Analysis Of Abner Snopes In William Faulkner's Barn Burning

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Family is often a hand people do not get to choose for themselves, but rather they are left dealing with the hand they were dealt till they are strong enough to break free. Sometimes family can do more harm than good in providing proper guidance, love, and support. This is certainly the case with living with Abner Snope in William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning”. It takes place in a post-civil war time period and based in the southern rural regions of Mississippi. Abner Snopes, the father as well as the family’s primary provider, works in the sharecropping profession. The conflict begins promptly at the beginning of the story when Abner is on trial for burning down a barn and he and his family are subsequently banished from their county. …show more content…

Even though he works long hours being a sharecropper he is barely providing for his family. His son, Sarty is “small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him” (Faulkner 181). Abner is constantly reminded of his shortcomings by those around him all throughout the story which seems to continually instigate the conflicts further and further cause him to rebel against the society around …show more content…

He is described as very inhuman “…without face or depth-a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds” (Faulkner 184). Then again when he strikes Sarty it is done “hard but without heat…” (Faulkner 184). Abner being repeatedly compared to that of a machine by William Faulkner throughout the story is quite deliberate. This can be an indicator that Abner will not change similarly how machines do not change. They also lack the capability of expressing empathy and remorse. Additionally, Snopes family situation is quite similar to that of Mrs. Abner’s broken clock that was “inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten day and time” (Faulkner 183). At one time, it had regularity, beauty, love, and hope of time to come, but now it is a broken reminder of how they are stuck in time. A description that can be similarly applied to Abner, being as he is stuck in this repeating pattern of ruining any chance his family has of moving up and out of their

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