“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

– 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: 1914-1965MODERN DEVICES IN FAULKNER• Stream of consciousness narration • Decadent and culturally degenerate setting• Extended sentences• Images of extreme violenceFAULKNER’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

CriticismsSummarize 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?

CriticismsBlood 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 Class- DeMott

• 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?