Barn Burning

“For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until Harris said, ‘Not him. The little one. The boy,’ and, crouching, small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the men between himself and the table part and become a lane of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the Justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles, beckoning him.”

Faulkner’s description of his characters in this scene reveals inner characteristics as well as outward ones. Sartoris is described as small and physically similar to his father, which points to the power of blood and the pull of familial loyalty. Sartoris’s eyes are “wild as storm scud,” illustrating his role as an outsider. Even though Sartoris is drawn towards the law and morality, he is touched by the wild something that makes his family, and particularly his father, socially unacceptable and undomesticated.

“He felt no floor under his bare feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim turning faces. His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will have to do hit.”

This line demonstrates a key phrase repeated throughout the story: “frantic grief and despair.” Over and over again, this phrase comes to Sartoris’s mind, like a mantra that he cannot escape. It is clear, even at this early point in the narrative, what torments Sartoris: the pull to tell the truth and do what is right. In Sartoris’s mind, it is right to tell the truth, and it is not right to burn barns, but loyalty to one’s family is also right—and that is the conundrum that causes Sartoris “grief and despair.”

“Now time, the fluid world, rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat, the fear and despair and the old grief of blood.”

Another illustration of the “fear and despair and the old grief of blood,” though worded differently, illustrates the central theme of Faulkner’s story” “fear and despair” brought on by “the old grief of blood” he inherits from his father’s crimes. Sartoris has inherited guilt for his father’s actions, even though his father possesses no remorse.

“It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember—the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother’s dowry.”

This quote introduces several important themes that commonly appear in Faulkner’s short stories and novels. The wagon full of broken belongings speaks to the Snopes family’s economic hardships, but it also indicates larger conceptual hardships. The clock, a remnant of Lennie’s dowry is a symbol of Mississippi during this time. Once beautiful, the clock now does not “run, stopped at some […] dead and forgotten day and time.”

“Likely his father had already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he… Again he had to stop himself. He (the father) always did. 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.”

This scene provides some insight into Abner Snopes and Sartoris’s perception of his father. Although disgusted by Snopes’s actions, Sartoris is also proud of his father’s “stiff-legged” bravery and defiance. Snopes is so sure of his rightness that he can be depended upon to look out for an advantage for himself and his family; however, Snopes’s ability to pivot and move his family to a new place does not protect them from the scorn of society or economic struggle. Sartoris is proud of his father, but he is also afraid of him.

“The nights were still cool and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and cut into lengths—a small fire, neat, niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his father’s habit and custom always, even in freezing weather. Older, the boy might have remarked this and wondered why not a big one; why should not a man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his blood an inherent voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned everything in sight? Then he might have gone a step farther and thought that that was the reason: that niggard blaze was the living fruit of nights passed during those four years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called them). And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion.”

This passage is particularly Faulknerian in scope: long and winding. However, beyond demonstrating Faulkner’s style, it also reveals information about Abner and Sartoris Snopes. Firstly, Faulkner’s look forward imagines Sartoris at different stages of life. While we spend most of “Barn Burning” with a young, naive Sartoris, this scene ages the character, revealing how his knowledge of himself and his father will change and grow. Young Sartoris does not question the size of the fire, but older Sartoris begins to wonder at his father’s restraint when Abner so obviously can start large, dangerous fires. By that point, Sartoris has learned darker truths about his father’s Civil War service. As an adult, Sartoris knows that the small fire reflects elements of his father’s intense character. About Snopes, this passage reveals much. He was not a loyal Confederate soldier or even a defector who fought for the North during the Civil War. He was a deserter or worse.

“‘You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him.’ He didn’t answer. His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger: ‘You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this morning, would? Don’t you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had them beat? Eh?’ Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, ‘If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again.’ But now he said nothing. He was not crying. He just stood there.”

Faulkner reveals more dimensions of the father-son relationship. A key character trait of Snopes, revealed in his “stiff leg” and his use of small fires, is illustrated here in his treatment of his son. His voice is “without heat or anger,” despite striking Sartoris, and throughout the story, Snopes never seems to become incensed or impassioned with anger. Everything he does is controlled; he calculates and makes moves with purpose. His mechanical use of violence is frightening. His words to Sartoris speak to the conflict that Sartoris grapples with throughout “Barn Burning.” Family loyalty is important to Snopes and Sartoris, which makes Sartoris’s struggle to accept his father so poignant and interesting. Family loyalty was highly significant in Southern American culture specifically after the Civil War; though Snopes’s lack of loyalty to either side during the war brings up a question of what loyalty means to him. Does blood mean as much as he says? Or is it only important to Abner that his son be a loyal, willing participant in his crimes?

“They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that’s all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive… this, the peace and joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and which now, against the serene columned backdrop, had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow.”

This passage reveals the larger-than-life figure of Snopes. Although Sartoris describes his father as “not dwarfed by the house” and “stiff and implacable,” these descriptions are more indicative of Sartoris’s perception than they are of Snopes’s character or power. The house, large and beautiful, awes Sartoris and brings him a sense of peace. Perhaps the peace and dignity represented in an opulent plantation house speak to Faulkner’s focus on the transition from pre-to-post-Civil War epochs in Mississippi. The house symbolizes to Sartoris something peaceful, something untouched by struggle, poverty, or strife. However, to someone like Snopes, the house’s meaning is likely darker: before the Civil War, Major de Spain’s land would likely have relied on slave labor. Now, the Snopes family and other poor tenant farmers cultivate the land, illustrating a shift of labor and power which, in Snopes’s mind, places him at a lower rung of society.

“From the woodpile through the rest of the afternoon the boy watched them, the rug spread flat in the dust beside the bubbling wash-pot, the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic reluctance, while the father stood over them in turn, implacable and grim, driving them though never raising his voice again. He could smell the harsh homemade lye they were using; he saw his mother come to the door once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair; he saw his father turn, and he fell to with the axe and saw from the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground a flattish fragment of field stone and examine it and return to the pot, and this time his mother actually spoke: ‘Abner. Abner. Please don’t. Please, Abner.’”

This scene reveals much about the secondary characters. Although “Barn Burning” largely focuses on Sartoris and Snopes, there are key concepts and themes present in and represented by the other members of the family. Sartoris’s two sisters, unnamed, are consistently described as being lazy; they stoop “with that profound and lethargic reluctance” and are often described as being “bovine,” or cow-like. In contrast, Sartoris’s mother, Lennie, is described as capable and willing to work. There is a disconnect between generations, which Faulkner illustrates through these characters. The mother and her sister possess a refinement that encourages a willingness to work; however, the younger women are described as lazy, slow, and unintelligent. This breakdown of values is another expression of Faulkner’s view of Mississippi post-Civil War—as the family descends the social and economic ladder, the generations descend in ability and knowledge. The younger women are willing participants in their father’s schemes—or are perhaps too apathetic to notice them—whereas Lennie is broken and distraught over her husband’s choices. But she is unable to stop them.

“Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be; thinking, dreaming now, so that his brother had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule: Maybe he even won’t collect the twenty bushels. Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish—corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses—gone, done with forever and ever.”

Sartoris wishes for something impossible. His hope that his father will respond to punishment with contrition and give up his ways is naïve but well-meant. Ultimately, Sartoris wishes to be free from being torn between family loyalty and moral rightness.

“He saw the man in spectacles sitting at the plank table and he did not need to be told this was a Justice of the Peace; he sent one glare of fierce, exultant, partisan defiance at the man in collar and cravat now, whom he had seen but twice before in his life, and that on a galloping horse, who now wore on his face an expression not of rage but of amazed unbelief which the boy could not have known was at the incredible circumstance of being sued by one of his own tenants, and came and stood against his father and cried at the Justice: ‘He ain’t done it! He ain’t burnt.’”

Several key events and descriptions occur in this passage, starting with Sartoris’s perception of the Justice of the Peace. Although the Justice is kind to Sartoris and seems to judge fairly on the matters of the arson and the soiled rug, Sartoris is colored by his father’s perceptions, and his conflict is at its most obvious here. He loathes the law for its attack on his father, while also longing for the law to punish him enough to change him. Sartoris loathes himself—and feels grief and despair at his feelings of disloyalty, but he also wishes to defend and support his father. In the heat of the moment, Sartoris almost accidentally indicts his father by assuming that the Justice has returned to press Snopes again about the burned barn.

“It was after sundown when they reached home. They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the doorstep, the boy watched the night fully accomplish, listening to the whippoorwills and the frogs, when he heard his mother’s voice: ‘Abner! No! No! Oh, God. Oh, God. Abner!’ and he rose, whirled, and saw the altered light through the door where a candle stub now burned in a bottle neck on the table and his father, still in the hat and coat, at once formal and burlesque as though dressed carefully for some shabby and ceremonial violence, emptying the reservoir of the lamp back into the five-gallon kerosene can from which it had been filled, while the mother tugged at his arm until he shifted the lamp to the other hand and flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard, into the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for balance, her mouth open and in her face the same quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice.”

This scene provides further insight into Snopes and Lennie. Snopes’s actions are strangely calculated and not aggressive: “not savagely or viciously, just hard” he flings his wife away. He does not seem to engage in violence for passionate joy, and he does not seem to enjoy flinging his wife. Instead, violence is innate and natural. He is violent because he must be to achieve whatever ends he set for himself, his family, and those around him. Lennie is frantic and morally sure of the wrongness of what Abner does, but she is a character lost to “hopeless despair,” ineffective against the tide of violence.

“But there was no glare behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father. My father, he thought. ‘He was brave!’ he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: ‘He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!’ not knowing that 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 as Malbrouck himself did: for booty—it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own. The slow constellations wheeled on.”

This scene describes the conclusion of Sartoris’s conflict. After he saves the de Spain’s property—which leads to the death of his father—Sartoris is distraught. The “terror and fear” brought on by Snopes ends with “grief and despair.” Still torn, Sartoris cries about his father’s bravery, but his voice is soft, and Sartoris is unsure of his father’s character. Again, Faulkner references a future in which Sartoris learns the truth about his father’s actions during the war.