Character Keys

She is one of three daughters of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline in Light in August. Unlike their older brother Nathaniel, who is dark like their mother, all three daughters have blue eyes.

She is one of three daughters of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline in Light in August. "Beck" is presumably short for Rebecca. Unlike their older brother Nathaniel, who is dark like their mother, all three daughters have blue eyes.

In Light in August the first Nathaniel Burrington stands at the head of the ancestral line that reaches an end with Joanna Burden. He is a Unitarian minister in New England who fathers ten children, the youngest of whom is Calvin, who changes his last name from Burrington to Burden.

A major character in Light in August, Joanna Burden is a middle-aged spinster who has lived in the "old colonial plantation house" (36) outside Jefferson since she was born, yet "she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction" (46). Nurturing and helpful to local Negroes, and a contributor to and supporter of many Negro schools and colleges across the South, she is regarded by the townspeople as a "Yankee, a lover of Negroes" (46).

Colonel Sartoris' killing of two Northerners during Reconstruction is told four times in the fictions. The first time, in Flags in the Dust, Will Falls refers to them as "them two cyarpet-baggers" (23). They are given names in Light in August, where the same event is retold from Joanna Burden's perspective. The younger of these men is her half-brother, Calvin Burden II; Joanna calls him "a boy who had never even cast his first vote" (249).

Faulkner recounts or mentions the auction of the wild horses in Frenchman's Bend in four different texts. The auctioneer is a "Texas man," as the narrator of "Spotted Horses" repeatedly calls him (167), a "broad-hatted stranger" in "Centaur in Brass" (150), "that Texas feller" in The Town (35), and Buck Hipps in The Hamlet. His character is displayed in detail in that novel and "Spotted Horses." In both texts he is armed with an "ivory-handled pistol" - though he also carries "a box of gingersnaps" right next to the gun (167, 300).

A Jefferson town marshal who appears in several of the fictions, though as "Buck" in Flags in the Dust, as "Buck Conner" in "Centaur in Brass" and Light in August, and as "Buck Conners" in The Town. In the first novel he follows Miss Jenny's orders to get care of Young Bayard, giving up his own bed in the jail building to allow Sartoris to sleep off the effects of his fall and his drinking. Flem Snopes pays him a compliment of sorts in "Centaur": "Buck Conner'll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his corn-crib" (159).

At the end of Intruder in the Dust Gavin mentions "Booker T. Washington" twice while talking to Lucas, contrasting the way Lucas did "what nobody expected you to" with how Washington "did only what everybody expected of him" (237). Gavin's meaning is extremely difficult to pin down. The historical Booker T. Washington was born into slavery but by the end of the 19th century was perhaps the best-known black leader in America. As the principal of Tuskegee Institute, a prominent orator and an adviser to several U.S.

Theron Quick, who appears in The Hamlet as one of the suitors for Eula Varner's hand, could be Lon Quick's son, who appears elsewhere in the novel and has a separate entry in our database. He is among the suitors who ambush McCarron, but ends up being beaten unconscious by Eula, who defends McCarron with her father's buggy whip. He is also one of the two Frenchman's Bend suitors who leave the area "suddenly overnight" once it is discovered that Eula is pregnant - though Ratliff believes both of these young men were "just wishing they had" (140).

There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon Quick and Lon Quick are one character. Dasher and Kirk, on the other hand, separate them into two characters, which is what we also do in our data. Nor is it absolutely clear how to disambiguate Lon Sr. and his son Lon Jr., or as they are sometimes referred to by other inhabitants of the Bend, "Big Lon" and "Little Lon." This entry is Lon Junior's, who appears in three texts altogether.

There are several Quicks living in Frenchman's Bend - Faulkner scholars don't agree on how many. To Brooks, Solon and Lon Quick are one character. Dasher and Kirk, on the other hand, separate them into two characters, which is what we also do in our data. And it is not absolutely clear how to disambiguate Lon Sr. and his son Lon Jr., or as another character puts it in As I Lay Dying, where the family first appears, "Big Lon I mean, not little Lon" (161). This entry is for Lon Sr.

One of Ben Quick's grandchildren is mentioned in The Hamlet, although not identified as a boy or a girl. Ben has a son named Isham, but whether he is the father of this child is also not said.

Ben Quick is an inhabitant of Frenchman's Bend, though he appears differently in the two texts that mention him. In The Hamlet he is the father of Lon, a "hale burly old man" (92) who raises goats on his farm. In "Tomorrow," he is the father of Isham, and the owner of the sawmill in Frenchman's Bend.

In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet Beasley Kemp is a neighboring farmer with whom Ab Snopes does a horse trade.

The number of children born on the Armstid farm in Frenchman's Bend is either four or five. A character in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" refers to them as "them chaps" (138), but at least one is a daughter: in "Spotted Horses," Ina May, the only one ever named, is twelve, and "big enough to take care of the little ones" while their mother is at Mrs. Littlejohn's nursing their father (178). Though unnamed, she plays the same role in The Hamlet. In Light in August there are five children, all born "in six years," and now "raised to man- and womanhood" (15).

The wife of the farmer named Armstid appears or is mentioned in seven texts; she is unnamed in five of them, but her name is Lula in As I Lay Dying, the first one, and Martha in Light in August. That is not the only inconsistency in her character. In both these novels she doesn't hesitate to speak her mind to her husband; in "Spotted Horses," however, she is extremely self-effacing, submitting without complaint to her husband's abusive behavior.

In The Mansion, Mr. Holland is the President of the Bank of Jefferson, the rival of the bank founded by Bayard Sartoris. Holland creates a scholarship in honor of his "only son," who died fighting in World War II (361).

In "Smoke," Virginius Holland is a son of Anselm (Senior) and twin brother of Anselm (Junior). The Holland brothers share "dark, identical, aquiline faces" (15), but have different temperaments. Virginius, as the twin who probably takes after his mother, tries to mediate between his brother and their father. No one has ever witnessed Virginius lose his temper. Nonetheless, even Virginius is forced by his father, eventually, to vacate the Mardis-Holland home. Hereafter, Virginius lives with his cousin Granby Dodge, whose mortgages he rather naively pays off.

In "Smoke" Anselm Junior is one of the twin sons of Anselm Holland. He seems to have inherited his father's violent misanthropy along with his name, although he "was said to have been the mother’s favorite" (4). He is the first of the twins to break with their father, moving "back into the hills" of Yoknapatawpha (5). He is "a dark, silent, aquiline-faced man" whom "both neighbors and strangers let severely alone" (6).

In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet "Old Man Anse Holland" (118, 33) is the landowner from whom "Pap" (in the short story) and Ab Snopes (in the novel) rent the farm they work on as a tenant farmer. In the novel, Ratliff lives on another tenant farm that Holland owns, "about a mile away" (33) - a distance that suggests that Holland is a large landowner, like the Sartorises or the McCaslins.

This Alice is the twelve-year-old girl in the Memphis orphanage in Light in August who mothers three-year-old Joe Christmas until she is adopted and leaves in the middle of the night. Hence, the narrative refers to the other girls who provide help or comfort to Joe in the orphanage as "occasional Alices" (166).

The mother of Aleck Sander - named Paralee in Intruder in the Dust and Guster in The Town - has been a servant in the Stevens-Mallison household for a long time, perhaps her entire life. She lives in a cabin behind the white family's house. Like her employer, Maggie Mallison, she is protective about her own child, but she is also a kind of 'mammy' to Chick Mallison. She is never given a last name, but the earlier novel mentions her father Ephriam, and the later novel gives her a husband (Big Top) and another son (Top, or Little Top).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Rider's "Unc Alec" tells him that his aunt wants him to come home (249, 143). Alec is Rider's "aunt's husband," "an old man as tall as [Rider] was, but lean, almost frail" (245, 138).

In As I Lay Dying Albert works at "the fountain" - that is, the counter where one can buy ice cream or a soda - in Moseley's drugstore in Mottson (199); he is also the person who tells Moseley about the altercation between the marshal and Anse in front of Grummet’s hardware store.

Adolph Hitler was the infamous leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945 at the end of World War II. He is first mentioned in "Delta Autumn," where Ike McCaslin calls him an "Austrian paper-hanger" (322) - repeating a term of contempt that was popular in America at the time; Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary, but there's no evidence that he was ever a "paper-hanger." In The Mansion Gavin Stevens calls him "the Nibelung maniac" (258).

Old Man Killgrew is a farmer who lives near the Griers in Frenchman's Bend. Although he never appears in person, he is mentioned in all three of the World War II stories about the Grier family. Killigrew is seventy years old, and prosperous enough to have a cook. He hunts foxes the old-fashioned way, which in Faulkner's Mississippi means "squatting on a hill" rather than riding to the hounds (27). His and his wife's deafness means that the Grier sons can stand outside his house and hear his radio reporting on the progress of the war.

In The Hamlet Ratliff notes that Eustace Grimm's new wife is a "Calhoun County Doshey" (399). (There are no Dosheys elsewhere in the fictions.)

This particular Snopes is identified in The Town only as the "old maid daughter" of the man (either Flem's father Ab or Flem's unnamed uncle) who lives in a house just close enough to Jefferson to see the town clock (136). Also in the household are two of I.O. Snopes' children, but her relationship to them is not defined at all. She may be Flem's sister, but more likely is another of Flem's many cousins.

According to The Town, "Dewitt Binford had married another of the Snopes girls. They lived near Varner's store" (383). Binford and his wife contract to provide room and board for the four children of Bryon Snopes.

Neither of Eck's parents appear directly in The Town, but two of the novel's narrators - Ratliff and Gavin - do discuss his parentage. Based on their contempt for 'Snopeses,' they both feel strongly that since Eck is so good a person, genetically he is "not a Snopes" (32). Thus they invent this "titular father" for him: the imaginary man with whom Eck's mother had an affair (33).

In The Mansion Mink Snopes tells the prison warden that Montgomery Ward Snopes is "my brother's grandson" (99). This is the only reference to Mink's brother in the fictions, and chronologically the possibility that a brother of Mink would have a grandchild Montgomery Ward's age is unlikely. Ratliff asks Montgomery Ward if Mink is his "cousin or uncle" (71); Montgomery refuses to answer, but in his own narrative chapter he refers to Mink as "Uncle Mink" (103).

The one member of the Snopes family who appears in "Shingles for the Lord" is not given a first name, and only given two minor roles to play in the story: he brings the ladder to the church in his wagon (38), and is among the members of the congregation who are there to watch as the church burns down (41).

Eustace Grimm's father is mentioned in The Hamlet, but all that the novel says is that he had two wives: the first one, Eustace's mother, is Ab Snopes' sister; the second is a "Fite" (399).

This is the second of Eck's two wives in The Hamlet. He marries her six months after arriving in Frenchman's Bend. A "big, strong, tranquil-faced young woman" (220), she is from the family whom he meets while he and Flem are boarding at a farm outside of the village. Together Eck and his wife have three children, but they are only briefly alluded to in this novel. No previous wife is mentioned when Eck and this woman re-appear in The Town; now she is the mother of both Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey - who were step-brothers earlier.

In The Hamlet the man who was the father of Lump Snopes' mother is described as a "congenital failure" (218), living in a state of perpetual bankruptcy and fathering numerous children.

According to The Hamlet, this member of the Snopes family was under indictment for stealing a "drummer's sample-case of shoes, all of the right foot" (218) when he married a schoolteacher and fathered one son with her before her untimely death.

The "Mr Snopes" in Frenchman's Bend with whom Anse bargains for a new team of mules in As I Lay Dying is not given a first name (192). According to Armstid, he owns "three-four span[s]" of mules (184), which suggests he is a fairly prosperous farmer, perhaps even a landlord. According to Eustace Grimm, who "works Snopes' place," this farmer is the nephew of Flem Snopes (192) - if so, he is Flem's only nephew or niece in the fictions.

According to Ratliff, the Greenwich Village sculptor who marries Linda Snopes is "not big, he jest looked big, like a football player" (190), and his "pale eyes" looked at you "missing nothing" (191). Several characters in The Mansion make it a point to mention that he is Jewish. Like so many of the southern men in the other fictions, however, Barton Kohl goes off to fight in a civil war - the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. He is killed there while serving with the Loyalists.

During Flem's funeral at the end of The Mansion, Gavin Stevens notices three people whom he has never seen before, and he knows almost immediately that "they are Snopeses," with "country faces" that make him think of "wolves come to look at the trap where another bigger wolf . . . died" (463). These are the last members of the family Faulkner creates, and as an anonymous group they seem meant to suggest how futile is the effort to defeat 'Snopesism.'

Orestes is one of the last Snopeses added to the family tree. He appears late in The Mansion as "a new Snopes living in Jefferson" (354). Also called Res, his exact relationship to Flem 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.

These "grandchildren" of Lucas Beauchamp are mentioned only in the short story "A Point of Law," and the one reference to them there is ambiguous. "He had one daughter with grandchildren" (214) - this could mean that the grandchildren are his daughter's instead of his. No other details about them, or about Lucas' larger family, are given in this short story. (When Faulkner revised the story into the "Fire and the Hearth" chapter of Go Down, Moses, the phrase "one daughter with grandchildren" was omitted.)

These unnamed children of Ike McCaslin appear only briefly, and enigmatically, in the magazine version of "Delta Autumn," where it says that Ike "had had a wife and children once though no more" (274). Go Down, Moses begins by saying that Ike McCaslin was childless, and when Faulkner revised this story for that novel these children disappear.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again the the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Samuel Beauchamp's father "deserted him" when he was born and is "now in the state penitentiary for manslaughter" (258, 354). This "father who begot and deserted him" is described as "not only violent but bad"; Gavin Stevens, a white man, believes the "seed" this man planted in his son is the cause of his criminality, though Samuel's black grandmother blames the white landlord Roth Edmonds for her grandson's behavior (258, 354).

The Stevenses are one of the older Yoknapatawpha families, but there is confusion about its earlier members. The first appearance of a Stevens is in "A Rose for Emily"; he is the eighty-year-old mayor of Jefferson referred to as "Judge Stevens" (122). According to Brooks, Dasher and Kirk, three of the scholars who create charts or indices of Faulkner's characters, this man is the same Judge Stevens who is Gavin's father in half a dozen other fictions.

In "Knight's Gambit," the one text in which he has a significant presence, Max Harriss is the twenty-one-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Harriss (nee Melisandre Backus). Gavin Stevens calls Max "the rich young earl" (192). As a son he takes after his gangster father; in a sense, the eyes have it: despite his "delicate face," there is "nothing delicate about the eyes" (143). Max is the older of "two spoiled children [born] a year apart" (148).

Charles Mallison's "great aunt" is one of several "aunts" in the canon that are hard to place on a family tree. She is mentioned in "Knight's Gambit," in a sentence about Mrs. Harriss: she has "spent ten years among what his great-aunt would have called the crowned heads of Europe" (168). There's no way to tell from the story, or from the larger history of the Stevens family in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, if she is related to Charles' mother or his father.

Like the enigmatic aunt of (Old) Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust, this aunt of Quentin Compson is hard to place on the family tree. She appears only, abruptly, in Absalom, Absalom! when Mr. Compson uses her to explain to his son Quentin something about the nature of women: this aunt - whom apparently neither of these males ever saw - is locked in what Mr. Compson calls one of those "inexplicable (to the man mind) amicable enmities" with "her nearest female kin" (156).

At the start of Flags in the Dust, in Will Falls' re-telling about the time the Yankee patrol chased Colonel Sartoris away from his plantation, he reminds the Colonel's son Bayard that among the people living there was "yo' aunt, the one 'fo' Miss Jenny come" (22). According to Falls' story, she is "a full-blood Sartoris," but this is the only time Faulkner's fiction mentions her existence.

The Sutpens' family cabin in the mountains of Virginia is described in Absalom! as "boiling with children" (179), and the novel never makes it more clear how many siblings Thomas has. At least two sisters are alive and living with him and his father in Virginia when, at 14, he runs away from home (192). But there must have been more: at least, Quentin tells Shreve that, because of the "dampness" and heat in the Tidewater, "sisters and brothers" get sick "after supper and die before the next meal" (184).