Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 05:17
The "Mr Snopes" in Frenchman's Bend with whom Anse bargains for a new team of mules is not given a first name (192). According to Armstid, he owns "three-four span[s]" of mules (184), which suggests he is a fairly prosperous farmer, perhaps even a landlord. According to Eustace Grimm, who "works Snopes' place," he is the nephew of Flem Snopes (192).
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 05:13
The horse that Jewel owns is referred to as "one of them Snopes horses" (112). Later in the novel this label is explained when Eustace Grimm mentions "them Texas horses" that Flem Snopes originally owned (192-93). The larger story of Flem occupied Faulkner's imagination for over three decades, but in this novel he is only mentioned in connection with those horses.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 04:33
One of the narrators of As I Lay Dying, Samson lets the Bundren family spend a night in his barn on their trek to Jefferson. His having a barn suggests he is a farmer, but at the start of the section he narrates he is sitting with a group of men at "the store" (112) - making it seem just as possible that he is both a country storekeeper and a small farmer.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 04:19
MacCallum, Rafe’s twin, is not given a first name in the text, because Samson cannot remember it. He is present at Samson’s place when the Bundrens pass. Samson tells us that he has been trading with him “off and on for twelve years. I have known him from a boy up; know his name as well as I do my own. But be durn if I can say it” (119). Readers of the earlier novel Flags in the Dust (1929) know that Rafe's twin is named Stuart.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 04:04
Littlejohn is one of the neighbors present at the Bundren farm after Addie's death. He is also the man who told Armstid that the flood washed out the main road to Jefferson. (Mrs. Littlejohn is a character in five Yoknapatawpha fictions, but none of them suggest how she and this male Littlejohn are connected.)
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 04:01
Houston is one of the neighbors present at the Bundren Farm after Addie’s death. He may be the same as the Houston who appears in the Snopes trilogy, where his first name is given as both "Jack" and "Zack" - they all live in Frenchman's Bend.
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 02:41
Uncle Billy’s wife is referred to in connection with Jody Varner’s birth in 1888. It seems that he is the first of many other children. (In The Hamlet the Varners have sixteen altogether.)
Submitted by dotty.dye@asu.edu on Fri, 2014-08-08 02:39
Whitfield is the local preacher in Frenchmen’s Bend. According to Cora Tull, "Brother Whitfield [is] a godly man if ever one breathed God's breath" (167). Whitfield himself would agree: the one section he narrates begins by proclaiming how he "emerged victorious" after wrestling with Satan (177), finds himself sustained by "His hand" (God's, that is), and "knows that forgiveness is mine" (178). At the end he takes it as a sign of God's favor that he need not confess his sin to his congregation. Addie loved him. Most readers, however, see him as a self-righteous hypocrite.