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.
Character Analysis
Colonel Sartoris Snopes
As the protagonist and narrator of “Barn Burning,” young Colonel Sartoris Snopes drives the central conflict of the story. Torn between loyalty to his father and a desire to do what is morally and legally right, Sartoris makes a split-second decision with dire consequences. Sartoris’s internal conflict is present from the beginning when the narrator describes “the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood” (1). Sartoris is called upon by “the old fierce pull of blood” to protect and lie for his father, Abner Snopes, an arsonist and outsider with little care for his employers, other townspeople, or the law. The “fierce pull” comes with “despair and grief” because Sartoris is bothered by his father’s cold, unfeeling behavior.
Sartoris is made in his father’s image: “small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud” (2). Despite his obvious desire to tell the truth, Sartoris identifies his father’s accusers as “his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!)” (1). Sartoris, driven by his love for and loyalty to his father, desires to protect Abner from his worst impulses, but the narrator’s description of Sartoris’s unconscious thoughts reveals another desire: “Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be” (12). Despite his love for his father, Sartoris recognizes the cruelty in Snopes’s actions and desires his father to change, to become a law-abiding man. For Sartoris, telling the truth, and letting his father pay the price of justice, is an option because he hopes just punishment will cure Snopes of the anger and resentment that colors all his judgments and actions.
Sartoris is driven by a desire to end the conflict within his own heart. He wants to be free of the “terror and fear” and “grief and despair” brought about by Snopes’s choices. In vain, Sartoris hopes that his father being caught and judged according to the law “will all add up and balance and vanish—corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses—gone, done with for ever and ever” (12).
Abner Snopes
A main character, partial antagonist, and the main driver of the physical action of the story, Abner Snopes is made larger-than-life by his son’s thoughts about him as conveyed in the third-person limited narration. Despite being told from Sartoris’s point of view, “Barn Burning” is a story about his father. As the events unfold, it becomes clear that Sartoris’s understanding of his father is distorted by the influences of love, pride, loyalty, and youth.
The first inkling of Snopes’s true character comes from Sartoris. He describes his father’s calculating manner as a “wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral” (4). Sartoris is awed by his father’s apparent courage and personal conviction, but he is also deeply afraid of Snopes and wants to please him. Faulkner’s use of foreshadowing reveals deeper truths about Snopes. In one scene, after Sartoris mentions his father’s use of small campfires, Faulkner explains what an older Sartoris will learn about Snopes’s past. For him, fire was
the living fruit of nights passed during those four years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called them) […] as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion (5).
Although Sartoris believes him to have been a Confederate soldier, Snopes worked more as a free agent, loyal to no one except himself. Snopes is propelled to heinous acts by contempt for his fellow man. Despite his talk to Sartoris about loyalty and blood, Snopes’s choice to place his family in economic and social jeopardy to further his need for retribution speaks to Snopes’s selfish, uncaring nature.
Lennie Snopes
Snopes’s wife and Sartoris’s mother, Lennie, plays a lesser role in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” Lennie’s presence is largely unseen and thematic. Early in the story, Faulkner describes “the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten day and time” (3), which was Lennie’s dowry. The clock, ornate and useless, has stopped, marking a long-forgotten “day and time.” Thematically, the clock, like Lennie, represents what Faulkner sees as the forever changed, dying elements of the pre-Civil War South. Lennie is capable, strong, and willing to work; she represents a strength of class and social conditioning that, in Faulkner’s view, has become obsolete after the war and is slowly being replaced by the fruit of constant economic and social hardship, which is represented in the behaviors and personalities of the other members of the family.
The Snopes Family
Although Snopes and Sartoris are round characters, the rest of the Snopes family is more of an archetype or thematic motif than individualized characters. Sartoris’s brother and sisters are not given names, and their relevance to the plot is minimal. Snopes and Sartoris are deeply analyzed in “Barn Burning,” but the rest of the characters, including the three other Snopes children, are secondary.
In contrast to Lennie Snopes and her sister, the two Snopes daughters are not shown to be particularly capable or bright. They are consistently lazy, uninterested in work, and described as being like domesticated animals: “The two sisters got down, big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons” (5). They are shown to be weak-minded and frivolous, and their demeanors are consistently contrasted to that of Lennie and her sister to highlight the destruction of social order in the South after the Civil War; the Snopes daughters are part of a social commentary on the destruction of class values after the social re-shuffling of Reconstruction.
Related Titles
By William Faulkner
