The Southern Social Themes of Barn Burning :: Barn Burning Essays

Written as it was, at the ebb of the 1930s, a decade of social, economic, and cultural tumult, the decade of the corking Depression, William Faulkners short story Barn Burning may be put down and discussed in our classrooms as just that--a story of the 30s, for Barn Burning offers students insights into these geezerhood as they were lived by the nation and the South and captured by our artists. This story was counterbalance published in June of 1939 in Harpers Magazine and later awarded the 0. Henry narrative Award for the best short story of the year. Whether read alone, as transgress of a thematic unit on the Depression era, or as an element of an interdisciplinary course of the Depression 30s, Barn Burning bathroom be used to awaken students to the race, class, and economic turmoil of the decade. During the 1930s, the Sartoris and Snopes families were overlapping entities in Faulkners imagination. These families with their opposing social values spurred his imagination at a eon when he wrote about the passing of a conservative, agricultural South and the col up of the South to a new era of modernization. This depiction of the agrarian society of the Sartoris family connects Faulkner to the nostalgic yearnings for a past expressed in Ill charge My Stand, the Fugitives manifesto of 1930, a book opening the decade yet emit sentiments of past decades. At the start of our classroom discussion of Barn Burning, we potentiometer explain the tenets of the Fugitives, their traditional, aristocratic attitudes, and their reverence for the landed gentry life style. We send word focus on the description of the de Spain home and property, with its opulence and privilege, as translator of the Agrarians version of the good life. Early we need to emphasize and discuss the standoff of the young boy Colonel Sartoris Snopes to the security and comfort of this style, his attraction to his namesakes heritage. In his version of the Sartoris-like agrarian society, F aulkner acknowledges its dichotomy the injustice, the lack of fair play, the blacks subservience, and the divisiveness within the community which conglomerate builders like the Sartorises and the de Spains wrought. It is, of course, this very social inequity, the class distinction, and the economic inequality against which Sartys initiate Ab Snopes barn burning rails. We now can lead our students to the usher of these social injustices within the story by identifying exemplary moments and scenes.