Launcelot|Lump Snopes

In The Hamlet, which has the most to say about Lump, Ratliff calls him "that Snopes encore" (218); he is referring to the fact that Lump takes his cousin Flem's place as clerk in the Varner store when Flem moves on up to Jefferson. His mother called Lump "Launcelot," surely one of the more egregious ironies in the Snopes' chronicles: as Ratliff elaborates, she chose the name of a Knight of the Round Table because she believed in the "honor and pride and salvation and hope" she had found "between the pages of books" (218). Lump, on the other hand, is as dishonest and unscrupulous as Flem, and probably even more distasteful. Among his various venalities in that novel, he exploits another of his cousins by removing a plank from Mrs. Littlejohn's barn and charging other men to watch Ike Snopes having sex with a cow. He may be the unnamed clerk at Varner's who appears in "The Hound." It is as that clerk that he makes a minor figure in The Mansion.