Barn Burning | The Narrator of Faulkner's "Barn Burning"
In the following essay, she discusses Faulkner's narrative technique in ''Barn Burning.''
Faulkner's short story ‘‘Barn Burning’’ poses a problem for me as a reader in that the narrator seems in several instances more intent upon explaining and justifying Abner's barn-burning than in registering the pain his family suffers in the context of these fires. The often quoted fire-building passage provides a good illustration:
The nights were still cool and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and cut into lengths—a small fire, neat, niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his father's habit and custom...
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