Not a fragment, not quite a finished work, Father Abraham is the brilliant beginning of a novel which William Faulkner tried repeatedly to write, for a period of almost a decade and a half, during the earlier part of his career--the novel about the Snopes family which he finally completed and published as The Hamlet in 1940.   Father Abraham, then, marks the inception of a work that altogether spans nearly the whole of Faulkner's career as a writer of fiction, a work that includes some of his best writing and which, as it evolved, had profound effects upon much of the rest of it. After Father Abraham, no matter what other novels and stories he turned to, Faulkner's Snopeses would be a vital part of what he called the "lumber room" of his imagination, and the completion of their saga would be one his major ambitions--or obligations--as an artist.