Character Keys

In Flags in the Dust Eustace Graham is "a young lawyer" who doesn't realize Young Bayard is drunk when he tries to introduce Sartoris to a fellow veteran named Gratton (125). He plays a much larger role in Sanctuary as the District Attorney who prosecutes Lee Goodwin. According to Horace, he is a "damn little squirt" (185) who probably pressured the hotel into turning Ruby out. According to the narrator, he has "a club foot, which had probably elected him to the office he now held" (261).

The man the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" calls "Grandpap" is actually his father's grandfather. Sounding like the boy he is, the narrator says he is "old, so old you just wouldn't believe it" (111). In his dotage all he talks about is "the Confederate war," though the narrative does not say how he was involved in the Civil War (112). (The narrator's mother's grandfather also served in the Civil War, but his last name wouldn't have been Grier.)

Mrs. Grier mentions this character in "Shall Not Perish" when she is consoling Major de Spain for the loss of his son: "my grandfather was in that old one there too" (109), meaning the Civil War.

The Grier family appears in three stories from the early 1940s, but only the last of them - "Shall Not Perish" (1943) - mentions first generations of Griers in Yoknapatawpha. They first farmed the land that seems to have been passed from one generation to the next.

Unlike the upper-class boy narrators of Faulkner's previous fictions, the unnamed eight-year-old who narrates the three 'Grier' stories in the early 1940s - "Two Soldiers," "Shingles for the Lord" and "Shall Not Perish" - narrates from within the class of impoverished farmers who subsist on the poor land around Frenchman's Bend. His concerns are closely tied to his family - mother, father and brother Pete - but in the first and last of the stories Faulkner also uses him to represent his caste in a new context, the second World War.

In "Two Soldiers," the first of the three stories about the Grier family that Faulkner published in 1942 and 1943, the mother of the 'soldiers' is called "Maw." Unlike her shiftless husband, although she wishes her son Pete wasn't determined to enlist, she accepts his decision to do so. Through her tears, she sends him off with mended and clean clothes and "a shoe box of vittles" (85). She also functions as something of a bridge between the World Wars, as her brother served in World War I.

Doctor Alford appears in Flags in the Dust as a "newcomer" to Jefferson in his "thirties" (93). He shares offices with Dr. Peabody but expresses impatience and often contempt for Peabody's traditional ideas about the practice of medicine. He is courting Narcissa Benbow, but without arousing much interest in her. He is mentioned in As I Lay Dying when MacGowan tells Jody to send Dewey Dell "upstairs to Alford's office" when she asks "to see the doctor that works" there (241).

Doctor Lucius Peabody is the only character who appears in the first three Yoknapatawpha novels: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He is only mentioned by Quentin in the second, but makes memorable appearances in the other two. According to Flags, he is "the fattest man" in the county (94). His medical practice takes him "out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him" (95).

Doctor Habersham is one of the original three white settlers in Yoknapatawpha, or as it's put in Intruder in the Dust, the first text to mention him, one of the men "who had ridden horseback into the county before its boundaries had ever been surveyed and located and named" (73). According to Requiem for a Nun, in fact, with his "worn black bag of pills and knives" he was so important to the settlement that for a time the place that became Jefferson was known as "Doctor Habersham's" (202).

The second of the two unnamed doctors in Sanctuary is the Florida doctor whom Popeye's mother consults about her sickly child; he tells her to "feed him eggs cooked in olive oil" (305). (It is possible that Faulkner is making a strange and subversive reference to the cartoon characters Popeye and Olive Oyl; both these E. C. Segar characters had appeared in newspapers at least two years before Sanctuary was published.)

Along with the similarly vague group of "ministers" (123), this group of "the doctors" in town visit Emily Grierson's house to persuade her to relinquish her father's corpse (124).

This is the doctor in The Hamlet who inspects Mink Snopes after his suicide attempt. (This very minor character is probably also the same "doctor" as the one who examines Cotton in the story "The Hound," but since Faulkner has changed 'Cotton' to 'Mink' when he revised that story for inclusion in the novel, it seems appropriate to enter this doctor as a different character too.)

There are over a dozen Jefferson physicians in the fictions, but the doctor in the story "Uncle Willy" is invented by Willy as a way to get his rich sister in Texas to buy him a car. According to Willy's letter to her, this doctor prescribes a car as a way to save Willy from having "to walk back and forth to the store" in his fragile health (235). According to the narrator, Willy wants the car in order to get to the moonshine stills in the hills outside Jefferson and to the brothels in Memphis.

The doctor who works at Hoke's sawmill appears anonymously in "Lion" and by name, as Doctor Crawford, in Go Down, Moses. He's not a veterinarian, but when in the short story Boon shows up "just before daylight," and "drags him out of bed like a sack of meal," he goes to the hunting camp and works on the wounded Lion (196). In "Lion" he also treats Boon, and in the novel treats both Boon and Sam.

This is the doctor whom Lucas Beauchamp goes to get when Zack Edmonds’s wife has trouble in labor in Go Down, Moses; he arrives too late to prevent her death. (In the various fictions there are three named Jefferson doctors who appear more than once - Habersham in the early life of the town; Peabody and Alford in the 20th century - but there are also over a dozen doctors who are never named.

In both "By the People" and The Mansion Devries is the good man from an (invented) county east of Yoknapatawpha who challenges Clarence Snopes in a political race for Congress; in the story it's the 1952 election, while for the novel Faulkner moves it back to 1946. That change necessitates a revision in his biography. In "By the People" Devries has been a soldier "in that decade between 1942 and 1952" (133), and comes back from fighting in Korea with a chest full of medals, including "the top one" (134) - i.e. the Congressional Medal of Honor - and a "mechanical leg" (136).

In Intruder in the Dust this "deputy" drives the car in which Sheriff Hampton brings Lucas Beauchamp to jail (42). (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

In "Tomorrow," Quick identifies this unnamed man as "the deputy or bailiff or whatever he was" (105). He accompanies the Thorpe brothers when they arrive in Frenchman's Bend with a court order for custody of their sister's child. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment.

This is the second of the two deputy sheriffs The Mansion; he is only mentioned, as transporting a prisoner from Greenville.

This deputy sheriff escorts Lee Goodwin on his trips between the jail and the courthouse in Sanctuary. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

This is one of the two deputies mentioned in "Monk." This deputy transports Monk to the state penitentiary by train. He may or may not be the same deputy who earlier arrested Monk. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment.

In "Smoke," this deputy follows up the health officer's report about Old Anse's behavior in the cemetery, and discovers the old man's body. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

In The Reivers this unnamed deputy holds Ludus after Boon shoots at him, and then escorts Ludus to Judge Stevens' office. (As is also the case with county sheriffs, there are many unnamed deputy sheriffs in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. It's possible that Faulkner is imagining at least some of these deputies as recurring, especially when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment. However, there is no way to be sure of that, so it is more accurate to represent each of these deputies as a separate character.)

In Absalom! the "second man" in the ambulance that Rosa Coldfield takes out to the Sutpen place at the end of 1909 is "perhaps a deputy sheriff" (299).

Anse Bundren is a farmer by vocation, but he is perhaps more accurately described with a term Faulkner's fiction regularly applies to the Snopeses: parasite. Unlike Flem, however, Anse is rendered comically rather than as a threat to the social order. He is described as a "kind of tall, gaunted man" (203). Physically his most striking feature seems to be his hair; Peabody calls it "pushed and matted up . . . like a dipped rooster" (44).

Darl is Anse and Addie Bundren's second child in As I Lay Dying. Chronologically this places him between Cash and Jewel. But psychologically he has no place: unlike his older and his younger brother, he was born completely outside the circle of his mother's love. The most prolific narrator in the novel (he narrates 19 chapters), he also seems to be omniscient, as he often narrates events at which he is not present (nor does he narrate them as though he is recounting a story he was told).

The unnamed county sheriff who appears in "A Point of Law" is not described in any detail. In the companion short story "Gold Is Not Always," the sheriff is only mentioned. When Faulkner combined these stories into the chapter in Go Down, Moses called "The Fire and the Hearth," he describes the sheriff who plays the same roles as "a tremendous man, fat" (62). We assume these are all the same character in Faulkner's imagination.

In "Uncle Willy" the sheriff, the county's chief law enforcement officer, locks Willy's drugstore after the clerk has stolen most of its stock and disappeared. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions. Obviously in some of these cases - at least when the stories are set at more or less the same historical moment - Faulkner may be thinking of the same unnamed character, or one of the half dozen "Sheriff Hampton"s who also appear in the fictions, but from the texts themselves there is no way to establish that.)

At the end of "Hand upon the Waters" the "sheriff of the county" visits Stevens to wrap up the details of Stevens' unofficial investigation. He tries to get Stevens to confirm that Joe murdered Boyd Ballenbaugh. Stevens does not take the bait. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

In both versions of "Go Down, Moses" - the short story and the chapter of that name in the novel Go Down, Moses - Gavin Stevens briefly considers consulting "the sheriff" for help locating Mollie Beauchamp's grandson. There are three 'sheriff's in the novel, two unnamed ones (in "The Fire and the Hearth" and "Go Down, Moses"), and Sheriff Maydew in "Pantaloon in Black." They are essentially contemporaneous, but the text does not suggest any connection between any of them - so we have created three separate "Sheriff" entries.

In "Monk," the county sheriff is mentioned by negation, as a way to characterize the hill country in the eastern part of the county from which Monk hails: according to the narrator, the area is so dangerous to outsiders that not even the sheriff will go there. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

This sheriff is only mentioned in "Skirmish at Sartoris" as a story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished. After killing the two Burdens, John Sartoris tells his followers that he plans to find the sheriff and "make bond" (208). The office of Sheriff was different from the office of Marshal that is at stake in the election. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The county sheriff in The Sound and the Fury is a man with "vigorous untidy iron-gray hair and his gray eyes were round and shiny like a little boy's" (301-02). He exercises his judgment - about Jason Compson in particular - when he refuses to help Jason chase after his niece on Easter Sunday. (Unnamed county sheriffs appear in fifteen different Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The Jefferson doctor who appears twice in Light in August is not named. Some years before the events of the story, he arrives at a cabin where Gail Hightower has just delivered a stillborn Negro baby. In the novel's present he is also the doctor whom Byron Bunch contacts when Lena goes into labor in a different cabin; again he arrives too late, but this time after Hightower has successfully delivered the baby.

The man who is referred to simply as "the coroner" in Sanctuary man may also be the local undertaker, but all one can say for certain is that he "sits over" Tommy's body as it lays in the funeral parlor trying unsuccessfully to learn the corpse's last name (113).

The role of the coroner who appears in both "Pantaloon in Black" and Go Down, Moses is to pronounce Rider's cause of death and return the body to Rider's relatives. The script he follows is that of the Jim Crow system.

In As I Lay Dying Kate is one of Vernon and Cora Tull's two daughters. The way she appears in her parents' narrative sections suggests that she is clear-eyed if not angry and cynical about the place that she occupies as a poor woman. She calls out the woman who changed her mind about buying her mother's cakes as one of "those rich town ladies" (7) and even gets ahead of the plot of the novel when she predicts that Anse will "get another [wife] before cotton-picking" (34). She may also be attracted to Jewel Bundren.

The children of Frenchman's Bend farmer Vernon Tull and his wife are all girls, but there is no consensus among the fictions about how many daughters they have. In the earliest representation of the Tull family, As I Lay Dying, there are two, named Eula and Kate. In "Spotted Horses" there are three - none named. In The Hamlet, there are four, again not named; though one of these girls is referred to as the "biggest" when all four appear at the Snopes trial, they are described as a unit when they "turn their heads as one head" (357).

Vernon Tull is a farmer in Frenchman's Bend who appears in ten different Yoknapatawpha fictions. In As I Lay Dying he narrates six of the novel's sections, which gives readers a particularly intimate connection to him; in these chapters he is one of the novel's more reliable commentators, particularly when he suggests that it might be a mistake for a person "to spend too much time thinking" (71).

Referred to in Flags in the Dust by Monaghan as "that big Irish devil" (387), Comyn was Royal Air Force flyer (identified in "Ad Astra" as a lieutenant) with whom Young Bayard and Johnny Sartoris flew during World War I. In "Ad Astra" he appears as a proud Irishman who disdains the English nation he has served. He is drinking heavily and looking for women or a fight or both.

Colonel Dick is a Union cavalryman with a "bright beard" and "hard bright eyes" who appears in "Ambuscade" and "Raid" and is mentioned in "The Unvanquished" as a short story. Across these texts as well as The Unvanquished he appears as a chivalrous gentleman who knows how to treat a lady like Rosa Millard even in the midst of the confict between Yankees and rebels.

The man named "Charley" in The Reivers (146) is described by Lucius as "a switchman, a railroad man anyway," in "greasy overalls" (141). He helps load the horse into the boxcar.

This emancipated slave is mentioned in "Skirmish at Sartoris" and again in The Unvanquished. Before the Civil War, Cassius was called "Uncle Cash"; he was enslaved by the Benbow family and worked as their carriage driver (66, 199). He is illiterate. During the War he "run off with the Yankees" (66, 199), but has returned to Jefferson and been appointed "Acting Marshal" by the northerners who are trying to reconstruct the town's government (66, 199). It is his possible election as Marshal that precipitates the story's climax.

Never given a first name in "Tomorrow," this "country girl of seventeen" (90) falls for Buck Thorpe's swagger. Her father, referred to only as "Bookwright," apparently discover her during "the inevitable elopement at midnight" and shoots Buck (90). Her subsequent fate is not mentioned.

Described in The Hamlet as "sturdy short-legged black-browed ready-faced man" (63), Bookwright is one of several characters in Frenchman's Bend who keep Ratliff apprised of the goings on about the hamlet when he is gone. At the end of that novel, he and Ratliff and Armstid are swindled by Flem Snopes into purchasing the Old Frenchman’s Place - an event that is referred to again in The Mansion.

Homer Bookwright (spelled without the "w" in "By the People") is a farmer and church member in Frenchman's Bend and a minor figure in four Yoknapatawpha texts. He does, however, have a memorable line in The Mansion, when he explains the jailor's wife's interest in Montgomery Ward Snopes' career as a pornographer by asking, rhetorically, "aint she human too, even if she is a woman?" (70).

In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished, Captain Bowen is in charge of the Union cavalry troop which Rosa, Bayard, and Ringo encounter on their way back home. Although he himself doesn't appear, one of his lieutenants says that the Captain mounted them with captured stock.

We can say for sure that this character lives in or near the Frenchman's Bend part of Yoknapatawpha, but otherwise our composite Bookwright|Bookright is based on interpretation. In The Town Cal Bookright is the father of the woman Zack Houston marries. In The Mansion Calvin Bookwright is a moonshiner: according to Hoke McCarron, the "stuff [he] used to make" tasted "jest like" Bushmill's, a well-known brand of Irish whiskey (190). In The Reivers "Uncle Cal Bookwright" makes moonshine whiskey that can be bought at Mack Winbush's for two dollars a gallon (12).

Freeman appears in both "Spotted Horses" and The Hamlet in connection with the auction of the ponies in Frenchman's Bend - though no first name is given in either text, and while he has a wife in The Hamlet, no other details about him are provided. In the novel Freeman ends up buying and losing one of the horses; in "Spotted Horses" he only appears driving his wagon past Varner's store several days after the auction, as Mrs Armstid is trying to get the money her husband spent back from Flem.