Abner Snopes of William Faulkner’s short story ‘Barn Burning’ is a despicable character who views the world through a lens of violence and cruelty, and he lives solely to mete out vengeance on any whom he perceives has slighted him. He views himself always as a victim rather than a criminal. He has no loyalty except to himself, he has no love for anyone, not even himself, and his distorted view of the world eventually destroys him.
‘Barn Burning’ opens in a store that doubles as a courtroom where Snopes is on trial for burning Mr. Harris’s barn. Mr. Harris tells the judge that Snopes’s pig got out of its pen and into his cornfield. He caught and returned the pig. When the pig got out again, Mr. Harris again returned the pig to Snopes along with a spool of wire for fixing the pen out of which the pig keeps escaping. He also tells the judge he warned Snopes that if the pig escaped again, he was going to keep it. The pig does, Mr. Harris pens it up, rides to Snopes’s place and tells him he has his pig and is charging him a ‘dollar pound fee’ to get it back (Faulkner, 1939, p. 1). While there, Mr. Harris notices ‘the wire [he] gave him still rolled on to the spool in his yard’ (p. 1). That evening a ‘nigger’ comes with the dollar, takes the pig, and leaves Mr. Harris with a message from Snopes: that ‘wood and hay kin burn’ (p. 1). That same night, Mr. Harris’s barn burns down.
What is most significant in this opening scene is that we can see Snopes’s view of himself as a victim rather than a criminal playing out. We learn that his neighbor fairly warns Snopes, not once but twice, to keep his pig properly penned and out of his corn. He even provides Snopes with the wire, without charge, necessary to repair and strengthen the pen. Snopes refuses to fix the pen, and when Mr. Harris follows through with his threat to keep the pig next time it ravaged his crop, Snopes, without remorse, seeks revenge rather than resolution and burns down Mr. Harris’s barn. When Snopes is told to leave the country, his response is ‘unprintable and vile, addressed to no one’ (Faulkner, 1939, p. 2). Rather than admitting his guilt and taking responsibility for both the pig and the barn, Snopes is a man totally unwilling to accept responsibility or admit culpability for the consequences that result from his actions. Why should he? He is the victim here, or so he thinks.
Snopes is a cold man, violent and cruel, a character without any real depth, and Faulkner (1939) repeatedly describes him in terms that reflect this: ‘[H]e could see his father against the stars but without face or depth—a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin’ (p. 3). Faulkner describes Snopes as being ‘flat,’ ‘without depth,’ ‘bloodless,’ ‘like tin,’ all terms that show us Snopes lacks human warmth. We see this play out in his interactions with his son Sarty, particularly when he believes Sarty was going to ‘betray’ his barn burning to the judge:
‘You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him.’ He didn't answer. His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger. (p. 3)
Snopes hits Sarty hard, but not any differently than he would hit a mule or kill a fly. There is no love for his son, no nurturing guidance, no emotion other than his disgust at the possibility of being betrayed. Faulkner (1939) also tells us that Snopes has a ‘wolflike independence’ (p. 3) and later compares him to a stinging wasp and a house fly (pp. 5,6). He also describes his hand as a ‘curled claw’ (p. 6) and the sound of his stiff foot as ‘a sort of vicious and ravening minimum’ (pp. 5-6). These animal-like characteristics further serve to dehumanize Snopes.
In the same scene in which Snopes hits Sarty, he tells him,
You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this morning would? Don't you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had them beat? (p. 3)
There are two issues in evidence here, and both are deeply ironic. First, we see again Snopes’s victim mentality. He is unconcerned with and indeed perhaps ignorant of his own culpability for his pig or in burning Harris’s barn. He sees the trial as a personal attack on him, as an attempt to get even with him for 'beating' Harris even though he was the one who attacked Harris by burning his barn. Snopes views burning the barn as justified by the perceived slight against him. The second irony lies in his advice to Sarty to stick to his own blood because Snopes is a man who did not do that when he fought in the Civil War. Being a Southerner, Snopes should have fought for the Confederate side—or defected and fought for the Union—but we learn that Snopes spent ‘those four years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called them)’ (p. 3, emphasis mine). We learn that Snopes only fought as a mercenary, only fought when there was something in it for him personally. We also learn that his ‘captured horses’ are stolen horses, and his limp is a result of being shot in the foot while escaping on a stolen mount. So although Snopes advises his son to be loyal, Snopes himself has never been.
This victim mentality later plays out again when Snopes burns down Major de Spain's barn in revenge for having been found guilty of and fined for intentionally destroying de Spain's rug. Again, Snopes has no recognition that he is culpable for his actions, and he feels wholly justified in burning the barn as retribution for the slight against him.
As we see, then, Snopes's view of the world is one in which he is a victim, and he makes himself feel better about his lowly position in the world by burning the barns of those who 'make' him feel bad. His view of the world eventually, however, costs him his life when de Spain shoots him down while Snopes is trying to burn his barn.
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