Violence and Confusion in “barn Burning”

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Perhaps one of the clearest contradictions that the story teller raises is in the difference between father and son with regard to the pull of wealth. The boy is very impressed by the wealth represented by “a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses…a gate swinging open between two brick pillars…a swept of drive…the house….he had never seen a house like this before…big as a courthouse….with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words” (Faulkner, 273). The despair of poverty, the longing for something that will never be – the underlying social conditions that push (however wrongly) the father towards his insolent criminality and revenge – are all contained in this sigh of remorse and regret. The father’s rage and defiance against the same symbols and social conditions that leave him at the margins, criminal and exploited, out to get what he can and make his mark through vandalism and destruction, also draw the son to the father – he veers between hatred and taking of his side.

Apocalyptic violence has occurred we sense and some threat, some system of rumor in this larger-than-life tale, pervades. Perhaps it is a yarn of memory or a fable about the world, told to enable the reader or listener to ponder the impossibility of clear sense of truth in a society that juxtaposes “shabbiness…against…bland perfection” (Faulkner, 274). Whether challenge to the oppressive conditions of rich against poor, father against son, man against women, white against black is redeemable the story is of time in nature and society that is deadening and empty, devoid of moral depth, lacking clear nourishment or spiritual grace. This itself is an aporia, a dark pool rising up from the story’s ground. The imagery – a coming of age which creates instinctual not necessary violence – may like the night and morning birds. sprout always as in the boy’s instincts in ways not yet available to know by the story’s end.

Work Cited

William Faulkner. “Barn Burning” in The Norton Anthology of short fiction shorter eighth edition by Richard Bausch and R. V. Cassill New York 1978.