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Contents
The novel's tragic center. Joe is a man who doesn't know his racial identity and can't find peace in any community. His violence comes from a lifetime of being beaten, abandoned, and categorized by others. He kills Joanna Burden and is then hunted down and killed by Percy Grimm. His story is the novel's darkest argument about what American racism does to a person.
Lena opens and closes the novel. She's pregnant, calm, and walking across the South looking for the man who abandoned her. She never panics, never stops moving, and accepts help without losing her direction. Faulkner uses her as a counterweight to Joe's destruction. She survives because she doesn't fight the world. She just moves through it.
A disgraced former minister who lives alone in Jefferson, obsessed with a vision of his Confederate grandfather dying in a cavalry charge. He has checked out of real life. Joe's story pulls him back. He delivers Lena's baby and tries to give Joe an alibi, but both acts come too late to change anything. His arc is about the cost of choosing fantasy over responsibility.
A white woman from a Northern abolitionist family who has lived in Jefferson as an outsider her whole life. Her relationship with Joe goes through three distinct phases and ends with her trying to force him into a religious and racial identity he refuses. Joe kills her. She represents the way even well-intentioned people can try to impose identity on others.
A quiet, decent man who works at the sawmill and falls in love with Lena the moment he meets her. He arranges help for her, involves Hightower, and follows her out of Jefferson at the end. He's the novel's most straightforwardly good character, though Faulkner gives him almost no drama of his own.
A young National Guardsman who pursues and kills Joe Christmas with cold efficiency. He acts without official authorization but with the community's tacit approval. He represents organized white supremacy at the individual level. His castration of Joe is the novel's most horrifying scene and its clearest statement about racial violence.
Joe's adoptive father. A strict Calvinist who beats Joe regularly and without apparent emotion. McEachern shapes Joe's capacity for endurance and his contempt for authority. Joe eventually beats McEachern at a dance and flees. McEachern's violence is the first violence Joe absorbs and the template for everything that follows.
Joe's maternal grandfather. A religious fanatic who believes Joe is the product of racial mixing and deserves to die for it. He places Joe in the orphanage and watches him with hatred. He later shows up in Jefferson during Joe's trial, calling for Joe's death. He represents the most extreme form of the novel's religious and racial fanaticism.
The man Lena is looking for. He got her pregnant, ran to Mississippi, and has been working at the sawmill under a fake name. He tries to claim the reward for turning in Joe Christmas and fails at even that. He is cowardly and self-serving at every turn. Faulkner uses him as a comic foil to Byron Bunch's decency.
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