Snopeses

According to Gavin, there are "probably more people named Snopes or married to a Snopes" or indebted to a Snopes "than any other name in that section of Mississippi" - by which he may mean Frenchman's Bend or more likely all of Yoknapatawpha (291-291). Snopeses are a persistent element in Faulkner's imagination, from the beginning to the end of his career. In the Character data for The Town there are 25 entries for the Snopeses we can identify in some clear fashion. This entry represents the members of the Snopes family whom the text refers to more generically, such as "another Snopes" (9) and "still another Snopes" (6), who follow Flem into Frenchman's Bend and then follow him again to Jefferson, working their way up the family employment chain, each "accreted . . . behind the next one's advancement" (9). One, for example, takes over the Varners' tenant farm from Ab. While Ab is Flem's father, and Flem is identified by the novel as leading this process of 'Snopesification,' the relationships between the various Snopeses remains vague: "they none of them seemed to bear any specific kinship to one another; they were just Snopeses, like colonies of rats or termites are just rats and termites" (42).