Ike Snopes

Isaac "Ike" Snopes is the cognitively limited cousin of Flem and Mink. At 14, he is a "hulking figure" in "bursting overalls" (94) who works around Mrs. Littlejohn's hotel as a kind of janitor. With Flem as his official guardian, Ike is referred to as an "idiot" and "creature" with a "mowing and bobbing head" and a "Gorgon-face" that "had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair" (95). Faulkner's account of Ike's romantic relationship with Jack Houston’s cow is both grotesque and affecting; his vision of her beauty parodies sentimental literature and yet possesses mythic proportions. When the boy looks into the "mild enormous moist and pupilless" eyes of the cow and sees "himself in twin miniature" - and so sees himself "contemplating what those who looked at Juno saw" (201).