[大学三年级] 陕西省 >> 商洛市 >> 商州区
“Barn Burning” is a story about the feudal states of the American South and a social outcry. The Story is set after the American Civil War and at this time, the southern states of the USA were especially agrarian-oriented. Faulkner's conceived Yoknapatawpha County,( Yoknapatawpha is a fictional county, which was created by William Faulkner) in which "Barn Burning" is set, shows this nature, too. Many farmers had not got the necessary funds to buy and cultivate their own farm, so they leased land to cultivate it. The leaser didn't pay money but a stipulated part of his crop. There was a disproportion between the leaser without land and funds and the rich owner of the plowed land. In the case of "Barn Burning" this pertains, too.
The main character and protagonist in this story is a boy named Colonel Sartoris. In this story, Sarty is faced with the decision of either going along with the views and actions of his morally challenged father or asserting his own morality and individuality by running away and leaving his family and his pain behind. The antagonist in the story is Abner Snobes. Abner Snobes is a very angry and inconsiderate man who has hate and detestation for almost anybody who is not “blood-kin”, and he portrays that hatred and contempt throughout the story (qtd. In Volpe 163). This story follows the typical format and is narrated in the third person.
SNOPES:
One of the most perniciousfamilies in all of Faulkner. Led by patriarch (or anti-patriarch) Ab Snopes, a barn-burning sharecropperand former horsethief, the seemingly endless number of Snopes who parade through Faulkner‘s fiction, most especially in the Snopes trilogy (the novels The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) represent an affront in some ways to the "lost cause" aristocratic ideals espoused by Yoknapatawpha County's leading families, such as the Compsons and the Sartorises. With the planters' decline in wealth and prestige in the decades following the Civil War, the upwardly mobile Snopeses are best exemplified by Ab's son Flem Snopes, whose progress from sharecropper's cabin to town to mansion is charted through the trilogy that bears his name.
Colonel Sartoris Snopes :
Sartoris is impressionable, inarticulate, and subject to his father’s potentially corrupting influence, but he is also infused with a sense of justice. Sartoris is in many ways a raw, unformed creature of nature, untouched by education, the refining influences of civilization, or the stability of a permanent home. Sartoris’s brother, John, lacks Sartoris’s insight, and he is an example of what young Sartoris could easily become.
Abner Snopes
Snopes is an influential, towering presence in Sartoris’s eyes, but he himself is simply a primitive, thoughtless force of violence and destruction. With his family he is stiff, without depth, emotion, or complexity. This stiffness makes him seem almost less than human, and Faulkner often characterizes Snopes in metallic terms, portraying him as ironlike, cut from tin, a mechanical presence whose lack of emotion underscores his compromised sense of morality. Snopes’s physical presence fully reflects the inner corruption and love of revenge that he embodies.
Lennie Snopes
Opposite Abner Snopes, with his penchant for revenge and destruction, is Lennie Snopes, a voice of reason and morality in the family. Because her morals are so different from her husband’s, Lennie sharpens the conflict that Sartoris faces as he attempts to form his own ideas of right and wrong. Although Lennie is forced into a quiet, inferior position in the family, she has managed to instill her values in Sartoris, despite the overwhelming, corrupting influence that Snopes tries to enforce. Although Lennie is abandoned by Sartoris in the end, he leaves because she has quietly taught him that it is the right thing to do.
In “Barn Burning,” Sartoris must decide whether loyalty to family or loyalty to the law is the moral imperative. For the Snopes family, particularly for Sartoris’s father, family loyalty is valued above all else. The family seems to exist outside of society and even outside the law, and their moral code is based on family loyalty rather than traditional notions of right or wrong. Snopes tells Sartoris that he should remain loyal to his “blood,” or family, or he will find himself alone. This threat suggests how isolated the family really is and how fully they rely on one another for protection, even when their faith in this protection is unfounded.
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