The "Prince of Darkness" that Faulkner describes trying to deal with Flem Snopes in Hell is apparently the son of the original Satan, "the Prince's pa" (168). Flem gets the better of him - or maybe we mean the worse.
In The Hamlet Faulkner's imagination takes one of its most amazing flights (or perhaps descents) when he describes Flem Snopes meeting the fallen angels in Hell. Among them is this "pa" of the Prince of Darkness, and so presumably Satan himself - though Faulkner's cosmology is by no means clear (168).
In The Hamlet the Old Frenchman's son has disappeared from the scene along with the rest of his family, except for a single detail: this heir to the Old Frenchman plantation - possibly accompanied by his father - rode into Jefferson in the early days of the Civil War to recruit men to the Confederate army (373).
The Frenchman's Bend planter who appears in The Hamlet is elsewhere identified as Louis Grenier. His family is distinguished by the way it has disappeared completely in the years after the South lost the Civil War: "he was gone now, . . . the Frenchman, with his family" (4). In one scene late in the novel the life of the white ladies and gentlemen on the old plantation is conjured up, but there too the novel notes that "there is nothing to show of that now" (373).
Labove's sister, the only one of his five younger siblings to be individualized, is "about ten" years old in The Hamlet; like everyone in the family, she likes to wear the football cleats he brings home (114).
In The Hamlet Labove's father is small time farmer in "the next county" to Yoknapatawpha (114) who sees no point in his son going to a university to become a teacher. He is "annoyed, concerned, even a little outraged that he should have deserted them with the remaining work on the crop - the picking and ginning of the cotton, the gathering and cribbing of the corn - to be done" (117).
Labove's "incredibly old" great-grandmother in The Hamlet smokes "a foul little clay pipe" and likes wearing the football cleats he sends home because of the sound they make (114).
In The Hamlet Labove is the child of a poor family in "the next county" (114). After working his way through the University of Mississippi doing menial jobs and playing football, he is hired to be the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend. Faulkner initially describes him as "gaunt, with straight black hair coarse as a horse's tail and high Indian cheekbones and quiet pale hard eyes and the long nose of thought but with the slightly curved nostrils of pride and the thin lips of secret and ruthless ambition" (117).
