Pap

Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, swapping discarded barbed wire, broken tools, and other people's chattels, but, as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). Pap's vanity and overreaching are tested when he finds out that his newly-acquired "sorry horse" was once owned by Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region. Even when fighting as a "self-appointed champion and knight" for his own honor (125) - and that of "Beat Four" (119) - he uses deceit. His attempt to out-trick Stamper ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his mistakes. (When Faulkner wrote The Hamlet, he interpolated a version of this story into the narrative; there "Pap" is Ab Snopes, the father of Flem.)