This essay offers a close reading of three short works of fiction — William Faulkner's "Barn Burning," Alice Walker's "Roselily," and Doris Lessing's "A Woman on a Roof" — examining how each author uses symbolism, narrative perspective, and social conflict to explore themes of power, loyalty, class, race, and gender. The analysis traces Sarty Snopes's conflict between family loyalty and universal justice, Roselily's entrapment within competing cultural and religious worlds, and the gendered dynamics of control and projection played out across a London rooftop. Together the three works illuminate how individual characters become vehicles for larger cultural and ideological conflicts.
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.
This much is fairly overt, but there is a deeper level. AS's outrage at being enslaved (7) is mirrored in his treatment of women. The Snopes patriarch is no stranger to Black people, employing them for communications and commerce he personally disdains (2) or simply pushing them aside when they bar his way (6). But what the patriarch does not seem to understand is that his own exploitation of his family places him in the same position he attacks in the person of De Spain. We find that the rug — and in fact the whole house — are Mrs. De Spain's (9), at least symbolically; AS makes the younger women clean up the mess he has made for them all. He equates the family's women with hogs (5) and sabotages the very labor he creates for them, driving them to complete it against their own and their mother's protests (7). CSS sees the younger women throughout as cattle, and De Spain takes this arrangement for granted (9), which generalizes it into a social system. If this parallel is not deliberate on Faulkner's part, then the misogyny is Faulkner's own — though that does not undermine the assertion that AS is himself a slaver. While the elder women are industrious (5), they hold no real authority, and the younger generation openly balks at the arrangement.
In fact, there is no evidence that the senior Snopes performs any physical labor at all. He excels at sauntering around town and teaching his sons the codes of men's culture. The older son has already internalized this perfectly, becoming the docile subordinate: he abets his father in attacking De Spain, leads the field labor without apparent complaint, and chews tobacco. Sarty, by contrast, is able to work alongside his sisters rather than attempting to dominate them — evidence that AS's conditioning has not fully taken hold. If the sisters rebel against AS, Mrs. De Spain commits a dual offense: she refuses to be walked on, and she enjoys the fruits of an aristocracy Snopes will not subordinate himself before. AS does not see himself as a slave but as a master; he therefore destroys her rug — ever the opportunist — to even the score.
The end result is telling. Although Sarty finally breaks from his father's pattern of retributive justice, once the patriarchal threat is removed he mythologizes the father he has effectively killed, while the women of the family are simply abandoned altogether, without an apparent second thought from anyone. They cease to exist in the narrative.
"Roselily" presents an altogether different situation: its protagonist is not being abandoned but taken up, up the river, to a city she has never seen. Alice Walker breaks the familiar marriage vows into their component pieces and sets them against an image of Black people standing beneath the sky, joining together what no man may put asunder — a woman and a man from two cultures in conflict. What Walker has done is to separate the lines of the marriage ceremony so we understand them differently than when they are read in their traditional sequence. This structure provides pacing that allows us to see how jumpy Roselily's thinking is before her fateful vow — a vow not important enough for us actually to hear.
Likewise, this very short story rewards analysis when broken into its component pieces. Roselily is looking forward to a new life she fears, and back at one she knows but wants to leave. Her new husband stands before her: like the people on the lawn but separated from them by religion and culture, having come from the city to carry her back with him to a place she knows nothing about, except that she may escape the familiar, well-wishing people who nonetheless "crush" her (3). His free hand clasps hers like an "iron gate" (3), and while he is not cold, he is stern and distant — a quality that nearly overwhelms the hope that she can escape her past. It is his peace, not hers, that the vows promise. He seems at peace — monumental, like Lincoln freeing her to a new and uncertain future, one that will no longer be "backward," "ignorant," and "wrong" (3). He may be right, but she does not share his peace. She experiences something closer to its opposite.
"Religion, race, and competing forms of bondage"
"Three workmen project gendered authority onto a sunbather"
She is not all women. There are other women in the story with different preferences and habits; she is only one. But the men single her out for their own reasons, reasons ultimately provoked by an unusual weather event. If the workers ever fry and devour "an egg from some woman," it will not be she who caters to their appetite.
Across all three works, Faulkner, Walker, and Lessing place individual characters at the intersection of competing cultural systems — systems defined by class, race, gender, and power. The short story form proves especially well suited to this purpose, compressing these conflicts into moments of crisis that expose the larger social structures undergirding everyday life. Sarty escapes his father's world only by destroying it; Roselily trades one form of constraint for another; and the unnamed sunbather simply endures. In each case the individual's fate is inseparable from the culture that shapes, traps, or expels them.
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