Who led the two horses out of the burning stables to safety?
Answers
Answer:
i do not know
Explanation:
Faulkner's short story about Sarty Snopes and his father, Abner Snopes, has been praised ever since its first publication in Harper's Magazine for June 1939. It was reprinted in his Collected Stories (1950) and in the Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner (1961). Part of the story's greatness is due to its major theme, the conflict between loyalty to one's family and loyalty to honor and justice. This conflict is vividly illustrated by having a young 10-year-old boy — Sarty — confront this dilemma as part of his initiation into manhood.
Young Sarty has a choice: He can be loyal to his father, his blood relative, or he can do what he innately senses is right. He knows that his father is wrong when he burns barns, but Abner constantly reminds his son of the importance of family blood, and of the responsibilities that being part of a family entails. He tells Sarty, "You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you." In other words, if you are not utterly loyal to your own family, no matter if the family is right or wrong, then you will have no place to turn when you need help. At the end of the story, this is Sarty's dilemma — he has no place to go and no one to turn to.
The opening of "Barn Burning" emphasizes the antithetical loyalties that confront Sarty. The setting is a makeshift court for a Justice of the Peace, for Abner Snopes has been accused of burning Mr. Harris' barn. Immediately, Sarty is convinced that the people in the court are his and his father's enemies. He fiercely aligns himself with a loyalty to blood and kin, as opposed to the justice of the court: ". . . our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! Mine and hisn both! He's my father!" Faulkner then recounts the events that have led up to the charge against Sarty's father: Mr. Harris had warned Snopes to keep his hog out of the farmer's cornfield, and he had even given Snopes enough wire to pen the hog; after the hog escaped yet again into Harris' field, the farmer kept the hog and charged Snopes a dollar for "pound fee"; Snopes paid the fee and sent word to Harris that "wood and hay kin burn." Because there is no proof — other than this enigmatic message — that Snopes is responsible for burning the barn, the judge is legally forced to find him innocent. However, he warns Snopes to leave the county and not come back.
The courtroom scene and the following fight outside between Sarty and some boys underscore Sarty's predicament. Called to testify during the hearing, he is about to confess his father's guilt when the judge dismisses him; yet, when he is outside the courtroom and hears the boys calling his father a barn burner, he comes immediately to his father's defense, engaging them in a fight during which he sheds his own blood to protect his father's — and his own — name. Thus, the literal importance of blood loyalty is strongly emphasized.
These opening scenes provide us with a clear picture of Abner Snopes, whose last name itself — beginning with the "sn" sound — is unpleasant sounding. A silent and sullen man, he walks with a limp, a significant factor when we learn later that he received the wound while stealing horses — and not necessarily the enemy's — during the Civil War. We also discover that Harris' barn is not the first barn that he has burned.
Snopes never burns farm houses, and while we might initially conclude that this restraint is proof that Snopes isn't wholly incorrigible, we soon learn that on farms, barns are more important than houses because they hold livestock and oftentimes harvested crops, which provide the money and food that farmers and their families need to survive. Farms can thrive without houses, but they are doomed to fail without barns. Abner, of course, is keenly aware of this fact.
Although he knows that his father is a barn burner, Sarty fights the boys to defend his father's integrity, while hoping fervently that his father will stop burning barns: "Forever he thought. Maybe he's done satisfied now, now that he has . . ." Sarty cannot complete his thought that his father is not only a barn burner, but that he has been one for so long that before he burns down one barn, he has "already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he . . ." Again, Sarty severs his thought before he comes to the logical conclusion. He cannot bring himself to finish the sentence, which presumably would end, "before he . . . burnt down the barn."