Journal 3 - Barn Burnings

Honestly, I did not enjoy reading this story at all. When the story starts, we're in a small town court room where Sarty is crouched watching a trial of his father, a sharecropper, and their master. Sarty's father is being accused of letting his hog run around, eating his master's corn, and then finally burning down his barn. Sarty is called on to be witness, and as Sarty walks up to the witness stand he thinks to himself as his father stares at him, "He aims for me to lie...and I'll have to do hit" (187). 

When the trial ends, Sarty and his family move to a new home where they begin sharecropping all over again. One night, Sarty, his father, and his brother go to the master's home, rudely barging in. As they walk into the home they track muddy foot prints onto a very valuable rug. After Mrs. de Spain asks them to leave, Sarty's father turns around and Sarty follows him home.

The next day, Sarty's sister's are attempting to clean the rug that was ruined the night before, not quite bringing it back to it's former glory. Later in the week, Mr. de Spain brought Sarty's father to court to work out the payment for the rug, which now showed burned-out holes where the stains had been. Sarty's father was charged ten bushels of corn this planting season to pay back Mr. de Spain for the damages and loss.

When the Snopes return home, Abner tells Sarty to, " Go to the barn and get that can of oit we were oiling the wagon with" (196). Sarty knew exactly what his father wanted the oil for, told his father no. After hearing this, his father struck him, threw a can at him, and told his mother to tie him to a bed post so that he could not warn the de Spains of his plan.

Sarty eventually escaped and ran to the master's home to give them warning. After giving Mr. de Spain the warning, Sarty just kept running. After a short rest at midnight, Sarty once again got up to walk, "He was only cold, and walking would cure that...He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too" (198). Sarty never returned and never looked back.

At the end of all of this, I was both disappointed and amazed. Sarty finally learned that blood may be thicker than water, but doing what was right did not mean lying for your family, no matter how much you love them. Mr. Snopes, Sarty's father, never learned a single thing throughout the entire story. He went on doing whatever he wanted with no thought to his master, and eventually burned the new master's barn to the ground. Sarty's family, minus Sarty, would have to up and leave once again, all because the father was so selfish as to try and make things difficult for the master and try to watch out for his family. This father, who was often compared to steel, hard, cold, heavy, and hard to mold, was exactly that, even to his own family. With the open ending, I just like to think that Sarty grew up differently and raised his own family right.

Work Cited

Faulkner, William. “Barn Burnings”. The Norton Introduction To Literature. 10^th ed. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2010. 186-198. Print.