SnopessInSH

If Faulkner had finished his first Yoknapatawpha fiction, "Father Abraham," the story of the spotted horses would have been his readers first introduction to the "tribe" of Snopeses. About three years after putting that manuscript aside, he revised part of it into this short story. Here he uses a first-person narrator whose vernacular voice identifies him as a countryman from the same rural world as the Snopeses to describe how Flem fleeces the men of Frenchmen's Bend - among whom are his cousins Eck and I.O. - by selling them horses that they will never be able to ride. The narrator introduces the tale by talking about the "big family" of Snopes who are share-croppers in that part of the county: "It was a regular nest of them" - and presumably he is thinking of snakes rather than birds (165). "It's a funny thing about them Snopes," he adds; "they all looks alike, yet there ain't ere a two of them that claims brothers. They're always just cousins" (180). That's not the only "funny" thing this representation of the family. Both Flem's lack of scruples and his cousins lack of intelligence are portrayed as comic.