Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Wed, 2015-03-18 21:25
The most publicly visible member of the Snopes clan in Faulkner's fiction, in "Centaur in Brass" Flem has moved to town from the country and begun his ascent up the town's social ladder. This story recounts how his trademark rapacity gets turned, for once, to his disadvantage. Almost omnipotent in other accounts of his financial machinations, here Flem "apparently had neither the high vision of a confidence man nor the unrecking courage of a brigand"; he has set his sights on targets "nobody would have remarked or cared about" (153).
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 16:01
The "municipal power plant" (151) where Flem Snopes is the superintendent generates electricity for the town by burning coal to heat water into steam. The job of shoveling coal into the fires is done by Negro "firemen," who are supervised by white men whose job includes making sure that the pressure in the plant's three boilers does not become dangerously high (153) - a job made much harder by Flem's theft of the machinery's brass fixtures.
