Flem Snopes

The story begins "Yes, sir. Flem Snopes has filled that whole country full of spotted horses" (165) and ends with I.O. claiming "You can't git ahead of Flem. You can't touch him. Aint'he a sight now?" (183). As this introduction suggests, Flem is arguably the central character of "Spotted Horses," though he seldom appears in the action. Flem Snopes appears throughout the Yoknapatawpha saga as a representative of a modern, upwardly mobile, capitalist, 20th-century American ethos, and Faulkner's imagination returned to him often across the course of his career. His final action in "Spotted Horses" of giving Mrs. Armstid a five cent bag of candy rather than returning her five dollars is typical of the kinds of callous transactions that enable his rise in the novels of the Snopes trilogy.