ESSAY: OVERCOMING THE LIMITATIONS OF POINT OF VIEW IN BARN BURNING by William Faulkner

 

I HAVEN’T READ ANY FAULKNER FOR AGES, so I'm not up on Snopes’ family doings, but I thought I would put out this short essay from, I think, a First Year Intro English class. 

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

William Faulkner

"BARN BURNING" IS A STORY OF COMING OF AGE. The protagonist, Colonel Sartoris Snopes*, age ten, is first revealed to us “crouched” (Faulkner, 444) on a keg of nails in a small country store where his father is on trial, accused of barn burning. The story’s point of view is limited to the events as they affect young Sartoris, as well as to his thoughts, feelings, and observations. The inherent limitations of this perspective are both obvious and more subtle. Much information, for example, is unavailable to the boy. He is not privy to the adult world. He is illiterate and limited in his understanding of adult motivations and in his knowledge of the past, and of people and events outside his youthful experiences. Additionally, there is the difficulty of translating what he sees, hears, or is told into an understandable language. For here, Faulkner examines one of his major themes, “the terrible handicap of being young” (448) and powerless.

 

There is no evidence Sartoris has been allowed any formal education. His life centers on his family, even to the point of measuring time not by the calendar, but by his brother’s age. “[He] heard his father tell a long and unhurried story out of the time before the birth of the older brother…” (454) The reader is aware of a terrible impoverishment and limitation of mind and spirit. Young Sartoris sees, hears and feels but he cannot fully comprehend.

To write exclusively from his perspective would be to present the story’s events primarily without causes (for the boy cannot explain the events in the manner of an adult.) As well, such a limited perspective would provide descriptions of emotion but with little context. Faulkner overcomes this difficulty with the addition of a narrator. The third-person narrator speaks for Sartoris, giving the boy an articulate voice for his emotions and providing a context for his life. “Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, ‘If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again.’” (447) The narrator shows us that Sartoris’ life is not just one day after another, one chore after another, or like the series of houses he lived in as a youth, “identical almost with the dozen others”, (447) but it is, rather, part of a broader context, extending in a sense back to his father’s civil war experiences, and forward, twenty years beyond his present young age. The narrator speaks past the boy’s “despair and grief” (444) and to our understanding.

Furthermore, the narrator provides us with information about the past and the future; about the true (or perhaps truer) character of Sartoris’ father, as well as providing additional commentary that informs us as to the ‘tone’ of the various speakers and the intent of the implied author; both of which, again, would be considerably more difficult to articulate if done exclusively through the perspective of a young boy, whose knowledge and understanding is surpassed by the complexity of the characters’ motivations and the events he experiences. For example, at the end of the first trial, the narrator informs us that Sartoris’ father has “said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no one.” (445) The narrator’s attitude toward the father becomes clearer. Or later, in describing the father as walking with a “stiff and ruthless limp” (447), or that his voice was “harsh like tin” (447), or unequivocally, at the end of the story:

 

“…his father had gone to war a private…wearing no uniform, admitting the authority and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war…for booty—it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.” (457)

 

Clearly, the narrator is describing an evil, obsessed, and tyrannical man.

As well, the narrator describes Sartoris’ older brother as “[c]hewing [tobacco] with that steady curious sideways motion of cows” (455), and his sisters as “big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons” (448); his mother and aunt of living with “hopeless despair” (455), characterizing all of them as domesticated, tamed creatures under the control of his father. The narrator is clearly sympathetic to Sartoris’ plight—trapped by circumstances of youth, and under the authority of a man with a “ravening and jealous rage.” (449)

With respect to the implied author, or the voice behind the narrator, we can say that the narrator here is closer to the implied author than, say, a narrative persona would be, and there is little evidence to suggest Faulkner has developed the narrator as any kind of character (even a peripheral one) in the story. It would seem the intent of the implied author is in accord with the narrator, in that we sense a sympathetic attitude toward the boy. Of course, there are many possible ‘intentions’ available to the implied author than simply being sympathetic or critical toward the story’s characters. However, it is useful for the reader to attempt to gauge such ‘attitudes’ to judge the narrative more accurately, as well as the thematic and symbolic components of the story. Again, without the narrator and the narrator’s commentary and information, the attitude of the implied author would be less available to the reader who would then need to discover it exclusively through the boy’s experiences.

Without the perspective of this third person narration, we would not gain the insights available from the passage of time and distance. For example, young Sartoris cannot yet understand why his father’s campfires are so small, “niggard almost”. (447) The narrator’s commentary provides an answer: the fire appeals to his father as a sort of ultimate weapon in the preservation of his integrity, however perverse, and of special significance to be used “with discretion.” (447) Sartoris alone could not provide us with such a clue to his father’s character; he can only note that “…he had seen those same niggard blazes all his life. He merely ate his supper beside it.” (447) Nor does he understand the significance of his father’s “absolutely undeviating course” (449) and his “stiff foot” (449) stepping in the manure even though he could have avoided it, and the fact his stride “ebbed for only a moment”; (449) these things, observed but not understood by the boy are, through the narrator, made clear as ominous portents that Sartoris’ father is again embarking on a dangerous and violent confrontation.

One of the important effects of this limited perspective, third-person narration is to introduce a major element of irony to the story. The key is the focus on Sartoris and his naïve love for his father, and the revelations, through the narrator, that the father is unworthy of this love. If we imagine an omniscient narrator, privy to the inner workings of all the characters, or if we imagine a point of view that shifts to Sartoris’ older brother or to some other character, then the power of irony dissipates.

When the narrator tells us in the opening court scene that Sartoris “could not see” (445) the kindness in the Justice’s face, “nor discern” (455) the troubled tone in his voice, we are altered to the possibility that the ‘enemy’, as Sartoris envisions it, “our enemy”, (444) may not be the Justice of the Peace or his neighbour Mr. Harris, but may in fact be his own father, a thought as yet unformed and incomprehensible to him. Or when the narrator reveals that Sartoris’ father was shot while stealing a Confederate horse during the Civil War, the irony is furthered, for his father is shown not to be as he still appears to his ten year old son, and having within him little that is heroic. Much later, Sartoris will come to understand, if not the specific facts of his father’s past and character—we do not know if he ever gains such knowledge—at least the facts of his father’s brutality and profound inhumanity.

 

After the barn burning and the death of his father whose “old blood…had been bequeathed him willy-nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it came to him” (455), after Sartoris’ horrific passage toward manhood, we are left at the end of the story with his renunciation of his cruel father’s authority over him. We are also left with the irony of a youth still not fully able to leave the past behind: “‘He was brave!" He suddenly cried…"'He was! He was in the war! He was in the Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!’”; a youth not fully ready to accept the truth but, nevertheless, not looking back either as he steps into the “quiring heat of the late spring night.” (457)

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Works Cited

 

Faulkner, William. Barn Burning. Bain, Carl E., Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter, eds. The Norton Introduction to Literature, 4^th ed. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1986

 

Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5^th ed. Fort Worth, Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1988.

 

 

 

 

*Named after Colonel John Sartoris who fought in the Civil War.

 

 

 

Third Person Narrator— "is someone who is outside the story proper, who refers to all the characters by name, or as ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’.” (145, Glossary)

Omniscient Narrator— the narrator “knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events” [and] “is free to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to character. (145)

Limited Perspective Third Person Narration— “The narrator tells the story in the 3^rd person, but within the confines of what is experienced, thought, and felt by a single character (or at most a few characters.)” (146)

Narrative Persona— "In literature the term generally refers to a character established by an author, one in whose voice all or part of a narrative takes place.” (Wikipedia)

Implied Author— “the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written…the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer…. The implied author may or may not coincide with the author's expressed intentions or known personality traits.”  (Wikipedia)

 

 

 

 

Prof comments: Grade=87 Very good understanding of the story and the concept of point of view.