The Snopes Trilogy

Abstract

The Snopes trilogy occupies an important place in Faulkner’s career. It represents his most determined attempt to be a chronicler, to pick up stories where they leave off, tie up loose ends, and narrate the lives of a family and its connections with other lives in his invented county. Filling in the Yoknapatawpha cycle proved easy in the sense that Faulkner had many stories to tell about local characters. He continues to use the meditative moments in those stories to structure novels in which action predominates, but the balance admittedly shifts. Before taking up in chronological order The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), I want to consider ‘Barn Burning’ (1939), a story he thought of using as the opening chapter for The Hamlet and one that is generally considered one of his best. Faulkner’s interest there in studying the male mind reacting to circumstances in a series of intensely emotional moments will serve as a helpful introduction to the subsequent discussion of the trilogy itself.