Faulkner
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The Southern Social Themes of Barn Burning
William Faulkner undoubtedly ranks one of the best and most influential writers both in America and in history. Among his various works of art, the most famous ones are those set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which is molded out of his “native soil.” Despite their Southern setting, these works convey something universally true. As Faulkner often claims, he is just a story-teller, telling about man in conflict, about how he “endures and prevails.” Before he received due recognition, Faulkner wrote quite a few short stories which he expected would help him improve his economic condition, so that he could write novels at ease. Nevertheless, although he was motivated by economic interests, many of these short stories turned out very prominent.
“Barn Burning” is one of Faulkners most frequently anthologized, though its prose is a bit more ponderous than the garrulous first-person narration of “Emily.” Set roughly 30 years after the Civil War, the story focuses on two members of the Snopes family: Ab Snopes, a poor sharecropper who takes out his frustrations against the post-Civil War aristocracy by burning barns, and his adolescent son, “Sarty,” who dislikes his fathers destructive tendencies and ultimately must choose between family and morality. This powerful coming-of-age story is notable for its conscientious prose styling, in which Faulkner mimics the inward turmoil and questions faced by his principal protagonist, as well as its carefully rendered settings of three historical milieus, each of which has important thematic concerns in the story: the sharecroppers cabin, the planters mansion, and the towns general store.
Faulkner incorporated the basic narrative of the story into his novel The Hamlet, though it is told in vastly different language and tone.
Written as it was, at the ebb of the 1930s, a decade of social, economic, and cultural tumult, the decade of the Great Depression, William Faulkners short story “Barn Burning” may be read and discussed by most of us as just that–a story of the 30s, for “Barn Burning” offers students insights into these years as they were lived by the nation and the South and captured by our artists. This story was first published in June of 1939 in Harpers Magazine and later awarded the 0. Henry Memorial Award for the best short story of the year. Whether read alone, as part of a thematic unit on the Depression era, or as an element of an interdisciplinary course of the Depression 30s, “Barn Burning” can be used to awaken students to the race, class, and economic turmoil of the decade.
During the 1930s, the Sartoris and Snopes families were overlapping entities in Faulkners imagination. These families with their opposing social values spurred his imagination at a time when he wrote about the passing of a conservative, agricultural South and the opening up of the South to a new era of modernization. This depiction of the agrarian society of the Sartoris family connects Faulkner to the nostalgic yearnings for a past expressed in Ill Take My Stand, the Fugitives manifesto of 1930, a book opening the decade yet echoing sentiments of past decades. At the start of our classroom discussion of “Barn Burning,” we can explain the tenets of the Fugitives, their traditional, aristocratic attitudes, and their reverence for the landed gentry life style. We can focus on the description of the de Spain home and property, with its opulence and privilege, as representative of the Agrarians version of “the good life.” Early we need to emphasize and discuss the attraction of the young boy Colonel Sartoris Snopes to the security