Violence and Confusion in “barn Burning”

Violence and Confusion in “Barn Burning”

by William Faulkner

Jiajun Le

ENGL 2101

Adam Hutka

 February 3,2016

       Confusion abounds and violence and soulless emptiness, cold and harsh, burning and unrelenting permeates a contradictory coming-of-age story by author William Faulkner. The story is entitled “Barn Burning”. The term aporia is useful to consider to help the reader to see that the level of confusion present in the mysterious narrative is purposeful to map out the conflict in the ten-year-old son towards his father who is a vandal and criminal, a role-model and antagonist. Obviously the son both admires and hates his father. Should he turn him in? Does he support the father’s vicious refusal to comply with authority? Through a limited third person narrative, an unknown storyteller, we discover the world of a boy who looks up to and in some ways understands the rage of the father, yet always is torn between his own sense of fear, and of right and wrong. A highly kinetic story, narrative, character, imagery build to a kind of frenzy where opaque terror seems to define an out of control world of endless brutality. If there is a moral purpose it is to gauge why it is so lacking in this hierarchical chaotic world.

        The storyteller, whether male or female, has both contempt and awe for the father as well, wonders if the son can escape fate and details the impact of the father’s behavior on the world to draw a vague portrait of the power of father over son; and of son’s growing rebellion. The father is described as being “without face or depth – a shape back, flat , and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frock coat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin” (Faulkner 272). The boy is illiterate yet has a very strong sense of the world through his heightened troubled emotional responses and reactions. In the story’s opening the boy is a witness to charges brought against his father. The narrator informs us that the boy lives in “the smell and sense…of fear…mostly…despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood” (Faulkner, 269). Is this push-pull in the boy something environmental? Or is it, as the storyteller might be suggesting, the outcome of nature, meaning of having been born from the father, inheriting his personality traits.

        The limited perspective enables the confusion in the flow of events, their lack of clarity, to play out in ways that suggest that the boy himself does not fully understand why what happens actually happens. This is clear when the boy gets attacked as they are leaving the first town. “he could not see, whirling…a face in a red haze, moonlight, bigger than the full moon, the owner of it half again his size…leaping in the red haze towards his face” (Faulkner 269). This sense of the opaque, of things moving in and out of view, of reacting to things not really clearly understood, not expected, not seen, yet also at some level of almost animal-visceral response, punctuates all the story’s events, creates the dark bitter mood, and creates the fear and terror. The burning world, an inadequate world out of control, a set of theatrical contortions where violence  becomes its own justification is portrayed whether it is the father hitting the boy to teach him not to tell the truth, or the result,  the blow itself – a likely occurrence – teaching the boy only one thing. This is “the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his few years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free” (Faulkner, 273).

        How is this a coming of age story? The boy is participant, victim,  and antagonist to the father. At the end,  when he runs away after telling the white farm owner – unsuccessfully – that his father is about to burn either his barn or (something) else on the  property, as the narrator describes the unrelenting final panic, when the boy exiting his family realizes the consequences of having betrayed his father so deeply, “he was moving, running, outside the house, toward the stable: this old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to chose for himself…run for so long….of outrage and savagery and lust)” (Faulkner, 279). What does this tell us?  As victim of brutality, the boy also wants to love and cherish his father, seeing him as the powerful protector, knowing he is nothing like that at all, instead the root of everyone’s crisis. But he is also, according to the narrator perhaps trapped in his own violent nature.