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.
Symbols & Motifs
Fire
Fire appears throughout “Barn Burning” and symbolizes some of the story’s themes. Prior to the second barn burning, Sartoris describes Snopes’s dress and manner as “at once formal and burlesque as though dressed carefully for some shabby and ceremonial violence” (15). For Snopes, starting a fire is a mode of practiced, ceremonial violence. His strange control and premeditated, cold rage make him terrifying. Yet his manner ironically lacks the warmth and passion of a fire: “There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral” (4). Snopes’s tight, rigid control of a wild element, like fire, symbolizes his inhuman self-control and penchant for ceremonial acts of violence.
Major de Spain’s House
Major de Spain’s house symbolizes the opulence of a time long past and the world it represents incites Snopes to quiet rage and violence. Upon seeing the house, Sartoris says, “the spell of this peace and dignity render […] even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive” (6). Major de Spain’s house represents the pre-Reconstruction South, and incited by his jealousies and anger, Snopes is a destructive element. Perhaps due to his youth and inexperience, Sartoris believes the calm grandeur of the estate will render it impervious to his father’s destruction. Yet the estate’s elegance incites his father’s violence even more. Snopes hates the social hierarchies of the South—not because they offend his sense of justice but because luck placed him on a low rung. The estate’s expression of the antebellum social order, which persists into Reconstruction, provokes Snopes to the confrontation at the story’s climax.
Abner Snopes’s “Stiff Foot”
Although Snopes is an arsonist, his manner is strangely controlled. Sartoris describes his father’s careful use of controlled violence on multiple occasions, mentioning things like his father’s tendency to hit or punish “not savagely or viciously, just hard” (15). Abner Snopes is described as possessing a “ravening ferocity” and a “ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions” (4). While many rage-filled characters come across as wild and uncontrolled, Snopes calculates his moves with precision, so that when he makes a move, it is a carefully planned act of revenge. Snopes steps with “absolutely undeviating course” and his “stiff foot come squarely down” repeatedly in acts of calculated violence (7). But beneath his strict, straight-backed exterior is a “ravening and jealous rage” (7). In short, Abner possesses a “stiff foot” for violence and hatred that, to Sartoris, feels unstoppable and powerful.
Related Titles
By William Faulkner
