A brief touch on William Faulkner's Barn Burning

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, 1
st
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 (3
rd
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 (2
nd
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 (2
nd
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, 2
nd
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.