SnopessInUNV

From the first - the unfinished "Father Abraham" manuscript - Faulkner's imagination linked Snopeses with Sartorises as the yin and yang, the new and the old, the evil and the good of Southern culture. In the work of the 1920s the connection is through the bank that Bayard founds and that Flem covets. When in the mid-1930s his imagination turned back to the Sartorises in the series of Civil War stories Bayard narrates, it wasn't long before it also brought a Snopes into the picture. This time it's Flem's father Ab, who appears in the stories as a lower class factotem who stays on the Sartoris plantation while Bayard's father John is away fighting the War. In this story he is apparently helping Bayard's Granny in the extra-military campaign she wages against the invading Union Army on behalf of the people of Yoknapatawpha, but by the end it is tragically clear that the only cause Ab serves is his own self-interest.