Lump Snopes

Ratliff calls Lump Snopes "that Snopes encore" (218. He enters the novel as the new clerk in Varner's store after his cousin Flem marries Eula Varner. Their two faces are almost identical, except that Lump's features were "plucked together at the center of it" and his eyes are "profoundly and incorrigibly merry" (161). He too wears a cloth cap and a bow tie. Like Flem, Lump is dishonest and unscrupulous. He quickly perjures himself at the Snopes trial (360) and, among his various venalities, he exploits his cousin, removing a plank from Mrs. Littlejohn's barn and charging other men to watch Ike Snopes having sex with a cow. His birth name, Launcelot, evokes an irony on which Ratliff elaborates, since Lump's mother named him after the Arthurian knight believing in "honor and pride and salvation and hope . . . between the pages of books" (218).