BARN BURNING
by William Faulkner, 1938

"Barn Burning" was born in the intense activity of William Faulkner's most brilliant decade. Absalom, Absalom! behind him, he gave increasing thought to the Snopes family, poor whites with stories worth telling—as he had already intimated in As I Lay Dying when Anse Bundren, his mules having drowned, is forced to buy a team from Flem Snopes. For writers in the 1930s stories about the poor were seemingly mandatory, but Faulkner presented his characters from a much larger perspective than did most fiction writers of the time. He placed them in a context that demanded that they be seen in a history and a locale, not merely as victims of a flawed economic system. Like the monied and established families of his fiction, Faulkner's poor are held accountable for their moral failures. Whereas much proletarian fiction of the 1930s now seems dated, Faulkner's Snopeses continue to intrigue and to challenge readers. Rooted in the lower class, they are larger than their class and speak across it.

Among Faulkner's most brilliant efforts in the short story form, "Barn Burning" is regularly anthologized. In 1980 a dramatization of it appeared on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS-TV) as part of the "American Short Story" series produced by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The series included the works of only those writers who had made a substantial contribution to the genre. "Barn Burning" was a fitting choice to represent Faulkner; the story stands with such classics as "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," "The Blue Hotel," and "Soldier's Home."

Were there no Snopeses elsewhere in Faulkner's fiction, "Barn Burning" would still command attention. The story is, however, interesting as a prelude to the Snopes trilogy—The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. Flem Snopes, the most outrageous member of their tribe, is the unifying character of the trilogy. Although "Barn Burning" portrays Flem and his parents, Flem's name (unpleasant in the extreme) never appears in the story. Nor is he its major character. Primary focus is on Abner Snopes, Flem's father, and on Sarty, Flem's younger brother.

The story asks readers to ponder how two brothers in the same family could be so different. Flem accepts the vision of the world that his father expounds; Abner declares that family loyalty is the only reality. Unfortunately he pushes that premise to an extreme: vindication of the self transcends the well-being of his family. Thus family pride becomes a mockery, something worthy of ridicule. Ridicule is central to the comic mode of the works, but there is little that is comic in "Barn Burning." As Faulkner's title suggests, Abner Snopes is a threat to the community; his path leads to destruction and to death. Faulkner shows that the Snopeses as well as the Compsons (The Sound and the Fury) and the Sutpens (Absalom, Absalom!) can touch the tragic notes.

By the time of the action of "Barn Burning" the course of Flem Snopes's life is set. Abner can trust him absolutely. But when brought to trial for burning a barn Abner senses that his younger son is inclined to speak the truth. For Sarty there may be loyalties that transcend family loyalty. Abner intends to teach his son otherwise, and that becomes his primary goal when the family takes up a new sharecropping contract in another community. As he begins that contract he takes Sarty with him to see Major DeSpain, intending to make his son see DeSpain as the oppressor. Thus "Barn Burning" becomes a story of education in which parent and child make a journey together and discover more than either anticipated. (It may be likened to Hemingway's "Indian Camp" or Ernest Gaines's "The Sky Is Gray" in this basic pattern.) In the lesson of moral outrage that Abner tries to teach his son, he is close to Mark Twain's Pap Finn when he lectures Huck. Huck's instinct tells him that his father is morally bankrupt. Increasingly Sarty's does too.

Unquestionably Abner's outrage is genuine—Faulkner humanizes him as Twain never humanizes Pap Finn—and his mistake is attempting too much at one time. He wants not only to teach Sarty but also to force his new landlord to take notice of Abner Snopes—just as his numerous barn burnings have made other landlords remember him. Approaching DeSpain's house he discovers the opportunity to make a similar impression. He does not veer from the fresh horse droppings in the path leading to the DeSpain door but plants his foot in the droppings and then on Mrs. DeSpain's rug. Coming down that same path Sarty gets a vision Abner did not intend. Looking at the house Sarty feels "a surge of peace and joy," and the narrator takes us into Sarty's thoughts:

"They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he is no more to them than a buzzing wasp; capable of stinging for a little moment but that's all; the spell of peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive."

Sarty makes two more trips to the DeSpain's house. (Abner has made moving a way of life for his family, and motion is a principal structuring device of this story.) The next trip comes because Abner wants his son to see his second insult to the DeSpains as he returns the rug that he has purposely ruined in order to make his "signature" indelible. Sarty makes the third trip because he feels morally obligated to do so—his sense of fair play demanding that DeSpain be warned that Abner is going to burn the barn in protest to the judge's ruling that Abner make modest reparation for ruining the rug.

Although Sarty does not hesitate in his decision to warn DeSpain, Faulkner brilliantly conveys the price that Sarty pays for his difficult moral choice. Sarty's dilemma is the central issue of the story: he loves his father, but his sense of rightness demands that he oppose him. Having warned DeSpain, Sarty does not break his frenzied run. When he hears gunshots, he knows that Abner is dead:

Springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying "Pap! Pap!," running again before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, "Father! Father!"

Twain's Pap is elevated to the more moving Father, catching biblical echoes of Jesus's crucifixion and reminding Faulkner's readers of another son's anguished call for acknowledgment from his father in Absalom, Absalom!

Although a part of Sarty still wishes to believe in a core of integrity in his father, Faulkner's narrator overrides Sarty's voice, declaring Abner a man without honor. As the story ends Sarty, having chosen the path of honor, walks into the future with some courage: he does not look back. And he is never again heard from in Faulkner's many stories of the Snopeses. Sarty carries with him the moral values that his long-suffering mother has tried to maintain, values that she may have asserted most forcefully for her son by naming him for Colonel Sartoris.

—Joseph M. Flora