" the commentary provided by "people in our town" on the story of Mrs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs. The narrator of "Hair" refers to the people of Jefferson several times, usually in connection with rumors and gossip about Susan Reed.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In almost every instance it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

One of the narrative devices that Faulkner regularly deploys is using the larger population of Jefferson as a kind of chorus to provide commentary on the characters or events of a specific story. In each case it seems fair to say that the "townspeople" he uses this way are implicitly the white people, but it seems more accurate to create a separate "Character=Jefferson Townspeople" for each text in which the device occurs.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. Four different units appear in the short story "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek." This entry represents the "two soldiers in one of General Forrest's forage wagons" who bring Lucius back to Sartoris (690). As foragers, these men were charged with finding food for the troops in the surrounding countryside - a common practice in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

There are over a dozen different groups of Confederate soldiers referred to in the fictions. This is company of soldiers in both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished who are "bivouacked" just outside of Jefferson; their uniforms are the color of "dead leaves" (20, 46). Since one of them hollers out "Hooraw for Arkansas!" when Bayard and Ringo drive by their camp, it seems likely that they are a unit that was raised from men in that state.

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. One that appears, with a few differences, in two different texts is the "battered remnant of a Confederate brigade" that retreated through Jefferson after losing a battle in 1864 (Intruder, 49); the "body" of troops who fight Union troops at the Sartoris plantation and retreat through Jefferson, where "a rear-guard action of cavalry" enables the unit to withdraw still further southward (Requiem, 182).

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. The "Carolina boys" whom Gombault refers to in "The Tall Men" are based on a historical fact: on the night after the first day's fighting at Chancellorsville, while reconnoitering for a possible attack, General Stonewall Jackson was fatally shot by his own troops in the 33rd North Carolina regiment (54).

In addition to the specific Confederate units who appear in the various stories that make up the novel Go Down, Moses is the abstract representation of these men whom Ike McCaslin imagines he sees when he looks at Lucas Beauchamp (who descends from slaves): "the face of a generation," "the composite tintype face of ten thousand undefeated Confederate soldiers almost indistinguishably caricatured, composed, cold" (104).

According to Charles Mallison in The Town, Yoknapatawpha's Chickasaw Indians "departed for Oklahoma in 1820" (11). Historically, the Chickasaw were the Indians who inhabited northern Mississippi when the white settlers arrived, and they were 'removed' by government policy to Oklahoma, but not until the 1830s and 1840s.

As Lucas Beauchamp notes in Go Down, Moses, the land that would have been Ike's McCaslin's inheritance was originally acquired from "the Indians back in the old time" (36). In "The Old People" the Indians are specifically identified as Chickasaws. Sam Fathers, himself half-Chickasaw and the son of a chief, refers to the tribe as "the People" (158).

The "Appendix Compson,"mentions the "young men" in Ikkemotubbe's tribe of Chickasaws who race horses against Jason Compson I's mare in the 1810's (328).

The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white traders and settlers arrived early in the 18th century. At that time they numbered perhaps 10,000 people. By the early 1830s, when they were 'removed' across the Mississippi River, that number had been reduced to less than 3,000 - many of whom had been assimilated from other tribes, and from mixed marriages with white men and black slaves.

The Chickasaw were the tribe living in northern Mississippi when the white settlers began arriving. In "A Name for the City" their interactions with the story's white characters they are depicted as friendly. After "ceding" their lands to the newcomers (200), however, they will be 'removed' from the region by the Indian policy of President Jackson's administration - or, as the narrator puts it at the outset of the tale, these "dispossessed people" "emigrated to Oklahoma in the thirties" (202).

Readers meet Granny's sister Louisa Hawk, who lives in Alabama, but both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished refer to another sister, who is neither named nor described but only mentioned: Granny explains the trip she's taking by saying that "My sister lives in Memphis, we are going there" (24, 56). Since "Millard" is Granny's married name, we have no way of knowing the name of her sister; however, she may be the mother of Cousin Melisandre who appears in "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek."

Rider, the protagonist of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, is one of Faulkner's most memorable black characters. We never learn his real name; "Rider" is a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken" before he became the devoted husband of Mannie (249, 144). He is depicted from two different perspectives in both texts.

Reverend Whitfield is the local preacher in Frenchman's Bend, and in four of the fictions set there. His character varies dramatically across those texts. He appears first in As I Lay Dying, in the part of a minister who has had an unconfessed affair with a married woman and is the father of an illegitimate child; many readers are reminded of Hawthorne's Dimmesdale, Hester and Pearl, not least because Addie Bundren, Whitfield's lover, names her son Jewel.

"Miss Reba" Rivers - whom Temple in Requiem for a Nun calls "the madam of [a] cat house" in Memphis (111) - appears by name in Sanctuary, The Mansion and The Reivers. She is a colorful character: fat, asthmatic, church-going and hard-drinking, with some pretensions to gentility but no illusions about life. When readers first meet her she is carrying a "rosary" in one hand and a "tankard" of beer in the other (144). In Sanctuary the great love of her life, someone named Mr.

In The Town, this is the first member of the Ratcliffe|Ratliff family in the U.S. Eula Snopes calls him V.K. Ratliff's "six or eight or ten times grandfather"(338) - but that's exaggerated. Originally from Russia, he arrives in the new world during the Revolution as an ensign in the British army. After being captured, he escapes and is rescued by "a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him" (338). He marries and takes the last name of the woman who saved him: Nelly Ratcliffe. After the Revolution he becomes "a Virginia farmer" (338).

This man, the grandson of a Russian immigrant, is the first Yoknapatawphan member of the family that culminates in the V.K. Ratliff who appears in ten fictions. He arrives early enough in the county's history to be one of the men who "started Jefferson," as The Town puts it (338). He appears fairly late in the Faulkner's career, first appearing in "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun as the nascent settlement's "post trader" - i.e. the person in charge of the Indian agency's trading post (206).

The legendary Pat Stamper, master of "the science and pastime of horse trading in Yoknapatawph county," makes a fool of Pap, who tries to trade with him in "Fool about a Horse," and of Ab Snopes, when that story is revised and interpolated into The Hamlet. With the help of his Negro hostler, he can even get not only the better of each trade but "actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars" - as it's put in the novel (37) - out of the farmers who try to take him on.

"Blind and deaf," with eyes that "look like two clots of phlegm" and apparently voiceless and toothless as well (12), Pap is one of the most grotesque characters in Faulkner's fiction. Lee and Ruby make sure he gets fed, but despite his name, Sanctuary gives no hint about "who he was kin to," as Horace puts it (110), or how he came to be at the Old Frenchman place. Horace facetiously speculates that he may have been there as long as the house itself. In his grotesqueness he does fit the Gothic atmosphere of the place.

The black woman who serves in "Mule in the Yard" and The Town as both partner in and witness to Mannie Hait's ongoing feud against mules and a man named I.O. Snopes remains a kind of enigma. No one in the town knows how old she is: as the story puts it, "she was about seventy probably, though by her own counting . . . she would have to be around a hundred" (249). Even at the younger age, she would have been born into slavery, though that story remains untold.

Miss Myrtle in Sanctuary is one of the two women who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after the funeral for Red. Myrtle is the "short plump woman in a plumed hat" who is accompanied by Uncle Bud, a "boy of five or six" (250). She may be his mother, though her attempt to discipline him for drinking from their beers is half-hearted at best. (The context suggests both she and Miss Lorraine might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.)

The Myrtle in Flags in the Dust is a "young woman" who works for Doctors Alford and Peabody as a receptionist. In her exchanges with Miss Jenny, she is alternately a trained professional and a deferential southern girl.

In Intruder in the Dust, the wife of the county jailer is only mentioned when the jailer, a man named "Tubbs," says "I got a wife and two children" (52). She appears in both the prose and the dramatic sections of Act III in Requiem for a Nun, though she is only named when in the latter jailer Tubbs mentions "Mrs Tubbs" (208). The prose section describes her as a woman "engaged in something as intimate as cooking a meal" (200).

The woman who is married to Wilbur Provine in The Town is mentioned during her husband's trial for making and selling illegal liquor. Judge Long tells Provine, "I'm going to send you to the penitentiary, not for making whiskey but for letting your wife carry water a mile and a half from that spring" (178).

Mrs. Killegrew and her husband are neighbors of the Griers in "Two Soldiers" and "Shingles for the Lord." In the second story she is described by the vernacular narrator as "worser deaf than even Killegrew" (28). In the first story that disability explains why the Grier sons can go to the Killegrews' to find out what's going on in the world beyond Frenchman's Bend: because she is "deaf" (that is, presumably, very hard of hearing), her husband "runs the radio as loud as it would run," and so the boys can "hear it plain . . . even standing outside with the window closed" (81).

The only son of Kentucky aristocrats, Gerald Bland is a Harvard University classmate of Quentin Compson. In The Sound and the Fury they come to blows, violently but anti-climatically, when Quentin projects his rage against Caddy's suitors onto him. In many ways Bland is Quentin's polar opposite, the Fortinbras to Quentin Compson's Hamlet-like character: Gerald is adored by his mother, an accomplished lady's man, athletic and decisive.

In The Sound and the Fury Mrs. Bland is the mother of Quentin's Harvard classmate Gerald; she has moved from Kentucky to Cambridge to be close to her son. She lays claim to an aristocratic heritage, and in person is both formal and insistent. Shreve calls her "fate in eight yards of apricot silk" (106).

In Flags in the Dust Will Beard is a "mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size" (104), Will Beard owns a grist mill in Jefferson and probably owns the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives - though that is run by his wife. He is identified by the "evil reek" of his "black evil pipe" (104, 105).

In both the story "Go Down, Moses," and the story as Faulkner published it in Go Down, Moses, Mr. Wilmoth is the editor the Jefferson newspaper. He is described as "an older man, though with hair less white than [Gavin] Stevens', in a black string tie and an old-fashioned boiled shirt and tremendously fat" (259, 355).

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This is the Mrs. Pruitt in "Tomorrow": the widow who is the Fentry's closest neighbor. Along with her son, she tells part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin solve the mystery of why Fentry voted to convict Bookwright in the killing of Buck Thorpe.

Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This Pruitt appears in "Tomorrow," where his widow tells Gavin Stevens how poor she and her husband were when they married: "we didn't even own a roof over our heads. We moved into a rented house, on rented land" (96-97).

Maxey owns the town barber shop in both "Hair" (1931) and Light in August (1932). He is a minor character in both texts, but plays a more central role in "Hair," where the narrator relies on Maxey for information about the story's major characters. (The Jefferson barber shop is a location in eight fictions. It's possible that Faulkner imagined Maxey as its owner in one or more other stories.)

In "Death Drag" Mr. Harris owns the car that Ginsfarb 'rents' for use in the air show - the quotation marks indicate how Ginsfarb skips town before paying him.

In both "Barn Burning" and The Hamlet this Mr. Harris is the farmer who brings Ab Snopes to trial after a dispute between them over a hog leads to the burning of Harris' barn. He is only mentioned in the novel. In the short story he is shown as both furious with Ab, and - when he decides against forcing Sarty Snopes to testify against his own father - compassionate for Ab's son .

Called "Mulberry" as well as "Uncle Pete," Gombault is "a lean clean tobacco-chewing old man" who was enslaved before the Civil War, and became a U.S. "marshal" during Reconstruction (190-91). A salesman of illegal whiskey before, during and after that appointment, as late as 1925 he was still "fire-maker, sweeper, janitor and furnace-attendant to five or six lawyers and doctors and one of the banks" (191-192). He is contemptuous of the various Federal agencies with abbreviated names that came into being in the 1930's, calling them "XYZ and etc. . . ." (190).

Lucius Binford - or as he's called in two of the three novels in which he is mentioned or appears, Mr. Binford - is the business and romantic partner of Reba Rivers, the madame of a Memphis brothel. In The Mansion he is referred to as a "pimp" (80). In The Reivers, the one novel he actually appears in, Lucius Priest says his "official" title is "landlord" (110). He is a little man, but there is something menancing about him; the first thing you notice about him, Lucius says, is "his eyes . . .