"Barn Burning:" Family vs. Morality

The theme of Faulkner's "Barn Burning" is Sarty Snopes's desire to break away from the oppressive conditions of his family life. Sarty gains this freedom when he decides to warn the de Spains because his father's violation of his own sort of morality liberates him from what he calls the "pull of blood," or duty to his family.

The narrator describes Sarty's father, Abner Snopes, as such: "There was something about his wolf-like independence and even courage . . . which impressed strangers, as if they got . . . a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lies with his" (218-19). Sarty believed in this conviction of his father's. He was prepared to defend his father at the first trial: "He aims for me to lie, he thought, and I will have to do hit," and he fights the boy twice his size who calls out, "Barn burner!" (217-18). Still, he hopes that the fires will end, thinking, "Maybe he's done satisfied now," but when Abner begins to set ablaze his next barn, Sarty extinguishes the family ties (218). This time his father breaks his own moral code by not sending anyone to warn. Sarty pleads, "Ain't you even going to send a [slave]?" "At least you sent a [slave] before!" (227).

This violation liberates Sarty from the "the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself" (227). During the first trial, as Sarty prepares himself to defend his father he experiences, "the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood" (216). Abner discerns this apprehension, and later warns him, "You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you" (219). When Major de Spain admonishes Abner for the soiled rug, fining him twenty bushels of corn, Sarty is hopeful, "Maybe it will all add up and vanish-corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses-gone, done with for ever and ever" (225). And so it does. However, it takes Sarty's painful severance of the family ties to make this so.

If Abner's violation of his own code is the impetus for Sarty's breaking away, why didn't the whole Snopes family run defiantly to the de Spain's home? It is because this breach of standards comes at an impressionable stage of Sarty's life, while he still bares "the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his few years . . . not heavy enough to keep him footed solid in [the world], to resist it and try to change the course of its events" (220). This "handicap" allows him, unlike the others, to see the wrong committed by his father and to strive to prevent its disastrous consequences.

The "pull of blood" is not strong enough to corrupt Sarty, to make him into what he seems destined to become. Together his father's offense and his own youthful sensitivity lead Sarty to his noble decision to warn the de Spain's.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. "Barn Burning." Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1997. 216-30.