Barn Burning

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of criminality that has stained her clan. Nervous in the presence of her irascible, unpredictable husband, she is a slim source of comfort for Sartoris in the violence-tinged world of the Snopes family.

Major de Spain - A well-dressed and affluent landowner. De Spain brings the soiled rug to the Snopeses' cabin and insists that they clean it and return it. Snopes's unpredictable nature unsettles de Spain, and he uneasily answers Snopes's charges in court.

Mr. Harris - A landowner for whom the Snopeses were short-term tenants. The plaintiff in the first court case, Harris had attempted to resolve the conflict over the Snopeses' hog. In the end, he is left with a burned barn and no legal recourse, as his case is dismissed for lack of evidence.

Colonel John Snopes - Sartoris's older brother. Although his name is not given in the story, Faulkner's other works of fiction feature the same character and identify him. A silent, brooding version of his father, John is slightly ...

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his years. "You're getting to be a man," Snopes tells his ten-year-old son after delivering a blow to the side of his head. In Sartoris's world, violence is a fundamental element of manhood, something he knows all too well from living with his father. Sartoris is impressionable, inarticulate, and subject to his father's potentially corrupting influence, but he is also infused with a sense of justice. Sartoris is in many ways a raw, unformed creature of nature, untouched by education, the refining influences of civilization, or the stability of a permanent home. The sight of the de Spain house gives him an instinctive feeling of peace and joy, but, as Faulkner notes, the child could not ...

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