Barn Burning by William Faulkner
Quick answer: Barn Burning by William Faulkner: summary with the ending, Sarty and Abner Snopes, the de Spain rug, blood loyalty against justice, and the craft of a child's point of view.
A ten-year-old boy stands in a country store serving as a courtroom, smelling cheese and canned meat, while a Justice of the Peace asks whether his father burned a neighbour's barn, and he knows he will be expected to lie. William Faulkner published Barn Burning in Harper's in June 1939, and it opens his Collected Stories (1950).
It is the Faulkner story most assigned in American high schools and a study of a child choosing between blood and justice.
The story in brief, ending included
Colonel Sartoris Snopes, called Sarty, watches his father Abner escape the charge of burning Mr Harris's barn and be told to leave the county. That night Abner strikes Sarty for nearly betraying him and tells him to stick to his blood. The family moves to a tenant farm on Major de Spain's land, and Abner, walking stiffly on a heel shot while he stole horses during the war, tracks horse manure across the white rug in the de Spain hallway. Told to clean it, he scrubs it with lye and a field stone until the pattern is ruined. De Spain charges him twenty bushels of corn; Abner sues, and the Justice reduces it to ten.
That night Abner fills a can with oil. Sarty's mother tries to hold the boy, but he breaks free and runs to the de Spain house, shouting the word barn. He runs on into the dark, hears a shot, then two more, and believes his father dead, though the story does not show it. He sits on a hill through the night, whispering that his father was brave, that he was in the war, which the reader knows is not the whole truth, and at dawn walks into the woods without looking back.
The characters
A boy, his father, a landowner.
Themes: blood loyalty against justice
The classroom readings are family against law, class resentment in the tenant South (fire is the weapon of a man who owns nothing), and initiation, since Sarty's run is his first adult act. The rug is the contested object: a possession, an insult, and to Sarty a beauty he cannot afford to admire.
The sharper observation is Faulkner's use of what Sarty does not know. The narrator tells us Abner was shot stealing horses, not fighting, so Sarty's closing whisper about a brave father is both loyalty and error, and the story lets him keep the illusion he has just betrayed.
The craft: a child's mind in an adult's sentences
Faulkner narrates close to Sarty in long sentences the boy could never form, then interrupts with what the boy would think if he were older. The store-courtroom gives the story its structure: Sarty is tried twice, once by the Justice and once by his own blood. The turn is the ruined rug; the ending is a verdict Sarty delivers by running.
The technique to steal is the narrator who knows more than the viewpoint character and says so. Perspective handled this precisely earns its marks on Voice and Character in any judged competition, Writory's included.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, structure your essay around the two trials, the courtroom and the run.
- Cite the rug and the lye as class war conducted through property.
- Use the narrator's aside about the stolen horses to argue what Sarty does not know.
- Writers: let a narrator know more than the child at the centre and say so once or twice.
- End with a walk away and no look back.
Try it yourself
Write a story about a child who learns that a parent's grievance is real and that the parent's answer to it is unforgivable. Open in a makeshift courtroom. Let a single object, expensive and beautiful, become the field of battle, and let the child act at the end without the story confirming what the action cost.
Questions
What is the theme of Barn Burning?
The conflict between loyalty to blood and loyalty to justice, set inside the class resentment of the tenant South. Sarty's choice to warn Major de Spain is his initiation into a moral life apart from his father.
Does Sarty's father die in Barn Burning?
Sarty hears three shots and believes his father has been killed, but Faulkner does not show it, and Abner Snopes turns up in later Snopes stories. The ending is left uncertain.
What does the rug symbolise in Barn Burning?
The wealth and beauty of the world Abner cannot enter, and the insult he feels from it. Ruining it with lye is his declaration of war; for Sarty it is the moment his father's logic stops holding.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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