Barn Burning

“The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish—this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood.”

The opening of Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” sets up the key events, symbols, and motifs that rule the story. The store-turned-courtroom, smelling of cheese and meats, the harsh eye of the law illustrated in the character of the Justice of the Peace, and most importantly, the story’s thematic core and conflict: “despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood.” Sartoris begins the story afraid, torn between his sense of morality—of trust in the rightness of law and order—and the “old fierce pull of blood” that encourages Sartoris’s loyalty to his father.

“For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until Harris said, ‘Not him. The little one. The boy,’ and, crouching, small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the men between himself and the table part and become a lane of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the Justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles, beckoning him.”

Faulkner’s description of his characters in this scene reveals inner characteristics as well as outward ones. Sartoris is described as small and physically similar to his father, which points to the power of blood and the pull of familial loyalty. Sartoris’s eyes are “wild as storm scud,” illustrating his role as an outsider. Even though Sartoris is drawn towards the law and morality, he is touched by the wild something that makes his family, and particularly his father, socially unacceptable and undomesticated.

“He felt no floor under his bare feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim turning faces. His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will have to do hit.”

This line demonstrates a key phrase repeated throughout the story: “frantic grief and despair.” Over and over again, this phrase comes to Sartoris’s mind, like a mantra that he cannot escape.