Barn Burning By William Faulkn

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de Spain's house is built with "nigger sweat" as well as the white sweat of the sharecropper. He seems to view himself as a victim of an unfair socio-economic system: he "burns with a ravening and jealous rage."(p.169), he is the "element of fire", the narrator speaks to "some deep mainspring" of Mr Snopes being "as the element of steel or powder spoke to other men, as one weapon for the preservation of integrity ...used with discretion."(p.166).
The father does not make any discrimination between the rich and the poor. For him, there are only two categories of people: blood kin and "they", into which he lumps all the rest of mankind and this division relates to his son 's crisis (to be related to the problem of identification too).
The physical description we are given about the father is always presented through the eyes of his son. The father really seems to be a kind of ghost which would come in no matter the place ("his father's foot were gone", "the silhouette was standing ...

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of willingness. They remain inscrutable and they indicate no desires throughout the story. We can note that each character (in the family) seems to have his double: the father with the older son, the twin sisters, the mother and her sister; most of the time, Sarty shows indifference towards them but he experiences a real contempt for his sisters he sees as bovine (p.167) and hulking (p.164). They are almost depicted as human cattle.
In the story's climatic scene, Mr Snopes orders his wife to hold her son to prevent him from warning de Spain that he intends to burn his barn. Ms Snopes is a will-less character who symbolises the strong power of her husband's will; his implacable force is ...

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