The colonel also inspires men’s confidences in matters other than wartime tactics. At the end of the war, he is broke and destitute, but he dreams of building a railroad. He is able to communicate that dream to others and convince enough of them to finance the project—not just once, but again and again—so that the railroad, and even the first engine, are built with capital from others. Although Colonel Sartoris himself has no money, he has a vision and a dream. Most important, he is a determined man who refuses to be vanquished—by anything or anyone.
The Snopeses. During his writing career, Faulkner wrote numerous short stories featuring members of the Snopes family. He also wrote a trilogy of three novels—The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion—that has the Snopes family as the central concern. Throughout the trilogy, he often revised his short stories about the Snopeses and included them in the novels.
As a class of people, the Snopeses are the antithesis of the highbrow society represented by Colonel Sartoris. Whereas Sartoris is refined and carries about himself an Old World gentility, the Snopeses are crass, poor, and ill-mannered. V. K. Ratliff, the narrator of “Spotted Horses,” sums up the Snopeses’ shady character with the deceptively simple saying, “Them Snopes,” an expression that underscores the astonishment and exasperation of Yoknapatawpha County’s citizens viewing the Snopeses’ behavior.
The Snopeses are best represented by Flem, who in “Spotted Horses” symbolizes the rise of an amoral materialism that will eventually overpower all other moral values. He is the elemental and destructive force of invincible greed opposed to all other forces in Faulkner’s fiction, and he accomplishes his ends with a perverse and distorted vitality. The Snopeses’ ubiquitous inhumanity infiltrates every aspect of the community life, and their calculating and dehumanizing exploits leave their victims stupefied and in abject rage.
Singularly, the descendants of Abner Snopes, who in “Barn Burning” epitomizes the single-mindedness of his family, are inveterate liars, thieves, murderers, blackmailers, and the personification of every type of treachery. As a clan, they present an insurmountable and insidious example of the horrors of materialistic aggrandizement, and they accomplish their aims with complete, unshakable calm. They are so impersonal that their gruesome inhumanity must be viewed in a comic manner. When we cease to view the Snopeses with ironic and humorous detachment, we lose all perspective. In “Spotted Horses,” it is almost impossible to define our reaction to Flem Snopes’ audacious gift—”A little sweetening for the chaps”—to Mrs. Armstid, except to agree with Ratliff that if he himself were to do what Flem does, he would be lynched.
Flem and his spotted horses represent the infiltration of unorthodox behavior into a heretofore serene community life. The disorder that he causes forms the basic pattern of his strategy. He does not pit himself against the community in personal combat; rather, he incites diverse elements within the community to battle each other. His last name symbolizes everything unprincipled and amoral in society.
