Will Varner appears or is mentioned in ten different texts, as "Uncle Billy" in the first two and as "Will" in all but one of the others (in "Centaur in Brass" he is the unnamed father of Flem Snopes' wife). In those first two - As I Lay Dying and "Spotted Horses" - he is a farmer and veterinarian who (in the absence of a real doctor) sets the broken legs of two different human critters. But in the other texts he makes a much more commanding figure as "the principal landowner" in Frenchman's Bend, to quote from his third text, "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (136).
Appearing only in The Hamlet, 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. 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). Officially, Flem is Ike's guardian, but he does nothing to protect Ike from being exploited by Lump Snopes.
One of Flem's closest relations - on the tangled Snopes family tree they share a common grandmother - Mink is described in The Mansion as a "small frail creature, not much larger than a fifteen-year-old boy" (55). Inside that body, however, he carries around enough rage to claim two men's lives. He first appears in The Hamlet when Faulkner decides to adapt his earlier short story "The Hound" into the saga of the Snopeses.
Ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris "Sarty" Snopes is the focal character in "Barn Burning." The youngest of sharecropper Abner Snopes' four children, he is "small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud" (4).
While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure.
While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. Only one sister - Net, this one - is named. In "Barn Burning" both are described as "big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons" (9), and very lazy: they do very little to help with household chores, leaving most of the work to their mother and aunt.
In the beginning was Flem Snopes. He is the very first character who appears in the very first fiction about Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner sat down to write. He is the "Father Abraham" in the title of that unfinished text, which was going to tell the story of Flem's rise from tenant farmer's son in Frenchman's Bend to bank president in Jefferson, from a sharecropper's cabin to The Mansion - as the final volume of the Snopes trilogy that Faulkner finished over three decades later is titled.
Mink Snopes tells Ratliff that "our grandma left us all three ten dollars a piece" (84). The three Snopeses here are Mink himself, Flem and Isaac. This earlier generation of the Snopes family is never clearly brought into focus, but since we know that Flem has more than two 'cousins,' the implication of this bequest is that his grandfather - Ab's father - married twice, and that this grandmother is one of his two wives.
Lennie is Abner Snopes' second wife - at least, he is given a childless first wife named Vynie in The Hamlet - and the mother of Flem. But her most memorable appearance is as the mother of Flem's younger brother in "Barn Burning." There, amidst all the hardships of a tenant farmer's life, she tries very hard to balance her loyalty to her husband with her love for Sarty. In one of the few times she speaks it is easy to hear her desperation: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner" (14).
In "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished the woman who opens the door of Ab Snopes' cabin to Bayard and Ringo is presumably his wife - at least, our database makes that presumption. She tries to throw them off the track by telling them that "Mr. Snopes" has gone to Alabama (101, 162). In The Hamlet Ab has two wives. This first one is named Vynie.
