Barn Burning, Roselily, and A Woman on a Roof Analyzed

Barn Burning: Loyalty, Justice, and Symbolic Conflict

William Faulkner leaves us in suspense at the end of a turbulent sequence of events titled "Barn Burning." Who killed whom? We could speculate from other books, perhaps, but this discussion is limited to the words of the story itself. Given that strict constraint, we do not really know. Sarty watches De Spain and his horse vanish in the distance and hears three shots, which he assumes kill his father at least, and perhaps his older brother as well. We will adopt this widest assumption while acknowledging that a fuller analysis would have to explore other possibilities. The result for Sarty is the same: he runs away from his father, his brother, and the women's culture regardless of who pulled which trigger at the De Spain barn.

By way of convention: Abner Snopes is designated here as "AS," De Spain as "DS," and Sarty as "CSS" — for brevity, but also for abstraction, because we are dealing with abstractions Faulkner ("WF") sets up through symbolic equations that permeate the entire allegory. These equations reveal the larger conflict WF presents between the cultures represented by each and every character.

Sarty's point of view is the primary lens through which the limited-omniscient, third-person narrative unfolds. Sarty is the "last man standing" and outlives all the other characters to reflect on these events "twenty years later" (4). Sarty identifies with his father from the opening vignette, wanting to lie for him — which CSS is willing to do, but only out of fear. He knows his father is wrong and guilty, though he finds that unpleasant to admit. This is the first we learn of any of these characters, but the conflict becomes thematic by the end. The father uses force to compel the son's loyalty to family rather than to wider abstractions of justice and fairness, because he knows the son already questions his moral inheritance (4). The father has no such scruples and is trying to train them out of the boy.

Is this assertion important? The father is an outlaw barn burner, yet he uses the legal system to sue De Spain. The family works for their keep, but Sarty is never allowed to forget the bullet in AS's foot — a wound earned stealing horses from the very army whose officer he named his youngest son after. WF tells us directly that the fires AS sets are the "one weapon for the preservation of integrity" against "all men, blue or gray" (4), which AS has harbored all of Sarty's life, unleashing it only as a last resort but with "voracious prodigality" (4) and to catastrophic effect.

Hence the conflict Sarty symbolizes: the unification of his own inherent youthful truthfulness — recognized by the Justice of the Peace (p. 2) — against his father's "ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions" (4), a conviction that transcends universal institutions whenever they conflict with tribal self-interest. CSS is simultaneously Colonel Sartoris and a Snopes. He is part officer of a locally recognized, landed, agricultural aristocracy that rebelled against but was defeated by larger democratic institutions, and part individual who constitutes, uses, attacks, and is expelled by that same institution as pragmatic self-interest dictates. Sarty is aristocrat and sharecropper, feudal serf and colonialist at the same time. AS uses violence — that is, power — to impose an artificial division that CSS does not naturally accept. We see this in the symbols AS chooses to attack.

WF has Snopes tell us directly that he attacks Justice by forcing CSS to identify with his "own blood" instead of the collective — "any man there this morning," all of whom are out to "get at" him because he believes himself superior to them (4). What does his other target, De Spain, symbolize? DS owns AS "body and soul" (5), at least for a time. This is tantamount to slavery (7), to which AS must voluntarily submit now that he has a family — a circumstance that was not always the case. To AS, the De Spain mansion represents the extension of slavery and thus aristocracy over the poor white, an affront his ruthless individualism finds impossible to accept, escape, or overcome.

The DS plantation is rooted among "oaks and cedars" (5) rather than the "locust and mulberry" (3) from which Sarty's vagabond family wandered across the small holdings other families had managed to stake out (5). At the moment Sarty views the De Spain palace, he identifies it with Justice — "a courthouse" (5) — and thus with "peace and joy" (5), "perfection" (7), and above all safety from his brutal father (5). He wishes this vision could change his father, but the father's sense of injury runs too deep. AS tries to teach Sarty and implicate him in attacking the slaver — sending him to fetch the arson oil on page 12 — and it almost works: Sarty himself lashes out against his own dream of peace, defending his blood against De Spain directly (9, 11) and through the intermediary Justice of the Peace (10) in spite of himself. But finally his deeper nature gains the upper hand, leading him to choose justice and thus escape from the unresolvable conflict — effectively by betraying his father to De Spain, which results in the father's death. The Colonel sends the Major to finish a war no boy could win on his own.