Mink Snopes

Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Wed, 2017-10-11 09:40
Text: 
The Mansion
Character Key: 
Mink Snopes
Display Name: 
Mink Snopes
Sort Name: 
Snopes, Mink
Parent: 
Mink Snopes' Mother
Mink Snopes' Father
AKA: 
Ernest Cotton
M.I. Snopes
Race: 
White
Gender: 
Male
Class: 
Poor White
Rank: 
Major
Vitality: 
Alive
Family: 
Snopes
Family (new): 
SnopessInM
Occupation: 
Farming
Specific Job: 
Tenant Farmer
First Mentioned: 
Courthouse and Square in The Mansion (Location)
Home: 
Mink Snopes' Farm in The Mansion (Location)
Date of Birth: 
Monday, January 1, 1883 to Monday, December 31, 1883
Narrator: 
First Person
Other Texts: 
The Hamlet
The Reivers
The Town
Biography: 

Physically Mink Snopes is a "small frail creature, not much larger than a fifteen-year-old boy" (55), but he carries around enough rage to claim two men's lives. He figures prominently in the first volume of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet (1940), where he is cast as greedy and murderous. In The Mansion, Faulkner renders a more sympathetic picture of Mink as a struggling sharecropper, who was taken advantage of by Zack Houston, and then abandoned (at least in his own mind) by his cousin Flem. Convicted of killing Houston, he is sentenced to Parchman Penitentiary at the age of twenty-five, and (after Flem tricks him into making an ignoble attempt to escape) spends a total of thirty-eight years there. Through all that time, Mink's determination to avenge himself on Flem never falters, and his fierce quest helps organize the novel's narrative from its first page through its last.

Note: 
CUT: Originally named Ernest Cotton in “The Hound,” CUT: In Mink's moral universe, the most important thing is to be true to your family, a cardinal rule which Flem betrayed. Consequently, Mink spends the majority of the novel plotting his revenge on Flem.
Disability: 
impotent
Individual or Group: 
Individual
Character changes class in this text: 

digyok:node/character/14362