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William faulkner research essay
Approaches to ethical dilemmas
Approaches to ethical dilemmas
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In William Faulkner’s story “Barn Burning” a young boy named Sarty is raised by an impoverished white family of sharecroppers, their circumstances leave little room for them to improve their conditions of living. Their family has to work on rich landowner’s farms and get paid a little share of the land owner’s crops. Given their situation Sarty’s father Abner when feeling wronged takes matters into his own hands, and often this is done by burning down the landowner’s barns. Sarty is constantly being placed into a situation where he has to choose between his beliefs in right and wrong, or his fathers. This causes the main psychological conflict in the story. Sarty starts to realize his father’s depravity and struggles between his loyalty to …show more content…
By the end of the story, although tortured by his choices, he achieves moral independence from his father. The struggle for Sarty is strong because of the great emphasis his father, Abner places on loyalty to one’s blood no matter the cost. Sarty might have been able to make his own choices of right and wrong, had it not been for the impact of his father’s words. His struggle becomes apparent because he doesn’t want to lie in court, but also feels strong loyalty to his father. He reminds himself that his father’s enemies are his own. “The smell and sense just a little fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair: ourn! Mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood. (Faulkner 172) This demonstrates to the reader that Sarty wants …show more content…
Abner goes before a Justice to show that he is being wronged. While the Justice still finds him guilty he does lessen the fine. However, that is not enough for Abner. This prompts Abner into taking matters, once again into his own hands. His father calls for him to go to their barn and retrieve a can of oil. Sarty starts for the barn. Then he realizes that he was doing what he was told out of obligation. “Then he was moving, running, outside the house, toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself.” (Faulkner 181) Although he is tormented by his choice he returns with the can. When Sarty realizes that Abner isn’t going to send warning, he feels Abner is breaking his own moral code. He then knows that he has to do the right thing, and warn de Spain. Abner knows that he wants to tell, so he wants him detained. Finally, able to break free he sets off to warn de Spain. After his warning, Sarty hears three shots fired. In a moment of guilt, he calls out to his father. “” Pap! Pap!”, running again before he knew he had begun to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, “Father! Father!”” (Faulkner 183) The change from an endearment to something more formal, shows Sarty putting emotional distances between himself and his father. In William Faulkner’s story “Barn Burning”
In “Barn Burning”, Abner enters the house at dusk and “could smell the coffee from the room where they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the afternoon meal.” (14) A warm meal would indicate fulfillment and cohesiveness within the family. The inclusion of the detail that the food was cold represents an inversion of these associations. The cold meal symbolizes the family’s distaste with Abner’s actions. The memory of the dinner lingers with the family as they get ready for bed and appears linked with negative images of “Where they had been were no long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of a lilliputian moving machine.” (15) In addition, the emphasis that this dinner was in fact a left-over meal symbolizes that the pattern of Abner’s destructive behavior and its effects on his family will not change.
In the two of the most revered pieces of American literature, “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, we examined two characters and the relationships that they shared with their fathers. Being a father and having a father-like figure plays a monumental role in a child’s life. Although in these components of literature, the two main characters, Huckleberry Finn and Colonel Sartoris Snopes, show animosity towards their fathers. They both aspired to be the farthest type of person from their fathers. Huckleberry Finn didn’t want to be a drunk, ignorant, racist. Although at the beginning of the short story, Sarty backed his father and lied for him when accused of burning barns, but at the end of
Throughout the middle of the short story, Sarty is involved in a couple dramatic events that lead to his ultimate decision. Following the trial, Sarty's wicked fa...
he sees his father as strict, but not overly demanding. He seems to begin to
Life with an abusive out of control parent often leads the offspring to grow up quicker than their years. In William Faulkner’s Barn Burning, one is taken on the journey of Colonel Sartoris Snopes (Sarty) growing up and maturing quicker than need be. Young Sarty is faced with the difficult decision of being loyal to his bloodline or to be loyal to himself. Ultimately Sarty had the strength and courage to break free from the verbal chains of fear that his father placed upon him and do the right thing, by telling on his father. This paper will highlight the two main events that were responsible for providing Sarty with the confidence and courage to do the right thing.
It would be easy to say that Sartoris, in the end, must make a choice between right and wrong, between the "peace and dignity" represented by the de Spains with the squalor and misery of the Snopes family, but it is more than that. At the story’s beginning, when Sarty was ready to testify that his father did not burn down that barn, he would have done it because a son’s job is to stick to his father. At the story’s end, he warns Major de Spain that his father is about to burn down his beautiful plantation, even though he knows that this will bring his family down once and for all, even though he knows that this means he will never be able to go
In the first excerpt, he describes his father turning on an overseer that was assaulting his wife and the overseer’s promise that nothing would come of it if he let him walk away unharmed. This was not the case, of course, and authorities soon followed him until he was captured and tortured. “…The
Sarty definitely feels a large obligation to be loyal to his father because of blood ties. Faulkner makes this quite clear in the text several times. Even in the first paragraph Sarty looks at the prosecutor and thinks, "our enemy" (Faulkner76) and also "mine and his both! He's my father!" (Faulkner 74). Faulkner also demonstrates that Sarty is willing to fight for his father. When someone hisses "Barn burner!" (Faulkner 76) at his father, Sarty immediately pursues the offender with the full intention of making him pay for injuring his father's honor. Furthermore, even though he thinks what his father did was wrong, he still shows loyalty by hoping his father will change. Faulkner shows this by writing "Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be..." (Faulkner 82). While Sarty was debating about betraying his father, he expressed his loyalty to his father in the lines "I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again. Only I can't" (Faulkner 85). In the end, even after he has betrayed his father he still sho...
In “Barn Burning” the setting is a time when people drove horse wagons and the workingmen were generally farmers. The major character in this story is Colonel Sartoris Snopes, called “Sarty” by his family who is a ten-year-old boy. In the beginning, Sarty is portrayed as a confused and frightened young boy. He is in despair over the burden of doing the right thing or sticking by his family, as his father states,” You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you.”
William Faulkner elected to write “Barn Burning” from his young character Sarty’s perspective because his sense of morality and decency would present a more plausible conflict in this story. Abner Snopes inability to feel the level of remorse needed to generate a truly moral predicament in this story, sheds light on Sarty’s efforts to overcome the constant “pull of blood”(277) that forces him to remain loyal to his father. As a result, this reveals the hidden contempt and fear Sarty has developed over the years because of Abner’s behavior. Sarty’s struggle to maintain an understanding of morality while clinging to the fading idolization of a father he fears, sets the tone for a chain of events that results in his liberation from Abner’s destructive defiance-but at a costly price.
Sarty's betrayal of his father in William Faulkner's story "Barn Burning" is justified. The reader is introduced to Sarty's father as he is being tried for burning the barn of Mr. Harris. Lacking evidence, the Justice of the Peace drops the charges against Abner Snopes, Sarty's father, and he is ordered to leave the country. A harsh image of Sarty's father is presented in the line, "he [Sarty] followed the stiff black coat, the wiry figure walking a little stiffly from where a Confederate provost's man's musket ball had taken him in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago" (2177). The reader is given insight into Snopes' shady past and learns he has never been a law-abiding citizen.
In the beginning, the court put Sarty on the stand speak against his father. “[C]aught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time” (500), Sarty does not know what to do with the newly awakened rebellious itch. Although, he makes an instant decision and acts from there. Faulkner uses action verbs, such as “springing…running…scrabbling” (510). These create chronological motion in the ending, moving away from the interjections of the past and futures interlaced throughout the
Although the girls didn’t want to clean the rug, they removed the father’s footprints from the rug and never disobeyed his command. The eldest son was a follower of Abner, in addition to the wife and aunt. The eldest son helped his father with the burnings of the barns and never questioned him. The aunt and Abner’s wife also did what was told of them and never spoke directly against his word. Faulkner provided these examples to show the importance of the Abner’s voice and authority in the family. Sarty couldn’t relate to loyalty. He often times pondered his father’s decisions in his head and questioned going against his
In the story “Barns Burning” Abner Snopes, the father is accused of burning a neighbor’s barn. Sarty is faced with a decision that will shape the rest of his life. Sarty is called to the stand, but because the plaintiff is ultimately unwilling to force him to testify against his own father, the case is closed, and the father is advised to leave that part of the country. As the family Sarty,
...eard the gunfire, no longer in terror and fear, "Father. My Father he thought." Sarty tried to think good thoughts about his father thinking, "he was brave!" He served as a solder under Colonel Sartoris in the war! When the morning sun came up, he was finally on his own to be his own man, free to make his own individual decisions without worrying about what his father would do to him. It was from Sarty's dilemma of family loyalty and the desire to please his father that kept him from doing the right things. Was his father so bitter due to experiences he had during the Civil War ? Was it society's fault for what happened to his father? Was Abner just born with his us against them attitude? These are all questions that Faulkner leaves with us after reading the "Barn Burning." and is part of that fire in the back of our minds that we will never be able to put out..