Abner Snopes
Text:
Character Key:
Display Name:
Abner Snopes
Sort Name:
Snopes, Abner
AKA:
Ab Snopes
Race:
White
Gender:
Male
Class:
Poor White
Rank:
Major
Vitality:
Alive
Family:
Snopes
Family (new):
Occupation:
Farming
Specific Job:
Tenant Farmer
First Mentioned:
Real?:
No
Other Texts:
Biography:
In the larger Yoknapatawpha saga, Abner Snopes is the patriarch of the Snopes family, the father of Flem. In "Barn Burning," he is a violent man embittered by the (decidedly unheroic) wound he got during the Civil War, when he was shot by "a Confederate provost's man" while trying to steal a horse (5), and by his years as a tenant farmer working for the wealthier white men who own the various fields he farms on shares. The wound leaves him with a limp. His experience as a tenant farmer leaves him with a smoldering resentment against his lot in life and the southern caste system that periodically bursts into flames whenever he burns a barn as his way of trying to preserve his "integrity" as a man (8).
Note:
CUT: he a horse trader for both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, when he was injured in his heel (leaving him with a limp) by a shot fired by Colonel John Sartoris when riding a horse he stole from the Colonel (this era of his life is dealt with in The Unvanquished). After the war he continues as a horse trader, including with Pat Stamper, and then becomes a sharecropper, gaining a reputation as a "barn burner" by the time he encounters Major de Spain in "Barn Burning."
Disability:
wounded
Individual or Group:
Individual
Character changes class in this text:
digyok:node/character/1743