Novel: The Town

Overview
William Faulkner’s The Town, published in 1957, is the middle volume of the Snopes trilogy and follows the calculated ascent of Flem Snopes from rural obscurity to dominance in Jefferson, the county seat of Yoknapatawpha. Told through three alternating narrators, Gavin Stevens, the idealistic lawyer; V. K. Ratliff, the shrewd traveling salesman; and Chick Mallison, Gavin’s observant nephew, the novel filters its story through competing voices, gossip, and partial knowledge. What emerges is a portrait of a community watching, resisting, and often abetting the encroachment of a remorseless, modern kind of power.

Plot
Flem Snopes arrives in Jefferson with a reputation forged in Frenchman’s Bend and a marriage to Eula Varner, whose beauty and enigmatic self-possession unsettle the town as much as Flem’s tight-lipped ambition. Installed in the bank and public life by a mixture of opportunism and calculation, Flem cultivates a façade of respectability while leveraging information and other people’s desires. His household, far from the warmth suggested by Jefferson’s manners, is cold and transactional. Eula’s daughter Linda, known to be not Flem’s child, grows up in that chill, watched over from the periphery by Gavin’s chivalric devotion and Ratliff’s wary sympathy.

The turning point arrives when Eula enters an affair with Manfred de Spain, a scion of the old elite and a powerful civic leader. The liaison becomes both Jefferson’s consuming rumor and Flem’s greatest asset. Knowing that honor, reputation, and office intertwine in a small Southern town, Flem quietly arranges for the scandal’s discovery to wound de Spain precisely where it will hurt most. By forcing a public reckoning without himself uttering a public word, he supplants de Spain’s influence, consolidates control at the bank, and advances within the town’s governing machinery.

Eula’s tragedy runs parallel to Flem’s triumph. To spare her daughter the permanent stain of a drawn-out scandal, and thwarted by Gavin’s elevated but paralyzing code of conduct, she takes her life. The suicide devastates Jefferson, strips Gavin of comforting illusions, and hardens the moral contrast between human feeling and Flem’s glacial utility. Afterward, Linda leaves Jefferson in the care of those who loved her mother, carrying forward a quiet defiance of Flem’s claim upon her.

Narration and Structure
The novel’s tripartite narration keeps Flem’s interior sealed and makes the town itself the protagonist. Ratliff’s pragmatic eyewitnessing, Gavin’s legalistic and romantic theorizing, and Chick’s coming-of-age recollections overlap, contradict, and correct one another, turning plot into a study of perception. This choral method exposes how power in Jefferson is manufactured not only in banks and offices but in conversations on porches, courtroom speeches, and the private conjectures that become public truth.

Themes and Tone
Faulkner sets the Snopes ethos of cash, leverage, and impersonal efficiency against the fading codes of honor and communal obligation. Eula embodies both the vulnerability and force of desire within a patriarchal culture; her beauty becomes the town’s mirror, reflecting men’s pretensions and failures. Gavin’s high-minded restraint proves a kind of impotence; Ratliff’s humane skepticism approximates wisdom but cannot halt the Snopes tide. The Town is less a melodrama of adultery than a diagnosis of how a community rationalizes and participates in its own transformation, trading memory and courtesy for speed, profit, and control.

Place in the Trilogy
Following The Hamlet’s introduction of the Snopes clan and preceding The Mansion’s reckonings, The Town shows the middle act of conquest: the moment when private appetite becomes public order. By the end, Flem sits enthroned in Jefferson, invulnerable precisely because no one can find a heart to strike, while those capable of love and loyalty are left to bear their losses and remember what the town once promised to be.