Faulkner's Barn Burning
William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” nestled in the period known as the Great Depression, focuses on the struggles of Southern lives during this era. Faulkner’s story depicts the vengeful life of an American tenant farmer in the early twentieth-century. The tale describes the Snopes family, whose endless dysfunctions range from psychological and physical abuse to dictatorship and eventually rebellion. As the father, Abner, barks orders to his troops to unload the wagon while he merely watches. Here, the reader gets a picture of how he rules the family. Abner, distinctively an uncouth man, displays this as he walks on his landowners expensive carpet carrying horse manure on his boot, then pivoting “leaving a final long and fading smear” (606).