Barn Burning Group

Question:

graciela67
graciela67
Student

Is there a setting described in William Faulkner's "Barn Burning"?

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Posted by graciela67 on Saturday July 25, 2009 at 9:17 AM and tagged with settings.

Answers:

  1. sarahsmilesalot
    sarahsmilesalot Teacher
    Middle School

    If you approach your question from the point of view of a movie director, imagine flying towards the setting of William Faulkner's short story, Barn Burning. Based on the dialog, your plane would certainly be circling over America's southland at a time when tobacco was king and barns for drying the crop dotted the countryside.  If you can see the scene, Graciela67, you've found the story's place and time. 

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    Posted by sarahsmilesalot on Saturday July 25, 2009 at 10:55 AM

  2. mwestwood
    mwestwood Teacher
    Community / Jr. College

    eNotes Editor

    Written in 1939, William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" is set in a time period that is at least twenty years after the Civil War A Rhe story opens with a trial held in a make-shift courtroom in a general store in a small Southern town.  It becomes apparent that the town is in the South when judge orders Mr. Snopes to "leave this country" and Snopes follows the judge out, 

    walking a little stiffly from where a Confederate provost's man's musket ball had taken him in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago.

    That the family is named Snopes indicates that the setting is in William Faulkner's fictional county in Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha, (also part of the South) since several of his narratives include this family.

    Sources:
    http://www.enotes.com/barn-burning

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    Posted by mwestwood on Saturday July 25, 2009 at 11:02 AM