“Barn Burning” (1938)
William Faulkner
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
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Greatest American Southern writer, won the
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950
A master of modernist experimentation in the
novel, related to his obsession with time
stream of consciousness, temporal shifts,
and multiple voices
Some major novels: The Sound and the Fury
(1929) [4 narrators], As I Lay Dying (1930)
[15 narrators], Absalom! Absalom! (1936)
Colonel William Clark Falkner (1826-89)
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Faulkner’s greatgrandfather
Civil War Veteran
Politician
Popular Romantic
Novelist (The White
Rose of Memphis,
1881)
Died of gunshot wound
from former business
partner
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
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Born William Falkner,
25 Sept. 1897, New
Albany, Mississippi
1918: joins Canadian
Royal Air Force
1919-20 U of
Mississippi
1921: U of Mississippi
Post Office
Faulkner: Early Publications
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1924: The Marble
Faun (poems)
1925: travels in Europe
1927: Mosquitoes
1928: Sartoris
Faulkner: Major Phase
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1929: The Sound and
the Fury
1930 As I Lay Dying
1931: Sanctuary
1932: Light in August
1935: Pylon
1936: Absalom,
Absalom!
Faulkner in Hollywood: 1930s
Faulkner: Later Fiction
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1938: The
Unvanquished;
“Barn Burning”
1940: The Hamlet
1942: Go Down,
Moses
1948: Intruder in the
Dust
Faulkner’s Critical Reputation
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Better regarded in
Europe than in U.S.
Then: 1946: The
Portable Faulkner
1950: Nobel Prize for
Literature
Faulkner, after the Nobel
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1954: A Fable (Pulitzer
Prize)
1957: The Town
1959: The Mansion
1962: The Reivers
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
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His great theme is the influence of the past on the
present
Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun (1951), says:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
“[T]o me,” Faulkner remarked, “no man is himself,
he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing
really as was because the past is. It is a part of
every man, every woman, and every moment. All of
his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of
himself and herself at any moment.”
Yoknapatawpha County
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Faulkner’s apocryphal county, patterned on
his native Lafayette County.
The county seat, Jefferson, resembles
Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford in many
particulars—but without Oxford’s University of
Mississippi campus
Faulkner said Yoknapatawpha means “Water
flows slow through the flatland.”
Yoknapatawpha County
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2,400 square miles;
the population, 6,298
whites and 9,313
Negroes, for a total of
15,611
from Nobel Acceptance Speech
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I believe that man will not merely endure: he will
prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone
among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but
because he has a soul, a spirit capable of
compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The
poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these
things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting
his heart, by reminding him of the courage and
honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity
and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
Question
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Is Faulkner’s vision in his fiction as positive
and uplifting as the vision expressed in this
Nobel lecture? Or is his fiction more
ambivalent?
“Barn Burning”
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a story of the Snopeses, a poor white family
who appear in a number of Faulkner’s
narratives of fictional Yoknapatawpha County
Setting: Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi,
about 30 years after the Civil War (1861-65),
thus, in the 1890s
“Barn Burning”: the film, 1980
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Part of The American
Short Story Collection
Starring Tommy Lee
Jones as Abner
Snopes
Featuring Faulkner’s
nephew Jimmy
Faulkner as Major de
Spain
“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict
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The father, Abner, avenges himself on more
socially established whites by burning their
barns and carrying out lesser acts of mischief
The younger son, named Colonel Sartoris
(Sarty) Snopes, 10 years old, struggles to
revolt against his father
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Colonel Sartoris: a Confederate Army officer and
leading citizen of Jefferson, Mississippi (higher
class and [perhaps] higher morality)
“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict
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Sarty struggles between family allegiance
and external standards of justice
Abner hits him and tells him “to learn to stick
to your own blood or you ain’t going to have
any blood to stick to you” (1793, last para.).
Later, twenty years later, he was to tell
himself, "If I had said they wanted only truth,
justice, he would have hit me again“ (1793,
last para.)
“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict
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Opening Scene (1790-92): makeshift
courtroom in general store
Sarty feels “the old fierce pull of blood” (1791,
1st para.); his father’s enemy is his enemy too
However, he also feels “grief and despair”
because he must tell a lie for his father
But when another boy calls Abner a “Barn
Burner,” Sarty attacks the boy (1792, middle)
Abner: Motivation
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Does Abner have an understandable
motivation?
Abner’s predicament: he falls into the cracks
of Southern society: he is not a member of
the white aristocracy nor the the black
servant class
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See visit to de Spain mansion (1796, middle):
“That’s sweat,” he tells Sarty. “Nigger sweat”
(1796, top)
Question: Does the history of slavery in the South
undercut or taint its ideals of “truth” and “justice”?
Abner: Motivation
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During Civil War, Abner did not fight for either
side. Instead he stole horses from both sides.
See 1802 (3rd para.): “his father had gone to
that war a private in the fine old European
sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the
authority of and giving fidelity to no man or
army or flag, going to war . . .for booty--it
meant nothing and less than nothing to him if
it were enemy booty or his own.”
Abner: Motivation
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In any case, Abner is persuasive. See 1793
(1st main para.): “There was something about
his wolflike independence and even courage,
when the advantage was at least neutral,
which impressed strangers, as if they got
from his latent ravening ferocity not so much
a sense of dependability as a feeling that his
ferocious conviction in the rightness of his
own actions would be of advantage to all
whose interest lay with his.”
Symbols: Fire
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As a barn burner, Abner is associated with
fire
See 1793 (2nd main para.): “the element of
fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his
father’s being”
Fire as force of civilization and destruction
See 1800 (2nd full para.): taking the family’s
lantern oil to burn de Spain’s barn
Symbols: Rug
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The destruction of the rug is symbolic of
Abner’s larger rebellion against society
See 1795: He dirties the rug with his stiff foot
injured during the war (1792): his rebellion
has long history
He “never looked at it, he never once looked
down at the rug”—willfully disregarding his
destructiveness (1795).
Symbols: Rug
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See bottom 1796-top 1797: After he “cleans”
the rug, his foot tracks are replaced by “long,
water-cloudy scoriations resembling the
sporadic course of lilliputian mowing
machine” (1797)—suggesting his rebellion is
small and not very effective
Symbols: Cheese
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Cheese is a peculiar symbol, associated with
the power of family allegiance over external
justice in the 2 court scenes
See opening of story: “The store in which the
Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting
smelled of cheese” (1790).
See 1800, top: Abner buys cheese from
“courtroom” store and shares it with his sons
Modernism
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Faulkner portrays this story of conflict through
a modernist aesthetic, through
experimentation with
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Consciousness
Time
Space
Modernism: Consciousness
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Using italics, Faulkner portrays the limited
and often conflicted internal thoughts of the
boy Sarty
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See, for example, 1791-92
Modernism: Time
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The narrator jumps backward and forward in time,
and suspends time:
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Abner’s wartime activities are repeatedly mentioned
“prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity” (bottom 1791-92)
The family carries an old clock stopped at 2:14 “of a dead
and forgotten day and time” (1792)
Abner’s handling of the mules anticipates descendants
handling of motor car (1792, last para.)
Narrators speculates how Sarty “might have” thought if he
were older (1793, 2nd main para.)
Modernism: Space
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Faulkner portrays reality through geometric,
two-dimensional shapes
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the father is repeatedly described as a “flat”
shape, “without . . . depth,” “depthless,” as if cut
from tin (1793, 1795).
the father’s crude, flat shape contrasts with “the
serene columned backdrop” of the de Spain
mansion, with its associations of peace, joy, and
dignity (1794-95).
Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, Oxford, Miss.
Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910
The Ending
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Sarty assumes that his father is dead. Can
we be sure?
Sarty concludes that his father “was brave,”
but the narrator protests (1802)
Sarty ultimately prepares to enter “the dark
woods” (1803), in some ways a typically
American ending, reminiscent of Irving’s “Rip
Van Winkle” and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn.