The snobbish tone that de Spain uses to berate Snopes—”But you never had a hundred dollars. You never will.”—prompts Sarty to side with his father against the landowner. Sarty affectionately addresses his father as “Pap” and promises that de Spain “won’t git no twenty bushels! He won’t git none!” In supporting his father against dc Spain, he distinguishes between the severity of burning a barn and his father’s role in ruining the rug. While barn burning is intolerable to Sarty, 20 bushels of corn as punishment for destroying a rug is excessive injustice, as the justice of the Peace will rule later. However, Sarty notes, one benefit of his father’s having to pay the twenty bushels is that it might make him “. . . stop forever and always from being what he used to be.” Sarty’s hoping for something to happen that will force his father to quit burning barns emphasizes his innate desire to conform to society’s justice—so long as that justice is fair.
When Sarty discovers that his father must appear before the Justice of the Peace, he does not know that his father is the plaintiff and not the defendant. In the courtroom, he cries out to the judge, “He ain’t done it! He ain’t burnt . . .” before his father shuts him up. Instinctively, Sarty comes to his father’s defense, which emphasizes his family loyalty, although we know that he remains upset by previous barn burnings.
After the judge rules that Snopes owes 10bushels of corn rather than 20, Sarty, still loyal to the family, sides with his father and says that de Spain “won’t git no ten bushels neither. He won’t git one.” Snopes tells his son, “. . . we’ll wait,” implying that the matter is still open to debate—de Spain does have a barn that can be burned. Although we are not aware of it until later that night, Snopes feels defeated again by the aristocracy; he feels inferior. His determination to revenge the court’s decision is revealed by the simple statement he gives his son.
That night at home, we hear Sarty’s mother cry out suddenly, “Abner! No! No! Oh, God. Oh, God. Abner!” Having lost his lawsuit, Snopes is preparing to set fire to de Spain’s barn. After Sarty hears his mother’s cry, immediately he sees a horrifying image: His father is still dressed in his black suit, “at once formal and burlesque.” This same black suit that Snopes wore to the legal hearing now becomes a suit for some “shabby and ceremonial violence.” The irony lies in the fact that Snopes, by his formal dress, is preparing for his ritualistic act of burning barns.
That Sarty’s mother is so opposed to her husband’s actions—to the point that she is brutally abused by him—foreshadows Sarty’s own opposition to this senseless and violent crime. When his father orders him to get more oil, he briefly hesitates. He is faced with three options: He can go along with his father, thus becoming a co-conspirator in the crime; he can “run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again”; or he can try either to stop his father or warn de Spain. Sarty embraces this third option when he pleads with his father, “Ain’t you going to even send a nigger? . . . At least you sent a nigger before!” We recall that in the story’s initial courtroom scene, Mr. Harris claimed that a black man delivered a threatening message to him from Snopes; now, Snopes is not going to give de Spain any warning.
Before Snopes leaves the house, he instructs his wife to hold Sarty tightly, knowing that his son will warn de Spain of the impending barn burning and thwart his revenge. He now knows, with certainty, that Sarty is torn between loyalty to his family and his need to enforce principles of justice.
After his father leaves, Sarty tries to break loose from his mother; his aunt, who joins in his pleas to let him go, threatens to go herself to warn de Spain. Ultimately, we realize, the aunt, the mother, and Sarty are all on the same side—the side of justice. This fact is important to note because, otherwise, we might consider Sarty an anomaly, but with his mother and aunt’s agreeing with him, his role as an advocate of justice is more convincing.
As soon as he is free, Sarty runs to de Spain’s, bursts into the house, and cries out, “Barn! . . . Barn!” He then flees down the road and is almost run over by de Spain on a galloping horse, headed for his barn. Sarty begins to run again, and suddenly he hears one gunshot followed by two more. He stops and yells, “Pap! Pap!”—his affectionate term for his father. Blindly running again, he falls down and calls out, “Father! Father!” There is little doubt that his father is dead.
At midnight, Sarty sits on the crest of a hill, his “grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair.” He attempts to reassure himself that his father had been in the Civil War and had served honorably in Colonel Sartoris’ cavalry. Faulkner comments that Sarty is unaware that his father went to war not out of a sense of loyalty, but for “booty—it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.” Later, Sarty realizes that he must have fallen asleep because it is almost dawn. He gets up and continues walking down the road.
The central image at the end of “Barn Burning” is one of rebirth and renewal, a typical image to end an initiation-into-manhood story. Sarty is headed “toward the dark woods,” from which he hears birds calling. Their “liquid silver voices” symbolize the vitality of the spring morning and, by extension, the unceasing spirit of Sarty Snopes. We feel certain of his devotion to the justice that he has sought throughout the story; as Faulkner notes of him, “He did not look back.”
These final images focus on Sarty: He is alone—he has cut himself off from his family and now must face the world by himself, possessing nothing but his own integrity and a strong sense of justice. He never again appears in any of Faulkner’s works, although Abner Snopes and Sarty’s older brother become central figures in other stories and novels. It is as though Faulkner did not want a male Snopes with a moral conscience present amidst the other amoral, unethical, thieving, and degenerate male members.
