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Barn Burning | Introduction

William Faulkner's ‘‘Barn Burning’’ (1939) comes from the mid-point of its author's career and finds its creator in consummate control of the modernist devices that he, more than any other, had brought to American prose: stream-of-consciousness narration, decadent and even culturally degenerate settings, extended sentences—interrupted by qualifying clauses—that give the effect of continuously suspended or deferred resolution of the action, and images of extreme violence. These modernist gestures disturbed Faulkner's early readers, and critics reacted harshly to his works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as the novels The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932). Faulkner stood accused of excessive mannerism and obscurity, and of a morbid interest in unhealthy types. Northerners found his depiction of the unassimilated South too regional and Southerners found it too harsh and scandalous to be acceptable.

Before he developed his signature style, however, Faulkner had proven himself a powerful writer of ordinary, perfectly accessible prose. A good example of this is the early story "Turnabout" (1925), in which an American aviator in World War I befriends a British torpedo-boat pilot and comes to see the conflict from a perspective less remote and abstract than that provided by aerial bombing. To some extent, ''Barn Burning'' represents a compromise between the brutal themes of Faulkner's high modernist style and the accessibility of his early prose. The result is still a powerful, more-straightforward-than-usual, glimpse into the author's fictional world.

Barn Burning Summary

The opening scene of ‘‘Barn Burning’’ finds the story's protagonist, a ten-year-old named Colonel Sartoris or "Sarty," waiting with his father, Abner Snopes, in a Southern small-town general store being used as a courtroom; the time is ten or fifteen years after the Civil War. As we learn from the interior monologue through which Faulkner conveys all of the story's events, Ab Snopes has been called into court on a charge of arson by his landlord-employer. (Ab is a sharecropper, someone who ''rents'' farmland by promising to remit part of his harvest to the property owner). Sarty is acutely aware of the physical aspects of the place, the aroma of the goods, the appearance of cans and jars on the shelves. His overwhelming thought is of an enemy, ''ourn! mine and hisn both!'' The reference is to the plaintiff. Faulkner underscores Sarty's sense of family loyalty to his father.

Mr. Harris, who charges Ab with the crime of burning his barn, explains how Ab's hog ruined his corn, how he took the hog as payment for the damage, and how Ab sent a go-between to him with the message that ‘‘wood and hay kin burn,’’ which he interpreted as a threat against his life and property. Sarty knows that Ab did set the fire (Ab is, in fact, in the habit of setting fires) and knows also that his father expects him to lie in court. Sarty never testifies. The justice of the peace finds insufficient evidence and dismisses the... » Complete Barn Burning Summary