“Barn Burning”
(1938)
William Faulkner
Quiz
Respond to the following prompt on a separate
sheet of paper after you finish your quiz.
Have you ever had to choose between betraying
someone you care about and being true to
yourself? What did you choose?
Who is William Faulkner?
• First published: June of 1939 in Harpers
• Winner of Nobel Prize for literature
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As I Lay Dying
The Sound and the Fury
Light in August
Absalom, Absalom!
“A Rose for Emily”
• Writes about disturbed adults and their disturbing lives
• Greatest American Southern writer, won the Nobel
Prize for Literature, 1950
Modernism: 1914-1965
MODERN DEVICES IN FAULKNER
• Stream of consciousness narration
• Decadent and culturally degenerate setting
• Extended sentences
• Images of extreme violence
FAULKNER’S WRITING FOCUS
• simple-minded characters
• Complex syntax
• Interior monologue
• Disrupted chronology
• Multiple perspectives
Yoknapatawpha County
• 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
• 2,400 square miles;
• the population, 6,298
whites and 9,313
Negroes, for a total of
15,611
SETTING OF STORY
• Set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha
(Yoknapatafa)County (northern Mississippi)
• Post Civil War
• Humiliated South trying to hold its own against
Northern victor
• Private social hierarchy
• Plantation life, small-town existence
• **setting of intense vulnerability intense resentment
• Not necessarily to specific place- moved around a lot
• Setting- road
POINT OF VIEW
• Stream of cosnciousness
Syntax- sentence structure
• Long
• Full of interruptions
• Sentence 2
Motifs and Symbols
• Blood- 402, 409
• White/Black
– WHITE: wealth
• Rug, De Spain’s house, de Spain’s linen suit, servant
with linen jacket, sweat
– BLACK: poverty
• P. 404; hat, coat
• Light/Darkness
Vigilante Justice
• taking the law into your own hands
– "Goodbye, Earl"
– Lynching- Emmett Till
– Gold Rush
– Road Rage
– Travyon Martin case– George Zimmerman
• Stand Your Ground Law: you have a right to self defense if
you feel your property is under attack
– My neighbor
Abner: Motivation
• 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
– See visit to de Spain mansion: “That’s sweat,” he
tells Sarty. “Nigger sweat”
– Question: Does the history of slavery in the South
undercut or taint its ideals of “truth” and
“justice”?
Abner: Motivation
• During the Civil War, Abner did not fight for
either side. Instead he stole horses from both
sides. -“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
• In any case, Abner is persuasive.
“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.”
Foster References
• Blindness
• Flight
• Injury
Themes and Symbolism
“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict
• 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
– Colonel Sartoris: a Confederate Army officer and
leading citizen of Jefferson, Mississippi (higher
class and [perhaps] higher morality)
“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict
• 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. ”
• Later, twenty years later, he was to tell
himself, "If I had said they wanted only truth,
justice, he would have hit me again“
“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict
• Opening Scene : makeshift courtroom in
general store
• Sarty feels “the old fierce pull of blood”; 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
Symbols: Fire
• As a barn burner, Abner is associated with fire
• “the element of fire spoke to some deep
mainspring of his father’s being”
• Fire as force of civilization and destruction
– taking the family’s lantern oil to burn de Spain’s
barn
Symbols: Rug
• The destruction of the rug is symbolic of
Abner’s larger rebellion against society
– He dirties the rug with his stiff foot injured during
the war: his rebellion has long history
– He “never looked at it, he never once looked
down at the rug”—willfully disregarding his
destructiveness.
Symbols: Rug
• After he “cleans” the rug, his foot tracks are
replaced by “long, water-cloudy scoriations
resembling the sporadic course of lilliputian
mowing machine”—suggesting his rebellion is
small and not very effective
Symbols: Cheese
• 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”.
• Abner buys cheese from “courtroom” store
and shares it with his sons
Criticisms
Summarize your criticism and answer the
question below.
• Blood Ties
– What is Sarty’s definition of family? Abner’s?
– Do you agree with Faulkner that we have to be “clannish?”
• Abner Snopes as Victim
– Are there any noble aspects of Abner’s character?
– Question #2- p. 416
• Conflict
– How do these two different types serve to frame the
conflicts in “Barn Burning?”
• Narration as Strategy
– What shifts of consciousness are seen in the story and
what is the impact of these conflicts?
Criticisms
Blood Ties – Hiles
– Southern clannishness
– Kinship bond
“We have to be clannish just like the people in the
Scottish highlands, each springing to defend his own
blood whether it be right or wrong…That is the tone we
live by. But I am sure it is because only a comparatively
short time ago we were invaded by our own people-speaking in our own language which is always a pretty
savage sort of warfare” (413)
– Do you agree with Faulkner that we have to be
“clannish?”
Abner Snopes as a Victim of ClassDeMott
• DeMott acknowledges Abner’s ignorance and
brutality, but he also presents him as a man who
suffers injustices. What are those injustices?
Discuss whether you think they warrant a more
balanced assessment of Abner’s character.
• Why doesn’t Abner protest his “oppression?”
Given DeMott’s perspective on him, how might
Abner- in another story- have been the hero
rather than a terrible source of conflict?
Conflict – Wilson
– The Paranoid
• “no political organization. In a strict sense it has no
legality”
• Lawless
• Relies on blood ties to form social alliances and
sanction actions
– The Apollonian
• Keeps to the middle of the road, stays within the known
map
• Strives to fulfill his civic role in terms of the
expectations of the community at large
• Turns to community and collective wisdom as law
How do these two different types serve to frame
the conflicts in “Barn Burning?”
Narrative Strategy- Ferguson
• skipping
Modernism
• Faulkner portrays this story of conflict through
a modernist aesthetic, through
experimentation with
– Consciousness
– Time
– Space
Modernism: Consciousness
• Using italics, Faulkner portrays the limited and
often conflicted internal thoughts of the boy
Sarty
– See, for example, 1791-92
Modernism: Time
• The narrator jumps backward and forward in time, and
suspends time:
– Abner’s wartime activities are repeatedly mentioned
– “prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity”
– The family carries an old clock stopped at 2:14 “of a dead and
forgotten day and time”
– Abner’s handling of the mules anticipates descendants handling
of motor car
– Narrators speculates how Sarty “might have” thought if he were
older
Modernism: Space
• Faulkner portrays reality through geometric,
two-dimensional shapes
– the father is repeatedly described as a “flat”
shape, “without . . . depth,” “depthless,” as if cut
from tin .
– 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.
from Nobel Acceptance Speech
• 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
• 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?
“A Rose for Emily” p. 80
• Compare and contrast Faulkner’s characterization
of ABNER and EMILY.
– How does the author generate sympathy for each
character even though both are guilty of terrible
crimes?
– How do they both isolate themselves from society?
• What is the NARRATIVE STRUCTURE of “A Rose
for Emily?” How does it compare to the NS of
“Barn Burning?”
• What is the Point of View?
• What is the time period? How do you know?