Despite being only a few hundred paragraphs long, William Faulkner’s 1938 short story “Barn Burning” is found in a wide variety of literary circles. Given that his protagonist, Sarty, is a ten-year-old boy who separates himself from his family to forge his own identity, it’s probably best defined as a coming-of-age story. On the other hand, the depiction of the story of small-town southern life, morally ambiguous characters, suspense, injustice, and madness have all the hallmarks of the southern gothic genre. Faulkner’s tendency to pop in and out of his main character’s unannounced thoughts qualifies the story as modernistic, while the fact that the protagonist’s father is a psychopathic arsonist also rates it fairly high on the “psychological thriller” scale. .
Though the story is capable of filling many literary niches, its bizarre and somewhat insane plot seems to fall short of what might be called real-world relevance. After all, how often do we get driven out of town on a two-mule cart because a certain family member likes to watch their neighbors’ buildings burn? While “Barn Burning” might not be the book that comes to mind as you go about your daily life, the underlying themes are pretty straightforward and incredibly relevant. To show that you don’t have to be an impoverished 20th-century Southern farmer to relate to Sarty’s situation, let’s compare it to, say, the story of Anne Frank, a 15-year-old German Jew who hid behind a bookshelf for two years. to escape religious persecution during World War II.
At the most basic level, both Barn Burning and The Diary of Anne Frank are about family and the reality of being stuck with them. Granted, the forced closeness of constantly being herded from town to town together or sharing a small annex non-stop for 760 days is pretty extreme, but this only speeds up the process some of us spend our entire lives dealing with: how to identify with one another. yourself and not as your father’s son or your mother’s daughter, or the one who slept with the light on until the seventh grade, but as your own independently developing entity.
Taking a stand against “blood attraction,” Sarty honors his inner good boy by alerting people to his father’s latest pyromaniac target. In the process, he’s also going up against his entire family, who are trying to keep him from implicating his dad in arson (and probably not quite ready to pack up and move yet). Anne’s struggle, on the other hand, is much less radical, since much of it takes place internally between what she calls the “two Annes”: her cheerful, frivolous, and flirtatious half, which her family doesn’t particularly respect, and her more secret half. serious, noble half, which they do not know well. Because she doesn’t have the freedom to make a grand gesture in a criminal-type situation (let alone GO OUT after her), she uses her own diary to build her character and tell her personal truth.
This battle for identity is fought not only within the family, but also within the community. Sarty discovers that his communal identity is inseparable from his father’s actions when, despite having nothing to do with the various fires, he is singled out and personally accused of being a “barn burner.” In addition to giving up his father and turning his back on his family, Sarty ends the ordeal by heading “into the dark forest,” symbolically stepping out of the civilized world to define himself in the absence of the wishes, demands, or opinions of others.
Similarly, Anne is keenly aware of the injustice of her persecution, lamenting that while “what a Christian does is his own responsibility, what a Jew does reflects on all Jews.” However, because she does not have the freedom to embark on a personal vision quest, she cannot separate herself from the relationships that (mis)define her, or from the discomforts that cause her to live up to her standards. . Frustrated, Ella Anne finds herself wishing “there were no other people in the world.”
While “Barn Burning” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” bear little resemblance to one another in terms of plot, setting, characters, narrative, or other major literary identifiers, they actually have a lot in common in how they are applied. all of us as readers. This is the beauty of stories: when we take a moment to stop thinking of them as literature and start thinking of them as narratives, the gap between the words and the world closes.