The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

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.

This fourteen-year-old boy has a "habit" of spying on Will Varner's affair with a tenant's wife; he reveals that "Varner would not even remove his hat" during their trysts (157).

Will Varner has an ongoing affair with the "middle-fortyish wife of one of his own tenants" (156).

These are the two young men, among the larger group of young men who court Eula Varner, who flee when it is discovered that she is pregnant. The narrative confers on them a particularly Faulknerian - which is to say, negatively defined - distinction: "By fleeing too [along with McCarron, who actually had sex with Eula], they put in a final and despairing bid for . . . the glorious shame of the ruin they did not do" (156).

This was Hoake McCarron's sole companion growing up. Many of Faulkner's wealthier white men had Negro companions and personal servants as boys; this pair represents an odd variant of that pattern. Early on, Hoake "dominates" his companion with fists and, afterwards, pays the other black boy a fixed sum to beat him with a "miniature riding crop" (151).

A few days after Hoake McCarron's father is "shot in a gambling house," a rumor arises that "a woman had shot him" (150). No evidence is given to support the rumor, but if it's true, then the context makes it likely that she is a prostitute.

This drover tells Alison Hoake McCarron of her husband's death (150). A "drover" is someone who drives herds of cattle, from pasture to pasture or from farm to market, and so on.

This icon represents the two groups of Negroes who are connected with the Hoake family: the "negro field hands" who work on the farm (149) and the "negro servants" who work inside the house, and with whom Alison Hoake McCarron leaves her nine-year-old boy when she goes to bring her husband's body home (150).

Twenty-three years old, Hoake is one of Eula Varner's suitors and, eventually, the biological father of her only child. He is a man of some means, having inherited his father's buggy and his maternal grandfather's estate. He possesses his "father's assurance in his face which was bold and handsome too" (150). He is "precocious, well-co-ordinated and quick to learn whatever he saw was to his benefit" (151). Unlike his father, however, Hoake is "a little swaggering and definitely spoiled though not vain so much as intolerant" (150).

Hoake - only his last name is given in The Hamlet - is "a well-to-do landowner" (152). After his daughter Alison elopes with McCarron, "Old Hoake had sat for ten days now with a loaded shotgun across his lap" (153) before the newlyweds returned. McCarron, however, learned his father-in-law's business quickly and Hoake eventually bequeathed the flourishing property to his grandson, Hoake McCarron.