Pap

Character Key: 
Display Name: 
Pap
Sort Name: 
Pap
Race: 
White
Gender: 
Male
Class: 
Poor White
Rank: 
Major
Vitality: 
Alive
Occupation: 
Farming
Specific Job: 
Tenant Farmer
Biography: 

Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, swapping discarded barbed wire, broken tools, and other people's chattels, but, as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). Pap's vanity and overreaching are tested when he finds out that his newly-acquired "sorry horse" was once owned by Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region. Even when fighting as a "self-appointed champion and knight" for his own honor (125) - and that of "Beat Four" (119) - he uses deceit. His attempt to out-trick Stamper ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his mistakes. (When Faulkner wrote The Hamlet, he interpolated a version of this story into the narrative; there "Pap" is Ab Snopes, the father of Flem.)

Note: 
His attempt to trade the horse back to Stamper fails, and his attempt to recover the "sorry horse" leads first to whiskey and finally to domestic disaster, but this failed trickster blithely refuses to acknowledge any of his mistakes.
Individual or Group: 
Individual
Character changes class in this text: 

digyok:node/character/11075