By Dana Gioia
The protagonist of "Barn Burning" is a poor ten-year-old boy with the unusual and very Faulknerian name of Colonel Sartoris Snopes (called Sarty by his family). His father, Abner Snopes, is a primitive and vengeful man who divides the world into two opposing camps—blood kin ("us") and enemies ("they"). He is the poor, ignorant, and vicious patriarch of an impoverished family. (Significantly, Faulkner gives Ab several features that link him on an associative level with the devil, as Edmond Volpe demonstrates in his discussion of "Barn Burning.") The main psychological story of "Barn Burning" is Sarty's growing awareness of his father's depravity and the boy's internal struggle between blood loyalty to his father and a vague but noble ideal of honor suggested by the aristocratic Major De Spain. The boy loves his father but he also understands his immoral destructiveness. Sarty sees himself as an individual different from his father and kinfolk. By the end of the story he has achieved a difficult and tortured moral independence from his father.