Barn Burning

Many of William Faulkner’s short stories, including “Barn Burning,” are set in Mississippi in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Faulkner seeks to portray the decay of the Deep South following the social and economic turmoil of the US Civil War and Reconstruction.

“Barn Burning” addresses the struggle between social, economic, and racial classes in the South in the era after the Civil War. The Snopeses are poor tenant farmers who do not own the land they cultivate. This fact seems to cause resentment in Abner Snopes, which is a contributing factor in his arsons and other dangerous acts. Moreover, Snopes refers negatively to the Black people in the story, threatening them, physically harming them, and belittling them. Snopes’s behaviors speak to a need to inflict suffering upon the only people considered less than himself: Black people and those who were formerly enslaved. Snopes attempts to prop himself up socially and economically through attacks on those “beneath” him. Of course, Snopes also attacks those who are socially and economically above his station, which implies that he is a man at odds with and angered over his social and economic standing in post-Civil War Mississippi.

Although the year of the story’s setting is left vague, the lack of references to automobiles and other mechanical features of the 20th century implies that “Barn Burning” is set not long after the Civil War. Snopes is described as a veteran of the war, though his rank, station, and loyalty are questionable. The narrator says that Snopes

had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did: for booty—it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own (18).

The trappings of the opulent white aristocracy of pre-Civil War Mississippi appear in “Barn Burning.” Major de Spain’s home, for example, is a former plantation house. Yet, much of the setting is poor—the court proceedings are held in a store, and even the Justice of the Peace is described as dressed shabbily.

Sartoris’s mother’s dowry also provides a clue as to the economic problems facing the family. The narrator describes it as “the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother’s dowry” (3). The clock, broken and showing a “forgotten day and time” is a symbol of post-Civil War Mississippi. The clock was once valuable, but its time has passed and left behind something useless and broken. The Snopes family carries the broken clock with them as a heavy reminder of what once was—just as the South does after the Civil War.