Loss of Innocence in Faulkner's and Joyce's Short Stories
This essay compares William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" and James Joyce's "Araby" as parallel narratives of adolescent disillusionment. Both stories feature young male narrators who, through formative confrontations with the adult world, are forced to abandon the certainties of childhood. The essay traces three shared elements: retrospective male narration, a crisis that demands moral or emotional growth, and a concluding moment of heartbreak that signals the irreversible end of innocence. In "Araby," romantic infatuation collapses under the weight of reality; in "Barn Burning," Sarty's ethical stand against his father destroys the only world he has known. Together, the stories illuminate Faulkner's claim that the human heart in conflict with itself is literature's central subject.
- Introduction: The Heart in Conflict: Thesis: both stories depict boys losing innocence
- Retrospective Narration in Both Stories: Older narrators reflect on youthful memories
- First Encounters with the Adult World: Infatuation in Araby; ethical crisis in Barn Burning
- The Destruction of Childhood at the Story's End: Both endings shatter the protagonists' innocence
- Conclusion: Parallel Losses of Innocence: Love and ethics destroy childhood for each narrator
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay anchors its argument in a well-chosen epigraph — Faulkner's own words about "the human heart in conflict with itself" — and consistently returns to that framing throughout, giving the analysis thematic unity.
- Parallel structure is used deliberately: each body paragraph addresses both texts in the same order, making the comparison easy to follow and reinforcing the claim that the two stories share a common architecture.
- Textual evidence is integrated at each key point, with page citations from both works, grounding interpretive claims in the primary sources rather than leaving them as assertion.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates parallel comparative analysis — organizing a two-text comparison thematically rather than text-by-text. Each section identifies one shared feature (narrative voice, the childhood–adulthood confrontation, the concluding loss) and shows how both stories enact it differently, then draws a synthesis. This structure prevents the essay from becoming two separate summaries pasted together.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a thesis framing the shared thematic concern, then develops three body sections: (1) the retrospective narrative stance in both stories, (2) the central crisis each narrator faces, and (3) the devastating endpoint that signals the end of childhood. A brief concluding paragraph restates the comparison and distinguishes the specific cause of each narrator's loss of innocence.
Introduction: The Heart in Conflict
William Faulkner famously said that "the human heart in conflict with itself" is the only topic worth writing about. Several short stories have proven this claim to be true. The narrators of both William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" and James Joyce's "Araby" are young men facing their first moments of conflict between childhood innocence and the adult world. Both boys — and the text makes clear that both narrators are male — tell of moments in their youth when they first came to realize that childhood would not last forever. Each boy has reached a point where he must choose between following his own convictions and submitting to the mandates of the adults around him. The stories share three key elements: a young male first-person narrator, an experience with the adult world that forces growth and maturity, and a conclusion marked by heartbreak as each boy enters the world of men with sadness and pessimism.
Retrospective Narration in Both Stories
Both Joyce's "Araby" and Faulkner's "Barn Burning" feature a narrator who speaks from the perspective of an older man reflecting upon memories of his youth. In the opening of "Araby," the narrator says, "North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boy free" (Joyce 1). This establishes that the narrator is speaking from some point in the future; the use of past-tense verbs indicates he is reflecting on a memory rather than describing present events. Similarly, the narrator of "Barn Burning" reveals himself to be speaking on behalf of a young boy — a child still young enough to believe his father without exception, even when that father is not on the side of the law.
First Encounters with the Adult World
In both stories the narrator is experiencing his first brush with the barrier between childhood and adulthood. In Joyce's "Araby," a young boy is completely infatuated with a girl in his neighborhood. "I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her… Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance" (Joyce 1). The boy has barely spoken to this girl, yet she intrudes upon his every thought. This is the nature of innocent infatuation and the beginning of the path toward adulthood. Not yet mature enough to comprehend the limits of his own emotion, the narrator feels he will remain enamored of this vision for the rest of his life.
In place of a love interest, the young boy in "Barn Burning" is facing an ethical crisis. His father has committed arson in the past and is preparing to do so again. The child understands, before his father even leaves the house, what is about to happen. The previous time, the father sent a messenger to warn the intended victims; this time he will not (Faulkner 28). Father and son face each other at this crossroads. At the story's opening, Sarty would not have dared act against his father's wishes, but now he has made up his mind. Even if it means the complete rupture of his family, the child will do what he believes is right and warn the barn owner of his father's intentions.
Conclusion: Parallel Losses of Innocence
Both "Barn Burning" and "Araby" examine what it is like for a young man who finds himself facing the end of childhood and the beginning of his entrance into the adult world. Though short works, both use considerable skill to place the reader in the seat of the protagonist and invite the reader to follow the narrator — and in some sense to feel what he feels. For both young men, the reader watches a childhood disintegrate. In Joyce's case, the child loses his innocence because love's reality cannot match his romantic imagination. Sarty in "Barn Burning" loses his innocence by taking a stand against his father, something no child still safely within childhood would dare to do.
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. "Barn Burning." Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner. New York, NY: Random House, 1993. Print.
Joyce, James. "Araby." Web. 2012. http://fiction.eserver.org/short/araby.html
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