These opening scenes provide us with a clear picture of Abner Snopes, whose last name itself — beginning with the "sn" sound — is unpleasant sounding. A silent and sullen man, he walks with a limp, a significant factor when we learn later that he received the wound while stealing horses — and not necessarily the enemy's — during the Civil War. We also discover that Harris' barn is not the first barn that he has burned.
Snopes never burns farm houses, and while we might initially conclude that this restraint is proof that Snopes isn't wholly incorrigible, we soon learn that on farms, barns are more important than houses because they hold livestock and oftentimes harvested crops, which provide the money and food that farmers and their families need to survive. Farms can thrive without houses, but they are doomed to fail without barns. Abner, of course, is keenly aware of this fact.
Although he knows that his father is a barn burner, Sarty fights the boys to defend his father's integrity, while hoping fervently that his father will stop burning barns: "Forever he thought. Maybe he's done satisfied now, now that he has . . ." Sarty cannot complete his thought that his father is not only a barn burner, but that he has been one for so long that before he burns down one barn, he has "already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he . . ." Again, Sarty severs his thought before he comes to the logical conclusion. He cannot bring himself to finish the sentence, which presumably would end, "before he . . . burnt down the barn."
