Ab Snopes

Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Thu, 2016-07-21 14:34
Text: 
The Hamlet
Character Key: 
Ab Snopes
Display Name: 
Ab Snopes
Sort Name: 
Snopes, Ab
Parent: 
Flem Snopes' Grandmother
AKA: 
Abner
Race: 
White
Gender: 
Male
Class: 
Poor White
Rank: 
Major
Vitality: 
Alive
Family: 
Snopes
Family (new): 
SnopessInH
Occupation: 
Farming
Specific Job: 
Tenant Farmer
First Mentioned: 
Varner's Store in The Hamlet (Location)
Home: 
Varner Sharecropper Cabin in The Hamlet (Location)
Other Texts: 
"Barn Burning"
"My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek"
"The Unvanquished"
"Vendee"
The Mansion
The Town
The Unvanquished
Biography: 

Abner Snopes is the oldest named of the Snopes clan, a horse trader turned sharecropper and a man who has acquired a reputation as a barn burner. He possesses "a pair of eyes of a cold opaque gray between shaggy graying irascible brows and a short scrabble of iron-gray beard as tight and knotted as a sheep's coat" (8). Anger shows in his "harsh knotted violent face" and in his eyes "fierce and intractable and cold” (54). He walks on a "club foot" which, according to Buck McCaslin, was due to Colonel John Sartoris shooting him for trying to steal Sartoris' horse during the Civil War (18). Ab married twice, first to Vynie from Jefferson and then to Lennie, with whom he has four children: Flem (the only one given a name in The Hamlet, another son (called Colonel Sartoris Snopes in "Barn Burning"), and twin daughters (one named Net in "Barn Burning").

Note: 
At the tie he began pulling together his previous Snopes material to construct The Hamlet in 1938, Faulkner anticipated the boy "Colonel Sartoris Snopes" of "Barn Burning" would eventually reappear and become every bit as disgusting as his older brother Flem had become. The finished novel, however, makes only a brief vague allusion to this character, who never returns to Yoknapatawpha in any subsequent text.
Disability: 
mobility impaired
Individual or Group: 
Individual
Character changes class in this text: 

digyok:node/character/10674