Barn Burning Summary & Analysis

The fact that a country store is also being used as a courtroom underlines the rural setting of the story, while Sarty’s sensitivity to the smell of meat and cheese suggests that he may be hungry and his family poor. That he sees his “sense of loyalty to his blood” as a feeling also establishes how that feeling of family loyalty is treated in the story as instictual, as being a deeply embedded and inescapable part of a person.

With a fierce burst of loyalty, Sarty aligns his own feelings with those of his father. He sees – has been trained to see – anyone opposing his father as not just someone who disagrees but as “enemy.”

Mr. Harris is describing the actions of Sarty’s father, whom Harris portrays as wilfully defiant and careless about other people’s property. This is also the story’s first case of derogatory language used to describe African Americans, a word that was often used by whites at the time.

Sarty initially imagines that he’s only an observer, that he can’t have any part to play in this trial. But in being called on to testify it is made clear that he is implicated in his father’s actions. His resemblance to his father further highlights that familial connection, while also suggesting the way that inheritances are passed down in families in ways that the family-members themselves can’t control.

Sarty knows what Mr. Harris is saying is true, and that lying would mean going against justice, but he can’t imagine another option. Yet his frantic realization that he will lie suggests his discomfort with being made to lie, even if his loyalty to his father compels it.

Colonel Sartoris is a character in some of Faulkner’s other stories who was a noted Civil War officer. Naming Sarty after that office suggests that Abner has some sense of honor about his service during the civil war (though later in the story this sense will be deeply complicated). Anxious and afraid, Sarty deals with these feelings by continuing to remind himself of the loyalties he must keep. He can’t recognize the kindness in the judge’s face as his world is defined solely by a sense of justice on one hand and loyalty to his family/father on the other.

Harris has some basic decency, and realizes – despite his frustration – that it’s unfair to make a boy testify against his father. Abner’s defiance is evident in his insistence that the Justice’s advice is no punishment, and instead is just what he already wanted. His lack of decency is evident in his unprintable curse.

Sarty often thinks of his father as stiff and upright, an aspect both of Abner’s old war wound and of his general demeanor. Sarty’s brother seems to fashion himself after his father more naturally than Sarty.

This impressionistic scene is confusing, but its confusion mimics Sarty’s own frantic feelings as he lunges unthinkingly in his father’s defense.

The clock, stopped at an unknown day and hour, reflects the family’s poverty, the mother’s attempt to cling to any small symbol of past joy, and the way in which life for the family repeats itself, making time irrelevant. Sarty’s mother cares for him in ways his father simply doesn’t, but she can never stand up to Abner.

Abner’s viciousness toward the mules reflects his actual resentment and anger, despite his assertion that he wants to leave this area. Also, note how the story often moves back and forward in time, making the family’s saga a multigenerational one, and further establishing the idea that a family’s traits are naturally and inevitably passed down.

Sarty wants desperately to be loyal to his father, but he also knows that what his father does is wrong, but finds it painful to think about. Here he hits upon the thought that his father might have set up this next house ahead of time, which would imply that he burned down Harris’s barn not in a fit of rage but in cold blood. But Sarty stops that thought before he has to face the implication.

Sarty’s father is not just rigid and despised: here we learn that his faults can also be strengths, and in another situation could well benefit the family.

The narration here uses a number of hypotheticals to, once again, shuttle between the past, present, and future, as well as to allow the reader to enter into knowledge of the father that Sarty does not now possess, including that his father’s role in the Civil War was not as honorable as Sarty thinks, as it seems to have involved stealing horses from both sides.

In another hypothetical, the narration settles on what is actually the case: that there is a deep connection between fire and Sarty’s father, for whom it represents a way for him to maintain control over a world in which he otherwise feels powerless.

In the courtroom, Sarty had believed it was necessary for him to lie, but it appears that his father saw only his fear and anxiety and interpreted that as disloyalty. Again, the story moves forward in time to suggest that in the future, Sarty will have a more confident, rational understanding of his father, and his father’s belief that family loyalty, and loyalty specifically to Abner himself, outweighs any other principle. Now, though, Sarty can only obey.

This particular journey of the family from one place to the next is the only one in this story, but we are meant to understand that such journeys define the family’s existence. While the mother and aunt are stoic and dutiful, the sisters deal with their reality with lazy passivity.

Abner’s claim about ownership underlines his resentment, but it also highlights the very real nature of sharecropping in the South, which is barely a step up from slavery (a fact that of course only increases Abner’s resentment, but also levels a subtle condemnation of the structure of Southern society more generally). Sarty, in turn, feels out of place, too old for innocence and too young for responsibility or control over his social familial situation.

Sarty’s feelings of joy and security on seeing the house make a notable contrast to his father’s sense of resentment and defiance. Here, Sarty allows himself to separate himself a small amount from his father in imagining this massive home as an impervious, safe one. His sense of his father’s inability to touch it is not a source of frustration but one of hope that such places might exist, even, for him. And yet this sense dissolved when he looks again at his father and sees his inexorable resentment and anger.

Sarty still has the capacity to imagine that his father might change, that he might be affected by the beauty of the house just like he was. But his father’s purposeful step into the horse dung along with his stiffness and rigidity signal that Sarty’s dreams of his father changing are no more than that: dreams.

Abner’s behavior here, insane as it is, seems completely planned out: from stepping in the horse dung to soiling the rug. It is clear, then, that Abner is purposely and proactively announcing his defiance, that regardless of his status as a sharecropper he refusese to acknowledge the superiority of the landholders for whom he works. That the black servants are so much better dressed than Abner only further emphasizes his social position, and feeds his resentment and need to assert superiority, which he does by ordering the servants around and calling them by racial epithets.

Abner has such contempt for the servants that he barely considers them as other people: instead, he is fixated on the defiant purpose at hand, ruining the rug. Meanwhile, the story subtly implies through the black servants horror that they don’t just fear Abner but also what de Spain will do to them when he finds out what they couldn’t stop happening. The story thereby subtly portrays how racism in the South was deeply embedded everywhere (not just in Abner), even if it took many forms.

Abner’s ugly prejudices reveal that he feels himself superior than both the blacks who built the house, and the whites who deigned to hire them. He manages his resentment and prejudice in such a way that, by his logic, only he is truly pure or superior.

Sarty, his mother, and his aunt all take up the necessary work of chores and errands, while his sisters refuse to join in (and their mother seems unwilling to force them to). Sarty may be too young to influence his father, but he is aware enough to pay close attention to everything around him. Meanwhile, the dropping-off of the rug indicates that de Spain expects Abner to clean what he soiled, but the passive aggressive way in which it is dropped off also shows the way that de Spain simply and naturally expects such cleaning to occur not only because Abner should clean up the mess he made, but because Abner, as an inferior, should of course show deference to de Spain.

While it was Abner who soiled the rug, he now takes pleasure in asserting his own authority within the family by ordering his wife and children around. His wife wants to avoid conflict at all costs, but even that is something overrules.

Abner seems to enjoy ordering his daughters to work. However, in throwing the stone into the wash pot he also renders the washing effort useless, since now the rug will be stained and even more ruined. His wife fears this, but Abner seems unable or unwilling to stop himself from defiantly showing his independence from his “superiors” through destructive acts.

Sarty often perceives his father as almost two-dimensional, a flat though intimidating silhouette: it is as if flattening his father in his mind is a way for him to try to come to terms with his father’s incomprehensible decisions and impenetrable mind.

Abner often does seem to want his son around, but not to help or assist him in anyway—merely as a witness to his actions. Perhaps he is providing a model for his son to follow, as Sarty’s brother seems to have learned to do, or perhaps for Abner his defiance only can register if it is witnessed.

Major de Spain seems more surprised than angry, which only underlines the rarity of someone in a position so far beneath him ever even being able to cause him harm. Their economic statuses, indeed, are so radically distinct that the Major struggles to find a punishment that might be “fair” for both, as the rug in house costs more than Abner will make in a lifetime. The economic inequality on display in the story is staggering.

Sarty almost instinctively begins to blurt out expressions of loyalty to his father about how they’ll never give up the twenty bushels, yet despite Abner’s prior insistence that Sarty be loyal to him, here he’s just as dispassionate to his son as to the Major.

Unlike his sisters, and unlike his father, Sarty knows how to work hard and obey authority—an element of his “blood” that seems to stem from another member of the family, his mother. As he has before, here Sarty tries to imagine an alternate reality to his situation in which his father changes and does not pursue the kind of “justice” than the one his father insists on. That Sarty even thinks of “fire” as part of the “balance,” though, shows that Sarty already senses that his father is going to resort to burning things. Even as he hopes that things will change, Sarty’s inclusion of a “fire” that has not occurred in his thoughts shows that nothing will.

This court scene is in many ways a repetition of the one that started the story, though this time it’s Abner who is trying to turn the system of justice to his own advantage by bringing a case against de Spain. Once again, the Major seems more incredulous than angry that Abner has dared to challenge his proper place in the world.

To ten-year-old Sarty, his father’s various misdeeds meld into one. He thinks he’s been given another chance to defend his father and does so with vigor – he’s always looking to gain his father’s favor, to show his loyalty to his blood, though such a desire to do so communicates Sarty’s conflicted feelings about that loyalty.

At first, Abner does seem to want the Justice to understand him and confirm his sense of his own rightness. When it looks like the Justice is challenging his account, however, Abner refuses to participate any longer.

This time the Justice does find against Abner, but like the Major he tries to find a fair balance between the two parties’ vastly different social situations—but such “fairness” only further highlights that ultimate difference between de Spain and Abner’s situations, and that is never something Abner will abide.

Sarty continues to try to win his father over by showing that he’s on his father’s side. Abner’s uncharacteristically gentle response that they’ll wait until October seems to indicate a kind of mellowing, but also might indicate that his father already has a plan.

The narrator, and thus the reader, know more than Sarty does about his father’s true past occupations. Here Abner exaggerates in order to make his relationship to horses sound more glamorous (rather than a horse-trader he stole horses during the war). What is evident, nonetheless, is that he does genuinely love horses. Sarty staring at the circus poster is a reminder of his youth, but also a reminder of the sort of world of fun and entertainment that is inaccessible to him.

Abner is perhaps in a better mood while boasting about horse trading: Sarty does get to eat some cheese, which he could only smell at the general store at the beginning. Though, again, Abner’s cheer might actually be an indication of a planned response to the court decision against him.

After a more pleasant lull amid the anxious activity that has characterized most of the story, Abner puts his new plot in motion. This time Sarty’s mother attempts to resist, but ineffectually. Abner’s combination of cruelty combined with a lack of outright viciousness captures the sense that he feels that he is following a kind of principle rather than just rashly acting out: he believes he must assert his defiance and independence.

As he does only rarely, Sarty allows himself to imagine a life beyond and apart from his father, from the pull of his “blood.” But at this point his connection to his father and hgis blood remains too strong for him to disobey Abner.

Even though Sarty could not bring himself to disobey his father, he continues to retain his own sense of justice—he thinks it only fair for his father to warn the Major de Spain of what he plans to do. Now Abner is once again convinced that Sarty, unlike his brother, is the one whose loyalty is up for question.

This is the only moment at which Sarty’s aunt seems to express her own opinions and desires—she too thinks that what Abner is doing is wrong, and that Sarty should be allowed to escape to warn de Spain.

Running as before, this time Sarty’s desperate racing allows him to refrain from thinking too long about what he is doing, the disloyalty that he is showing to his father. Instead he simply works based on his own instinct of justice, even as he refuses to say more than a word to the Major.

Now Sarty is caught between two homes, the mansion and the shack, and between two worlds. He knows, however, that his word to the Major has been effective, as he hears the man’s horse behind him. The Major’s own brutality in pursuit of “justice” is evident in the way he disregards Sarty’s safety, such that Sarty has to thrown himself from the road to avoid being trampled.

We are not told what has happened, but are left, like Sarty, to conjecture that Abner and possibly Sarty’s brother have been shot by the Major. The Major has enacted his own brutal “justice” in response to Abner’s “justice.”

While on his race to de Spain’s mansion Sarty was momentarily poised between two worlds, the very position of his body now underlines the fact that he has left his family behind. Once again the narration separates from Sarty’s own mind, in an instance of dramatic irony in which we come to know more about Abner than his son does. Sarty continues to feel the pull to find things to love and honor in his father, and finds it in his father’s military service as part of Colonel Sartoris’s cavalry. But the story makes it clear that his father, in fact, was just a mercenary looking for money. Sarty will never know this fact which makes his own name, given to him by his father, a kind of lie. And so, even as Sarty leaves his family, separates from his “blood,” the story makes it murky indeed about whether he can ever actually escape his familial “inheritance.”

Sarty’s stiffness serves as a final suggestion of his father’s own stiff gait, creating a physical image that challenges the notion that Sarty might ever be able to rid himself of his father’s heritage for good.