SnopessInLJC

Along with the contemporaneous "Centaur in Brass," this is one of the few stories which show Flem explicitly conning other people - though interestingly the question "how do I know it's Flem?" is asked three times by one of his victims, and for a manipulator of Flem's fabulous reputation, the con by which he hoodwinks those victims is surprisingly trite. Flem's accomplice is a man named Eustace Grimm, presumably the same man who worked for a Snopes in As I Lay Dying, but here identified by that same victim - though this question occurs to him too late - as "some kin to them Snopeses? . . . A in-law or something?" (150). That's often as close as we can get to locating the various Snopeses on the family tree, though when Faulkner interpolated this tale into The Hamlet, Eustace is identified as another of Flem's cousins.