THEME & STYLE OF BARN BURNING

THEME & STYLE OF BARN BURNING

Anger and Hatred

Syntax

Alienation and Loneliness

Point of View

-The most noticeable feature of Faulkner's style,

in "Barn Burning" and elsewhere, is his syntax or

sentence structure. Faulkner's sentences tend to be

long, full of interruptions,

-The second sentence of "Barn Burning"offers a case in point: It is 116 words long and

contains between twelve and sixteen clauses.

-Abner Snopes is anger embodied, ready to take offence over any interaction with other people.

-Ab is locked into a hell of personal revenge and his viciousness appears to have played a large part in the misery of his family.

- Readers witness the anger of others, like Major de Spain and Sarty.

-Faulkner was perspectivist :That is to say he liked to tell a story from some particular point of view or sometimes many point of view.

-Faulkner tells his story primarily from the point of view of young Sarty, a ten years-old boy. This requires that Faulkner gives us the raw reportage of scene and event that an illiterate ten-year-old would give us, if he could.

-There are few departures from this strict perspectivism, but they are telling, an omniscient narrator tells the truth about Ab's behavior as a soldier during the Civil War. -But even this is a calculated feature of Faulkner's style: the breaking-in of the omniscient narrator is another way of fracturing the continuity of the narrative.

-Faulkner depicts a child,on the verge of moral awareness, who finds himself cutt off from larger social world of which he is growing conscious ;this sense of alienation takes root.

-Because of his father's criminal recklessness, Sarty finds himself the object of an insult.

-His father has taught him to regard others as the "enemy" such as school-companion or a friend.

-The story concludes with Sarty alone on a hilltop at night, watching the stars. This reflects the boy's loneliness, and lack of social ties.

Setting

Loyalty and Betrayal

Morals and Morality

- Abner's crude psychological stratagem for gainning the complicity of his family in his bizarre way of life is to reflect his claim of family ties, of loyalty

-Sarty betrays his father to Major de Spain but in larger moral sense.

- It is the post-Civil War South in which a defeated and in many ways humiliated society is trying to hold its own against the Northern victor.

-Slavery has been abolished, but a vast distance still separates the land-owning Southern aristocracy from the tenant-farmers and bonded workers who do the trench-labor required by the plantation economy, itself in a state of disruption and decadence.

- Sarty notes, he has lived in at least a dozen ramshackle buildings on at least a dozen plantations in his ten short years. In a way, then, the story's "setting" is the road, or the Snopes' constant removal from one place to another due to Ab's quarreling and violence.

-Ab Snopes persistently and willfully flouts morality so conceived.He beats his son, force his wife, picks fights with people who have done him no harm, an is an arsonist.

-Barn Burning traces Sarty's passage from immersion in the egocentric Hell of his father's life to his espousal of morality and law.

THEME & STYLE

Order and Disorder

-Abner Snopes's life, symbolized by his constant

removal to new quarters on account of his

quarrels with everyone and by the random wretchedness

of the family's meager belongings, is a life

of violent disorder.

-Ab can not integrate himself into any aspects of the social matrix.

-Ab's tendency toward barn-burning sums up his warlike attitude toward social structure.