Barn Burning
A poor sharecropper's son is torn between loyalty to his vengeful, barn-burning father and a growing conscience that finally forces him to choose justice over blood.
Ten-year-old Sarty Snopes stands in a makeshift courtroom, expected to lie for the father who burns the barns of anyone who crosses him. Each move to a new farm tightens the same trap: obey the family or obey what is right. By the end of a single violent night, the boy will betray his father to save a stranger's property, and run toward a future he cannot yet imagine.
What happens
Sarty Snopes is the young son of Abner Snopes, an embittered, itinerant sharecropper who answers every perceived slight by setting fire to his employer's barn. As the story opens, Abner is on trial again, and Sarty fears he will be made to testify and lie. The family is ordered to leave the county and moves to a new farm owned by Major de Spain. There Abner deliberately tracks manure across an expensive rug, then ruins it when ordered to clean it, provoking a dispute over damages that he takes to court. Enraged by the ruling, Abner prepares to burn de Spain's barn. Sarty, torn between the fierce family loyalty his father demands and his own deepening sense of justice, breaks free and races to warn de Spain. Shots ring out in the dark, and the boy, believing his father killed, flees into the night and does not look back.
Timeline the story arc, beat by beat
- Opening The country store trial
Abner is accused of burning a barn; Sarty dreads being forced to lie and is relieved when his father is merely told to leave.
- Rising On the road again
The family packs its meager belongings and travels to yet another tenant farm, the pattern of their rootless life laid bare.
- Rising The de Spain mansion
Arriving at Major de Spain's grand house, Abner forces his way in and soils the costly French rug with manure.
- Turn The ruined rug
Ordered to clean the rug, Abner instead damages it further, and de Spain charges him for the loss.
- Rising The second trial
Abner contests the charge before the justice of the peace, who reduces but upholds a penalty, deepening Abner's rage.
- Climax Sarty's choice
As Abner moves to burn de Spain's barn, Sarty wrenches free of his mother's grip and runs to warn the major.
- Ending Into the dark
Gunshots sound behind him; believing his father dead, Sarty keeps walking away and does not turn back.
Characters and how they connect
Colonel Sartoris Snopes (Sarty)
Protagonist
A ten-year-old boy named for a Confederate officer, caught between blood loyalty and an awakening moral conscience.
Abner Snopes
Antagonist and father
A cold, resentful sharecropper who wields arson as private justice against the landowners who hold power over him.
Major de Spain
Landowner
A wealthy planter whose grand house and expensive rug become the stage for Abner's last act of defiance.
Lennie Snopes
Mother
Abner's worn, frightened wife who clings to family unity and tries to restrain Sarty in the final crisis.
The older brother
Sibling
Abner's grown son, hardened into his father's silent accomplice, a mirror of who Sarty might become.
Relationship map
- Sartytorn between obeying and betrayingAbner
- Abnerresents and attacksMajor de Spain
- Sartywarns and protectsMajor de Spain
- Abnercontrols and silencesLennie
- Sartydiverges fromThe older brother
Themes what the story is really about
Loyalty versus justice
Sarty's central agony is the clash between the blood loyalty his father demands and the fairness his conscience insists on, a choice he can only resolve by betrayal.
Class and powerlessness
Abner's arson is a desperate, destructive answer to a system that keeps tenant farmers permanently beneath the planters who own the land and the law.
The inheritance of violence
The story asks whether a child can break the cycle of his father's bitterness or is doomed to repeat it like his hardened older brother.
Moral awakening
Across a few days Sarty matures from a frightened accomplice into a person willing to act on principle even at terrible personal cost.
Symbols & motifs
Fire
Abner's chosen weapon represents both his fury at injustice and his need to seize the one kind of power available to the powerless.
The French rug
The costly rug embodies the planter class's wealth and the social distance Abner cannot cross except through ruin.
Blood
The repeated insistence on family blood stands for the suffocating loyalty Abner enforces and Sarty must finally reject.
The road
The endless moving from farm to farm symbolizes the family's rootlessness and Abner's inability to belong anywhere.
Recurring motifs
Stiffness and cold. Abner is repeatedly described in rigid, lifeless terms, marking his emotional deadness and machine-like resolve.
The smell and pull of the courtroom. Trials recur as the arena where Sarty's loyalty is tested and the family's pattern of conflict plays out.
Running. Sarty's flight at the climax is foreshadowed by earlier impulses to flee, building toward his final escape.
Conflicts
Internal
Sarty wars within himself between the duty to protect his father and the duty to do what is right.
Individual vs family
Choosing justice means breaking with the Snopes clan and the unbreakable loyalty his father preaches.
Individual vs society
Abner's feud is with the entire landowning order that confines and degrades men like him.
Literary devices
- Limited third-person with interior access
- The narration stays close to Sarty's perception while occasionally reaching beyond his vocabulary to voice what he cannot yet articulate.
- Symbolism
- Fire, the rug, blood, and the road carry the story's meanings about class, loyalty, and entrapment.
- Foreshadowing
- Sarty's early dread and impulses to run prepare the reader for his climactic decision to flee.
- Imagery of rigidity
- Abner is drawn in hard, metallic images that make his coldness and inflexibility vivid and oppressive.
- Italicized interior voice
- Faulkner sets off Sarty's unspoken thoughts to dramatize the gap between what the boy feels and what he can say.
At the climax Sarty escapes his mother's hold and sprints to warn Major de Spain that his barn is about to burn. As he runs away in the dark, he hears gunshots and assumes his father and possibly his brother have been killed. The story ends with the boy continuing to walk away into the woods, refusing to look back, with morning ahead of him. The ambiguity is deliberate: we never see Abner's body, so the boy's grief may rest on an assumption. What is certain is that Sarty has chosen conscience over blood and severed himself from his family. The closing movement away from the past and toward the dawn suggests a painful but genuine liberation, the cost of which is loneliness and the loss of the only world he has known.
Common misreadings
MythAbner burns barns out of pure cruelty.
ActuallyHis arson is also a warped protest against a class system that strips poor tenants of dignity and recourse, though it remains destructive and indefensible.
MythSarty clearly knows his father is dead at the end.
ActuallyThe boy only hears shots and assumes the worst; Faulkner leaves Abner's fate deliberately uncertain.
MythSarty's choice is easy once his conscience kicks in.
ActuallyThe decision is wrenching precisely because the family bond is real and the betrayal costs him everything he has.
Test yourself
1. How does Abner respond to disputes with landowners
Abner's signature act of revenge is setting fire to the barns of those he believes have wronged him.
2. What does Abner do to Major de Spain's rug
Abner soils the costly rug deliberately and damages it further when told to clean it, sparking the final conflict.
3. What does Sarty do at the climax
Sarty breaks free and races to warn Major de Spain, choosing justice over loyalty to his father.
A ten-year-old boy named Sarty lives with his poor, angry father, Abner, who burns down the barns of any landowner who makes him mad. The family keeps having to move because of it. When they arrive at a wealthy man's farm, Abner ruins an expensive rug on purpose and then gets in trouble for it. Furious, he decides to burn that man's barn too. Sarty knows this is wrong, so he runs to warn the owner even though it means betraying his own father. He hears gunshots behind him and thinks his father has been killed, but he keeps walking away toward a new life. The story is about a boy learning that doing the right thing can cost you everything and still be worth it.
Ask the story
Ask anything and get an answer grounded in the text: why a character acts, what a symbol means, how this compares to another work. For in-copyright texts the tutor works from our structured analysis, never the full text.
AI tutor in development
Flashcards flip, self-grade, and the deck remembers what you know
Deck mastered — all cards marked “Got it.”
Compare & connect the story universe
A Rose for Emily
By the same author and set in the same Yoknapatawpha world, both probe the South's class tensions and the grip of the past.
The Scarlet Ibis
Another story of family bonds and a younger figure shaped by an older one, ending in loss and hard self-knowledge.
Sonny's Blues
Both examine loyalty between family members and the pull between duty and individual conscience.
The Lottery
Each interrogates how tradition and group loyalty can demand morally unbearable participation.
Adaptation. Barn Burning (1980, Television film).
Key questions students ask
- Why does Sarty betray his father in Barn Burning
- What does fire symbolize in Barn Burning
- Is Abner Snopes dead at the end of Barn Burning
- How does class conflict drive Barn Burning
- What is the meaning of blood loyalty in Barn Burning
- How is Barn Burning a coming-of-age story
Analysis is original StoryBites commentary on Barn Burning by William Faulkner (1939). The text is under copyright and is summarized and analyzed in our own words, not reproduced.