“Barn Burning” (1938)

William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Greatest American Southern writer, won the

Nobel 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)

Colonel William Clark Falkner (1826-89)

Faulkner’s great-grandfather

Civil War Veteran

Politician

Popular Romantic Novelist (The White Rose of Memphis, 1881)

Died of gunshot wound from former business partner

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Born William Falkner, 25 Sept. 1897, New Albany, Mississippi

1918: joins Canadian Royal Air Force

1919-20 U of Mississippi

1921: U of Mississippi Post Office

Faulkner: Early Publications

1924: The Marble

Faun (poems)

1925: travels in Europe

1927: Mosquitoes

1928: Sartoris

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!

Faulkner in Hollywood: 1930s

Faulkner: Later Fiction

1938: The

Unvanquished;

“Barn Burning”

1940: The Hamlet

1942: Go Down,

Moses

1948: Intruder in the

Dust

Faulkner’s Critical Reputation

Better regarded in

Europe than in U.S.

Then: 1946: The

Portable Faulkner

1950: Nobel Prize for

Literature

Faulkner, after the Nobel

1954: A Fable (Pulitzer

Prize)

1957: The Town

1959: The Mansion

1962: The Reivers

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

His great theme is the influence of the past on the

present

Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun (1951), says:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

“[T]o me,” Faulkner remarked, “no man is himself,

he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing

really as was because the past is. It is a part of

every man, every woman, and every moment. All of

his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of

himself and herself at any moment.”

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

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?

“Barn Burning”

a story of the Snopeses, 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

“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

“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” (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.)

“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)

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”?

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.”

Abner: Motivation

In any case, Abner is persuasive. See 1793 (1st main para.): “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.”

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

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).

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

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

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” (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.)

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).

Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, Oxford, Miss.

Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

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.