28 pages • 56 minutes read
William FaulknerBarn Burning
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Family Loyalty
In “Barn Burning,” Sartoris is torn between loyalty to his father and his own sense of morality. Sartoris struggles to reconcile his love and admiration for his father with his father’s reprehensible actions. On the surface, Sartoris believes that his father’s actions are morally wrong and dangerous. However, shifts in point of view and tone also reveal that, over time, Sartoris comes to realize that his image of his father is flawed. The key conflict in the story, and the conflict at the core of Sartoris’s character, is the “fierce pull” of loyalty that he feels for his father, despite all the bad his father does. The narrator says,
The old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it came to him. I could keep on, he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again. Only I can’t. I can’t (15).
Faulkner explores how far loyalty extends in times of stress. Sartoris represents the struggle between loyalty—to family, friends, causes, and community—and moral rightness. Faulkner ponders the question: is blood loyalty stronger than the human sense of right and wrong? Although Sartoris’s struggle is individual, personal, and familial, Faulkner’s examination, through its setting and focus on the post-Civil War American South, ponders the loyalty that leads communities and countries to fight for causes that are unsound or unjust. What is it that leads good people to support bad causes? Faulkner seems to postulate that loyalty to one’s family and community can complicate questions of moral rightness. At the end of the story, Sartoris turns on his father; he goes against his instinct to protect his family in order to do what is morally right. Afterward, Sartoris grieves for his father, but he also experiences a type of freedom: “hugging himself into the remainder of his thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair” (18).
Inheritance
Two phrases appear consistently in Faulkner’s story. While the “fierce pull” of familial connections indicates the importance of family loyalty, the second phrase focuses more intently on the weight of those family ties across generations: “the old grief of blood” (2). Faulkner focuses on the Snopes family to explore the inheritance of suffering, belief, and immoral acts. Snopes was loyal only to himself during the war. Yet, despite his lack of loyalty, Snopes demands extreme loyalty from his family, especially Sartoris: “You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this morning, would?” (5).
Faulkner explores the relationship between Snopes and Sartoris to comment upon inheritance. Although Sartoris, his mother, and his siblings have not done anything that warrants exclusion and ridicule by the community, they inherit the stain of their father’s lack of loyalty. Sartoris literally inherits the stain of his father’s violence through physical attacks on his person, and it is implied that the Snopes family has suffered financially and emotionally as a result of the father’s actions, both during and after the war. Faulkner illustrates the depth of the family’s suffering at the beginning of the story when Sartoris describes the “sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember—the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run” (3). Faulkner implies that violence, grief, and disloyalty are inherited and passed through generations as an inescapable weight.
Crime and Justice
Sartoris and his father represent conflicting ideals. “Barn Burning” is the story of Snopes’s quest for revenge and Sartoris’s desire for justice. At the start of the story, Sartoris hopes for justice—even if that justice is at his father’s expense, and Snopes casts a large, dark shadow over the narrative. When Snopes and Sartoris walk up to Major de Spain’s manor house, the differences between the two characters and their motivations are made clear: “walking on in the spell of the house, which he [Sartoris] could even want but without envy, without sorrow, certainly never with that ravening and jealous rage which unknown to him walked in the ironlike black coat before him” (7). Faulkner often describes Snopes with terms reminiscent of metal; he is “ironlike” and “stiff,” and although he simmers with a “ravening and jealous rage,” Snopes’s manner is cold and controlled. Snopes is terrifying because he is in control of his darker impulses and still chooses to act on them.
Conversely, Sartoris is swayed by a desire to do what is right, and his struggle revolves around his understanding of justice. Faulkner opens with Sartoris imitating his father’s beliefs and manner. For example, Sartoris shows and feels hostility toward the judge at the beginning of the story: “Enemy! Enemy! he thought; for a moment he could not even see, could not see that the Justice’s face was kindly nor discern that his voice was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris” (2). As the story goes on, Sartoris’s inner monologue reveals that he does not agree with his father’s actions. Sartoris’s inner monologue shifts from that of young Sartoris to an older, wiser Sartoris who reflects with more nuance upon his father’s actions. The shifts in perspective serve to highlight Faulkner’s thematic focus on justice and revenge. While young Sartoris repeats his father’s dark sentiments and does not recognize or understand his father’s immoral and vengeful spirit, the voice of an older, wiser Sartoris cuts through, giving the reader a stronger understanding of Snopes’s cruelty. The shift in perspective also reveals that Sartoris’s understanding grows over time to encompass justice despite his father’s influence.
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