Character guide

Benjy Compson

major

Also known as Benjamin, Ben, Whooey, Sassprilluh

Benjy is the youngest Compson son, cared for by the family's Black servants and treated by his mother as both a burden and a permanent child. He has no language but an almost unbearable sensitivity to order and loss: he moans when the golfers call "caddie," when his sister Caddy is absent, when the smell of trees changes. His fragmented, sensory narration opens the novel and forces the reader to assemble the Compson family's history from the outside in.

Quentin Compson

major

Also known as Mr. Quentin, Quentin Compson

Quentin is the eldest Compson son, sent north to Harvard on money the family can barely spare, and he is consumed by his sister Caddy's sexuality and his own inability to protect or possess her. His father has taught him that time conquers everything and that virginity is a fiction men invented, and Quentin cannot decide whether to believe him or defy him. His long, circling day in Cambridge is the novel's second movement, and his obsession with Caddy drives the book's central wound.

Jason Compson IV

major

Also known as Jason, Mr. Jason, Jason Compson

Jason runs the Compson household after his father's death, managing his mother's complaints, his niece's truancy, and the family store with the same sour efficiency. He believes he was cheated out of a job and a fortune, and he takes his revenge in small cruelties — withholding money, burning tickets, threatening his niece. His section is the novel's third movement, and his voice is the most lucid and the most poisonous, showing what the Compson decline looks like from inside a ledger.

Caddy Compson

major

Also known as Candace, Caddie, Miss Caddy, Quentin Caddy

Caddy is the center of her brothers' emotional lives: Benjy's comfort, Quentin's obsession, Jason's grievance. As a girl she climbs trees to see into funerals, smells like trees to Benjy, and promises to take care of him; as a young woman she becomes pregnant, marries a man who divorces her, and leaves her daughter behind. She never narrates her own section, and her absence is the engine of the novel's first three movements.

Dilsey Gibson

major

Also known as Case Miss Dilsey, Sis Gibson

Dilsey has worked for the Compsons for decades, raising the children, managing the kitchen, and absorbing Mrs. Compson's complaints without either breaking or pretending. She is the one who dresses Benjy, feeds the household, disciplines Luster, and sees the family clearly — including its decline — without despair. Her section closes the novel, and her endurance is the moral counterweight to the Compson brothers' self-destruction.

Mr. Compson

supporting

Also known as Father, Mr. Jason Richmond Compson, Compson

Mr. Compson is a lawyer who has stopped practicing, a father who lectures his sons on the futility of honor, and a husband who has long since retreated from his wife's anxieties into whiskey and quotation. He gives Quentin the grandfather's watch with a speech about time as a mausoleum of hope, and his voice echoes through Quentin's section as both comfort and poison. His death leaves the family without even the pretense of authority, and his children spend the novel trying to escape or fulfill what he taught them.

Caroline Compson

supporting

Also known as Mother, Mrs. Compson, Miss Cahline, Cahline

Caroline Compson presides over the family from her quilted dressing gown, calling Dilsey's name from the head of the stairs and mourning the burdens her children have become. She clings to her Bascomb pride and her sense of herself as a woman wronged, even as she leans on the Black servants who actually hold the house together. Her self-pity and withdrawal set the emotional weather of the Compson home, making her children's loneliness and resentment legible from the first pages.

Luster

supporting

Also known as Dar Luster

Luster works the Compson kitchen under Dilsey's sharp hand, fetching wood, dodging blame, and minding Benjy through the long present-day Saturday. He is boyish and evasive, innocent-faced when caught in the cellar, yet tender enough to be entrusted with a grown man's care. His small rebellions and running commentary give the novel's present its pulse, showing how the old order's labor now falls on a generation that never chose it.

Maury Bascomb

supporting

Also known as Uncle Maury, Maury L. Bascomb, Bascomb

Uncle Maury drifts through the Compson house as a dependent whose Bascomb name outranks his usefulness, meddling in family quarrels and borrowing against others' patience. His presence sharpens the family's decay: he is the parasite the household cannot expel, a reminder that the Compsons' decline is also a failure of the class that produced them. His schemes and small treacheries feed the resentments that drive the middle sections of the book.

Versh

supporting

Also known as Jason Versh

Versh belongs to the earlier generation of Dilsey's family, the one that raised the Compson children while their own mother kept to her room. In the childhood sections he is the steady presence who buttons coats, warns against the cold, and absorbs the children's whims without complaint. His quiet labor establishes the pattern the novel keeps returning to: the Black household sustaining a white family that cannot sustain itself.

T.P.

supporting

Also known as Sign T.P., T. P. Frony

T.P. drives the family buggy and manages Benjy on the fraught journeys of the past, his casual competence a foil to the Compsons' agitation. He is young, watchful, and already practiced at handling other people's crises, whether calming a nervous horse or a frightened child. His presence in the 1910 timeline anchors the family's remembered world, showing who actually kept it moving while its members spun inward.

Shreve MacKenzie

supporting

Also known as Shreve, Mr. MacKenzie

Shreve shares Quentin's Cambridge room, padding across the floor in slippers while Quentin lies listening to his grandfather's watch. He is genial, unhaunted, and largely uncomprehending of the Southern obsessions Quentin carries north with him, which makes him the perfect ear for Quentin's looping disclosures. His ordinariness throws Quentin's torment into relief and gives the Harvard section its second voice, a patient witness to a mind coming apart.

Miss Quentin

supporting

Also known as Quentin, Poor Quentin

She lives as the Compsons' ward, a girl whose mother's name is spoken only in whispers and whose schooling, manners, and whereabouts Jason monitors like a debt ledger. Cornered over skipped school and a forged report card, she answers with curses and a slammed door, then cries out for the mother she doesn't have — a want that lands on Dilsey instead. Her defiance turns the household's buried shame into a daily, visible war, and it is her running, more than anyone's remembering, that pulls the family's decline into the present tense.

Uncle Job

minor

Also known as old Job, Job, Old man Job

An elderly black man working for the Compsons.

Frony

minor

Dilsey's daughter and Luster's mother.

Earl

minor

Also known as Mr. Earl

Jason's employer at the hardware store.

Roskus

minor

Dilsey's husband and the Compson family coachman.

Spoade

minor

A Harvard friend of Quentin's from the South.

Gerald Bland

minor

Also known as Gerald, marster marse gerald, marse gerald

A wealthy, arrogant Harvard student who antagonizes Quentin.

Mrs. Bland

minor

Also known as Bland

Gerald's doting mother who accompanies him at Harvard.

Dalton Ames

minor

Also known as the Dalton Ames

Caddy's lover, whom Quentin confronts.

Julio

minor

A Mexican man who chases Quentin after an incident with his sister.

Herbert Head

minor

Also known as Herbert, Ah Herbert Candace

Caddy's wealthy but dishonorable husband.

Charlie

minor

A man who kisses Caddy in the swing, seen by Benjy.

Natalie

minor

A girl Quentin kissed as a child, causing Caddy's jealousy.

Damuddy

minor

Also known as damuddy

The Compson children's grandmother, who died when they were young.

Lorraine

minor

Jason's mistress in Memphis.

Mrs. Patterson

minor

Also known as Patterson

A neighbor woman with whom Uncle Maury had an affair.

Mr. Patterson

minor

The jealous husband of Mrs. Patterson.

Deacon

minor

Also known as The Deacon

A black porter at Harvard who befriends Southern students.

Doc Wright

minor

Also known as Doc

A local doctor mentioned in the Compson household.

Queenie

minor

The Compson family's horse.

Dan

minor

The Compson family's dog.

Anse

minor

A man who works for the Compsons or is a local hand.

Louis Hatcher

minor

Also known as Louis, Unc Louis, Uncle Louis

An old black man who tells stories to the Compson children.

Mink

minor

A minor character mentioned in passing.

Mac

minor

A minor character in the town.

Ab Russell

minor

Also known as Russell

A man from the town, possibly a farmer.

Fancy

minor

A horse or mule mentioned in the narrative.

Prince

minor

A horse owned by the Compsons or a neighbor.

Miss Daingerfield

minor

A woman from the town, possibly a teacher.

Nancy

minor

A minor female character mentioned in passing.

Beller

minor

A minor character, possibly a servant or neighbor.