A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "Barn Burning"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "Barn Burning," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535819152

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Barn Burning

William Faulkner

1939

Introduction

William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939) comes from the mid-point of its author’s career and finds its creator in consummate control of the modernist devices that he, more than any other, had brought to American prose: stream-of-consciousness narration, decadent and even culturally degenerate settings, extended sentences—interrupted by qualifying clauses—that give the effect of continuously suspended or deferred resolution of the action, and images of extreme violence. These modernist gestures disturbed Faulkner’s early readers, and critics reacted harshly to his works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as the novels The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932). Faulkner stood accused of excessive mannerism and obscurity, and of a morbid interest in unhealthy types. Northerners found his depiction of the unassimilated South too regional and Southerners found it too harsh and scandalous to be acceptable.

Before he developed his signature style, however, Faulkner had proven himself a powerful writer of ordinary, perfectly accessible prose. A good example of this is the early story Turnabout (1925), in which an American aviator in World War I befriends a British torpedo-boat pilot and comes to see the conflict from a perspective less remote and abstract than that provided by aerial bombing. To some extent, Barn Burning represents a compromise between the brutal themes of Faulkner’s high modernist style and the accessibility of his early prose. The result is still a powerful, more-straight-forward-than-usual, glimpse into the author’s fictional world.

Author Biography

William Faulkner—store-clerk, carpenter, general construction-worker, coal shoveler, deck-hand, cadet-aviator, and ultimately a prime incarnation of the Great American Novelist—was a product of the Deep South. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, the son of a railroad worker, he joined Britain’s Royal Air Force in 1918, attended the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and then seemed to lurch through life, changing jobs and travelling. With the appearance of Soldiers’ Pay (1926), a novel published with the assistance of his friend Sherwood Anderson, he launched himself on the career for which he would become famous.

Many a paradox clings to Faulkner, a traditionalist and even a reactionary who struck out into the realms of extreme literary innovation. Focusing on simple, or sometimes even simpleminded, characters, he employed complex syntax, interior monologue, disrupted chronology, and multiple perspectives to create what might be called realistic allegories. Often, at the core of the most complicated narrative, one finds a Biblical or folkloric motif; and, despite his frequent defense of peculiarly Southern values, Faulkner was often