Anse Bundren

Anse Bundren is a farmer by vocation, but he is perhaps more accurately described with a term Faulkner's fiction regularly applies to the Snopeses: parasite. Unlike Flem, however, Anse is rendered comically rather than as a threat to the social order. He is described as a "kind of tall, gaunted man" (203). Physically his most striking feature seems to be his hair; Peabody calls it "pushed and matted up . . . like a dipped rooster" (44). He narrates three chapters in which he portrays himself as both the victim of "bad luck" and "them" - the anonymous people who make his life so hard (36). His neighbors, however, and most readers instead see how successful he is at getting other people to do all his work for him. Darl observes, "I have never seen a sweat stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats, he will die" (17).