Child Narrator In William Faulkner's Barn Burning

Stories with child narrators are usually written from the first person perspective and can be broadly categorized into two different types. The first is when the narrator is the age of the child and the reader discover things along the way, with them. The second is when the narrator is much older and is looking back on their childhood and recalling a story from that period of time. “They may make comments on the actions of their younger selves but other than that the illusion of child innocence and naïveté is preserved” (Kienlen). The Scout Finch who narrates To Kill a Mocking Bird is one such example. She is a child narrator, but she is also a mature adult. It is also entirely possible that the perspective is not in the first person only but in the third person too. There might even be a mixture of perspectives as seen in William Faulkner’s incredible short story, Barn Burning, which tells the story of a father’s struggles with class discrimination and his own shortcomings in dealing with them. Faulkner chooses the youngest child to be the primary narrator with the occasional omniscient third person. The narrative point of view shifts often and quite suddenly in Faulkner’s story and brings to life the dilemmas faced by the narrator’s family. In this case, the voice remains believable though there might be instances

Children are susceptible to finding other children ‘bad’ or dislikable too, just as adults are of the same. In fact, a child narrator does not necessarily makes the narrative seem truer. Children are frequently less innocent than they seem. For example, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is clearly not innocent. Some would say he is too precocious, independent and worldly-wise to be convincing; he does fake his own murder with great relish and