William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” examines a young boy named Colonel Sartoris Snopes and his life with his violent, cold-blooded father. The boy’s father is an uncaring sociopath who has a tendency to burn the barns of his perceived enemies. Faulkner’s story is a prime example of Southern Gothic literature, or a subgenre within 20th and 21st Century American literature that emphasizes the violent and macabre nature of Southern settings. Readers can see this through the brutal nature of the father:
“But he did not think this now and he had seen those same niggard blazes all his life. He merely ate his supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road here, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth—a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him; the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin” (6).
Colonel Sartoris Snopes’ father is a two-dimensional man, a man only capable of anger.
Moreover, Faulkner does pull from his own experiences as a Southern writer to inform his prose. He characters in the story use racial slurs against African-American individuals. Racial discrimination was more rampant and accepted in the American South at the time that Faulkner was writing. He obviously draws on his experiences with Southern individuals and landscapes to illustrate a vivid portrayal of the South, but he distorts it; this is where his Southern Gothic influence is best seen.
Thus, Faulkner draws on his experiences as a Southern man to write short stories such as “Barn Burning,” but he foregrounds the violence and strained aspects of the area. In doing so, his stories are largely representative of the Southern Gothic style that Faulkner has become synonymous with.
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