Barn Burning Essay, Research Paper
?Barn Burning? by William Faulkner was written in the
ebb of the 1930?s in a decade of social, economic, and
cultural decline. This story offers insight into the past
years for students to learn of the nation and the South.
This story shows the racial segregation that took place in
these times between the white landowners and white tenant
farmers, the blacks and the whites, and the poor white trash
class and the blacks.
The Snopes?s family was in the social class of the
poor, white tenant farmers. The father, Abner Snopes, had
to struggle to provide for his family. In the family there
were the mother and her sister, two daughters, and two sons.
The older son, Flem, worked with Abner, and the younger son,
Sarty, helped with the chores. Sarty, along with others, had
trouble understanding his father?s way of life and his
attitude towards society. Abner was a harsh man. His
crusade as a sharecropper exploited his inner feelings of
resentment towards the landowners. Having little or no
patience with each new situation, he resorted to the only
thing that he was diligently, effectively good at, burning
barns. His insensitivity to his family, landowners, their
families, and especially the blacks depicted him as a menace
to society. Pictured as ?poor, white trash?, Abner?s
struggle to be better than the ?nigger? race was a never-
ending battle, always ending in defeat. He invariably
resorted to retrieving some sort of satisfaction by
destroying wealthy landowners property, barns. Abner?s
inability to rise above the label of ?poor, white trash? led
to his demise as a functional part of society. He used the
barn burnings as a way of getting back at society for
suppressing him. He felt that people owed him and when he
did not receive, he resorted to destructive measures. He
felt that the tactics he employed were the only real way to
deal with the problem at hand. Another side of Abner tends
to go deeper than what appears on the surface. Although we
are not told in the story precisely why he burns barns, the
real reason may be deeper, or should we say internal. This
reason never foretold probably came out of his early
childhood. His parents? and other sharecroppers? homes may
have been destroyed by fire, therefore, leaving a
psychopathic desire to get even with society. Through this
deep-rooted psychopathic behavior, Abner incorporates barn
burning into every situation that he has difficulty
understanding.
The reader is intended to see Abner as only a surface
character, but internally, he is rather complex. You never
know what little things other than the obvious will set him
off. He has many conflicts going on at the same time. His
physical conflicts, those with landowners, and family
members, are very open to the reader. His internal
conflicts are intimated through actions and deeds performed
by him. He is true to his character because the end result
is always the same, even at the end when it costs him his
life. Abner felt he was justified in burning barns, not only
to relieve the internal pressure, but also to get even for
all the things that had gone wrong in his life. He felt he
was giving back to society what society had dealt to him.
Prentice Hall Inc. Literature. Upper Saddle River: New
Jersey, 1998.