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

Written as it was, at the ebb of the 1930s, a ex of social, stinting, and cultural tumult, the decade of the Great clinical depression, William Faulkners short tier Barn hot may be read and discussed in our schoolrooms as just that--a history of the 30s, for Barn Burning offers students insights into these years as they were lived by the nation and the southmost and captured by our artists. This story was first published in June of 1939 in Harpers pickup and later awarded the 0. Henry Memorial Award for the best short story of the year. Whether read alone, as part of a thematic unit on the Depression era, or as an element of an interdisciplinary course of the Depression 30s, Barn Burning can be used to awaken students to the race, affiliate, and economic turmoil of the decade. During the 1930s, the Sartoris and Snopes families were overlapping entities in Faulkners tomography. These families with their opposing social values spurred his imagination at a time when he wrote about the passing of a conservative, agricultural South and the enterprisingness up of the South to a naked as a jaybird era of modernization. This depiction of the agrarian society of the Sartoris family connects Faulkner to the nostalgic yearnings for a yesteryear expressed in Ill Take My Stand, the Fugitives manifesto of 1930, a book opening the decade yet echoing sentiments of past decades. At the start of our classroom discussion of Barn Burning, we can explain the tenets of the Fugitives, their traditional, aristocratic attitudes, and their reverence for the land gentry life style. We can focus on the description of the de Spain groundwork and property, with its opulence and privilege, as representative of the Agrarians version of the good life. Early we conduct to emphasize and discuss the attraction of the young boy Colonel Sartoris Snopes to the security and comfortableness of this style, his attraction to his namesakes heritage. In his rendition of the Sartoris-like agrarian society, Faulkner ack this instantledges its dichotomy the injustice, the lack of true(p) play, the blacks subservience, and the divisiveness within the community which empire 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 father Ab Snopes barn burning rails. We now can lead our students to the evidence of these social injustices within the story by identifying exemplary moments and scenes.