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Important Themes In William Faulkner's Barn Burning

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Are you awake? Are you ready to hear about William Faulkner’s, “Barn Burning”? Faulkner uses many important themes throughout the story; these themes play different roles in displaying the story but also the characters roles. These themes are loyalty to the family versus loyalty to the law, blood, and a search for peace is displayed in “Barn Burning”. I will be covering these themes in that order so you don’t get confused.
Blood is a theme shown in all the short stories we have covered in this unit but in this one it has a special meaning of literal blood and non literal blood, and you will see that later if you stay awake. Throughout Faulkner’s short story he uses many literary devices to display these themes such as repetition, metaphor, …show more content…

Blood is a theme used in all three prose stories in this unit, but in this one, blood is seen in a literal sense as well as a non literal sense, emphasizing the intensity among family. In the beginning of “Barn Burning” as you know, the Snopes’ are leaving the so called courthouse, and a local boy accuses Snopes of being a barnburner, and when Sartoris turns around to confront him, the boy hits Sartoris and bloodies his face, that probably hurt, right? Ouch! (965). The blood dried on his face during the ride out of town (966). This was a sense of pride for Sartoris, weird huh that he got beat up but still prideful, but Sartoris had defended the family name. A little later in the story Snopes plans to burn down a barn and it being De Spain’s barn, Sartoris feels that it is morally wrong and decided to tell De Spain that it was going to happen. De Spain then goes out and kills Snopes. As I said early in the paragraph before this that Sartoris has a hard time deciding between being loyal to his family or the law and in this case he was loyal to the law but the rest of the family was loyal and they still wind up alone, “… no blood to stick to...” This is that non-literal sense of blood if you didn’t catch

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The focus is more towards Sarty Snopes, but very well appears to focus on his father as well. The story wastes no time in establishing and showing the reader the relationship between Sarty and his father. His father immediately makes the connection between his son and himself hostile and toxic to a certain extent. What is used to paint such a distasteful collaboration of these characters is very real, earthly methods of manipulation. Sarty’s father turns a good value, loyalty, and twists it using it in a disgusting way to benefit himself.

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Sartoris was raised to be loyal to his family through violence and it is first shown when his father hits him on the side of the head and says, " *You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you.""(501). After being physically abused and lectured about being loyal to his own family, Sarty is left speechless but makes it clear that he understands his father's message. Towards the end of the story, Sartoris decides that he no longer wants to be loyal to his father. Abner decides to burn Major de Spain's barn and orders Sarty to retrieve oil to start the fire.

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