英文文學與文化教學資料庫

Barn Burning

Text: Norton Anthology of American Literature . Ed. Nina Baym. 6 th ed. Vol. D. New York : Norton, 2003. 1790-1803.

Introduction Characters and Themes Plot Structure and Setting Symbolism Modernist Techniques

Introduction
	“Barn Burning” offers a concise introduction to Faulkner's character types, themes, settings, techniques, and writing style.

Characters and Themes
	“Barn Burning” is a story of the Snopeses, a poor white family who appear in a number of Faulkner's narratives of fictional Yoknapatawpha County . In this particular story, the boy named Colonel Sartoris (Sarty) Snopes struggles to revolt against his father Abner, a corrupt and violent man who avenges himself on more socially established whites by burning their barns and carrying out other, lesser acts of contempt. The name Colonel Sartoris, after a Confederate Army officer and leading citizen of Jefferson , Mississippi , associates the boy with a higher morality and class than his father's. The conflict of the story, centered on the boy's consciousness, is between “the old fierce pull of blood” (1791)—that is, his natural allegiance to the father—and his aspiration toward standards of truth and justice that the boy himself is only beginning to understand. Even as he perceives his father's corruption with increasing clarity, the boy continues to prattle in his father's favor, impressed, in part, by his father's physical blow followed by the injunction “to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you” (1793). Sarty is also constrained by his vulnerable age: too old to “[soar] free” of the world, but not old enough “to resist it and try to change the course of its events” (1794). Faulkner's characterization of the father, Abner, is a study in the resentment fuming inside a poor Southern white sharecropper who doesn't fit readily into the hierarchy of Southern society. He belongs to neither the white landholding class nor the black servant class—both of whom perpetuate, in form if not in name, the master-slave relationship that defined the South up through the Civil War. During the War, Abner maintained a low-minded neutrality, stealing horses from Union and Confederate soldiers alike, a career he remembers deceptively as “horsetrading.” (One of his legs is stiff from being shot while stealing a Confederate's horse.) In the present (some thirty years after the War, in the 1890s) he acts out his disrespect for Major de Spain's aristocratic mansion, scoffing that it was built by “[n]igger sweat”; however, far from sympathizing with blacks, he resents having his “white sweat” mixed with theirs (1796). Abner's reckless, antisocial behavior is selfish and cowardly, yet he first impresses strangers as a rugged individualist of “wolflike independence and even courage” (1793). The other family members are: an older brother, who unquestioningly supports the father's plots; twin sisters characterized as complacent and “bovine” (1794, 1801); a longsuffering wife and mother, who pleads ineffectually to Abner and finally despairs; and the wife's sister. TOP

Plot Structure and Setting
	Faulkner's plot structure and setting emphasize the impermanence and fragility Abner bestows upon his family: The opening scene is set in a store that functions as a makeshift courtroom. Here Abner is on trial for burning a barn. Sarty is called up to be questioned about his father, but in the end he is not required to testify. With insufficient evidence against him, Abner receives no punishment—only the justice's advice to leave the area. Sarty gets in a fight with another boy who calls out “Barn burner!” After several days' journey to the new family residence—a rundown house—Abner takes the boy to visit his new employer Major de Spain's mansion. The mansion leaves a deep impression on the boy as representing an order of life that is impervious to his father's touch. Abner deliberately tracks horse dung over the cream-colored French rug, horrifying Mrs. de Spain. Major de Spain and a black servant deliver the rug to be cleaned. Abner, refusing his wife's assistance, ruins it by washing it in lye and scratching out the stains with a stone. He returns it to de Spain's porch. The following morning, a Wednesday, Major de Spain, trembling, visits the Snopses and declares that Abner owes him twenty bushels of corn to compensate for the one-hundred-dollar rug. On Saturday Abner, accompanied by his sons, goes to court (in a store, similar to the first scene) to challenge Major de Spain's penalty. The judge finds against Abner, but reduces the penalty to ten bushels of corn. Returning home, Abner prepares kerosene and oil to burn down de Spain's barn. The older son cooperates, but Sarty questions his father's intentions and the father commands the mother to restrain him. Wrestling free, Sarty runs to warn de Spain, then runs to warn his father and brother that de Spain is coming. However, he is too late: de Spain races past him on a horse and fires three shots. At midnight, Sarty sits on a hill crest and reflects that his father “was brave” in the war, ignorant of his father's actual cowardice (1802). As dawn approaches, he sets out into the woods on his own. TOP

Symbolism
	Fire. Faulkner writes that “the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of [the] father's being” (1793). Fire is a force of civilization as well as destruction; either way, the father's use of it always victimizes others. He builds a small campfire for the family by burning a rail he takes from someone's fence. Later, as he prepares to burn de Spain's barn, he takes the kerosene from the lamp of the dining table—effectively stealing light from the family to fuel his personal act of vengeance. Rug. The rug the father ruins symbolizes his willful moral blindness. When he tracks horse dung over it with his stiff foot (his foot injury is itself a result of his wartime crimes), the father “never looked at it, he never once looked down at the rug”—willfully disregarding his destructiveness (1795). After he “cleans” the rug, his foot tracks are replaced by “long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of lilliputian mowing machine” (1797). The adjective “lilliputian” suggests the pettiness and insignificance of the father's rebellions. Cheese. The opening line of the story is unsettling: “The store in which the Justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese” (1790). The smell of cheese seems inconsistent with our usual idea of a courtroom. Near the end of the story, the father and his two sons share a piece of cheese purchased from another store, which has also functioned as a courtroom. What is Faulkner suggesting through the image of cheese? In both cases, the cheese is associated with a conflict between pure justice and the father's will. In the later scene, by sharing cheese with his sons, the father is attempting to unite with them against de Spain and against the community's system of justice. In the opening scene, the smell of cheese mixes, for the boy, with the smell of fear, despair, and grief, because he feels pressure from his father to lie to the court.
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Modernists Techniques
	Faulkner is a modernist writer as well as a Southern writer. “Barn Burning” therefore demonstrates some of the themes and experimental techniques typical of American and European modernist fiction of the first half of the twentieth century. Experimentation with Consciousness. “Barn Burning” reflects Faulkner's concern with representing the complexity of consciousness, here the divided consciousness of a boy torn between his father and abstract justice. Faulkner portrays the boy's limited perspective, and uses italics to indicate his internal thoughts. Experimentation with Time. While sticking closely the boy's limited perspective, Faulkner's narrator occasionally leaps backward or forward to provide a broader temporal perspective, noting the father's activities during the war; the family clock frozen at 2:14 of some “dead and forgotten day and time” (1792); the family descendants who would abuse automobiles the way the father abuses his horse; and the insights the boy would have into the father if he were older. Experimentation with Space. From the boy's perspective, the father is repeatedly described as a “flat” shape, “without . . . depth,” “depthless,” as if cut from tin (1793, 1795). This kind of spatial abstraction—representing something in two-dimensional geometric shapes rather than in realistic detail—is common in modernist literature and visual art. Here the abstraction conveys the father's actual appearance at night, but it also represents his crude, unreflecting power, as well as the boy's sense of his father's ultimate weakness in contrast to “the serene columned backdrop” of the de Spain mansion, with its associations of peace, joy, and dignity (1794). Writing Style. Faulkner's distinctive writing style of unwieldy, unrelenting sentences is well represented in “Barn Burning.” For Faulkner, this experimental style attempts to convey the ambiguities of time and perception. Two examples: But he could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while there was absolutely no sound in the crowded room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grapevine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time. (1791-92) His father had struck him before last night but never before had he paused afterward to explain why; it was as if the blow and the following calm, outrageous voice still rang, repercussed, divulging nothing to him save the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his few years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free of the world as it seemed to be ordered but not heavy enough to keep him footed solid in it, to resist it and try to change the course of events. (1794) TOP