A brief touch on William Faulkner's Barn Burning

1. A brief touch on
William Faulkner’s
Barn Burning

2. William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
• Born on 25 Sept. 1897 ,
New Albany , Mississippi
• 1918: joins Canadian
Royal Air Force
• 1925: travels in Europe
• 1950: won the Noble
Prize for Literature

3. William Faulkner
Greatest American Southern
writer , won the Noble 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)

4. Faulkner: Early Publications
• 1924: The Marble
Faun (poems)
• 1927: Mosquitoes
• 1928: Sartoris

5. Faulkner: Major Phase
• 1929: The Sound and
the Fury
• 1930: As I Lay Dying
• 1931: Sanctuary
• 1932: Light in August
• 1935: Pylon
• 1936: Absalom !
Absalom !

6. Faulkner in Hollywood: 1930s

7. Faulkner: Later Fiction
• 1938: The
Unvanquished ; “Barn
Burning”
• 1940: The Hamlet
• 1942: Go Down
Moses
• 1948: Intruder in the
Dust

8. Faulkner’s Critical Reputation
• Better regarded in
Europe than in U.S
• Then : 1946: The
Portable Faulkner
• 1950: Noble Prize for
Literature

9. Faulkner , after the Noble
• 1954: A Fable
(Pulitzer Prize)
• 1957: The Town
• 1959: The Mansion
• 1962: The Reivers

10. Yoknapatawpha
• Yoknapatawpha is an imagined
Mississippi county similar to his home in
Oxford.
• It is a fictional location that Faulkner fills
with unforgettable characters of old and
new South.
• Barn Burning also adopts Yoknapatawpha
as its setting.

11. Yoknapatawpha County
• 2,400 square miles;
• the population, 6,298
whites and 9,313
Negroes, for a total of
15,611

12. “Barn Burning”
• a story of the Snopes, 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

13. “Barn Burning”: the film, 1980
• Part of The American
Short Story Collection
• Starring Tommy Lee
Jones as Abner
Snopes
• Featuring Faulkner’s
nephew Jimmy
Faulkner as Major de
Spain

14. “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)

15. “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” (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.)

16. “Barn Burning”: Family Conflict
• 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)

17. 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 (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”?

18. Abner: Motivation
• 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.”

19. Symbols: Fire
• 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

20. Symbols: Rug
• 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).

21. Symbols: Rug
• 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

22. 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” (1790).
• See 1800, top: Abner buys cheese from
“courtroom” store and shares it with his
sons

23. Modernism
• Faulkner portrays this story of conflict
through a modernist aesthetic, through
experimentation with
– Consciousness
– Time
– Space

24. Modernism: Consciousness
• Using italics, Faulkner portrays the limited
and often conflicted internal thoughts of
the boy Sarty
– See, for example, 1791-92

25. 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” (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.)

26. 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 (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).

27. Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, Oxford,
Miss.

28. Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

29. The Ending
• 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.