Abner Snopes

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
Real?: 
No
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