The snopes trilogy The Hamlet

On the Monday morning when Flem Snopes came to clerk in Varner's store, he wore a brand-new white shirt. It had not even been laundered yet; the creases where the cloth had lain bolted on the shelf, and the sun-browned streaks repeated zebra-like on each successive fold, were still apparent. And not only the women who came to look at him, but Ratliff himself (he did not sell sewing machines for nothing. He had even learned to oper­ate one quite well from demonstrating them, and it was even told of him that he made himself the blue shirts which he wore) knew that the shirt had been cut and stitched by hand and by a stiff and unaccustomed hand, too. He wore it all that week. By Saturday night it was soiled, but on the following Monday he appeared in a second one exactly like it, even to the zebra-stripes. By the second Saturday night that one was soiled too, in exact­ly the same places as the other. It was as though its wearer, en­tering into a new life and milieu already channeled to compul­sions and customs fixed long before his advent, had nevertheless established in it even on that first day his own particular soiling groove.

He rode up on a gaunt mule, on a saddle which was recog­nized at once as belonging to the Varners, with a tin pail tied to it. He hitched the mule to a tree behind the store and untied the pail and came and mounted to the gallery, where already a dozen men, Ratliff among them, lounged. He did not speak. If he ever looked at them individually, that one did not discern it—a thick squat soft man of no establishable age between twenty and thirty, with a broad still face containing a tight seam of mouth stained slightly at the corners with tobacco, and eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features in startling and sudden paradox, a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk. It was as though the original nose had been left off by the original designer or craftsman and the unfinished job taken over by someone of a radically different school or perhaps by some viciously maniacal humorist or per­haps by one who had had only time to clap into the center of the face a frantic and desperate warning.

He entered the store, carrying the pail, and Ratliff and his com­panions sat and squatted about the gallery all that day and watched not only the village proper but all the countryside with­in walking distance come up singly and in pairs and in groups, men, women and children, to make trivial purchases and look at the new clerk and go away.

They came not belligerently but com­pletely wary, almost decorous, like half-wild cattle following word of the advent of a strange beast upon their range, to buy flour and patent medicine and plow lines and tobacco and look at the man whose name a week ago they had never heard, yet with whom in the future they would have to deal for the necessities of living, and then depart as quietly as they had come. About nine o'clock Jody Varner rode up on his roan saddle horse and entered the store.

They could hear the bass murmur of his voice inside, though for all the answer he got he might have been talking to himself. He came out at noon and mounted and rode away, though the clerk did not follow him. But they had known anyway what the tin pail would contain. If the clerk was eating his lunch, he had hidden to do it. Ratliff was back on the gallery before one o'clock, since he had to walk only a hundred yards for his dinner. But the others were not long af­ter him, and for the rest of that day they sat and squatted, talking quietly now and then about nothing at all, while the rest of the people within walking distance came and bought in nickels and dimes and went away.

Questions and tasks

1. Say some words about Faulkner's life.

2. What experience is reflected in some of his stories?

3. When did he begin to write?

4. When did his first book appear?

5. What did Sherwood Anderson encourage him to do?

6. How is the tragedy of the lost generation reflected in Faulkner's works?

7. What theme returned repeatedly throughout Faulkner's literary career?

8. What work created a sensation and brought its author financial independence?

9. What school of writers does Faulkner belong to?

10. What is Faulkner's attitude to the Southern myth?