Arsonist (William Faulkner)

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Brandstifter (in the American original Barn Burning ) is a short story by the American writer William Faulkner , which first appeared in June 1939 in Harper's Magazine and was awarded the O. Henry Award for the best short story of the year in the same year .

It is about class and loyalty conflicts and can be seen as a prologue to those three novels known as the Snopes Trilogy .

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The short story begins with ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris "Sarty" Snopes, who is attending a court hearing. His father Abner Snopes is accused of setting fire to his landlord's barn, Mr. Harris. The young Sarty, who knows of his father's guilt, is called to testify and it is difficult to bring the statements of innocence for his father to his lips. However, due to a lack of evidence, there is no guilty verdict, Abner Snopes is only supposed to leave the city.

The family is already prepared for the move and is leaving immediately. In addition to Abner and Sarty, Lennie (Abner's wife and Sarty's mother) and her unmarried sister Lizzie travel with them. Abner confronts his son about the scene in court and asks him to be absolutely loyal. He beats him during the address; Sarty himself is impressed with the new home in Yoknapatawpha County and speculates that his father will be too. He hopes that he will settle down and be satisfied with his situation.

During a visit to Abner's new employer, Major de Spain, Abner stains an expensive carpet because he doesn't wipe his shoes on the mat. Abner also scares residents who point out that de Spain is not home. Abner only leaves the house after repeated requests. The undesired appearance has consequences. Major de Spain personally shows Abner with the carpet and demands that he clean it. Instead of listening to the women who want to clean the carpet for him, Abner uses field stones and lye soap to clean it, and leaves the ruined carpet on the porch.

De Spain confronts Abner that he irrevocably destroyed the carpet and demands twenty bushels of corn in reparation. Abner is suing in court; there, however, de Spain is right, even if the compensation is reduced to ten bushels. Abner Snopes feels he has been mistreated again and, against all protests by the women, prepares to burn down de Spain's barn.

Sarty does not want to allow that and fights himself free from the women who want to hold him back. Sarty runs to the farm and warns Major de Spain with sentence fragments that mostly only contain the word "barn" ( barn in the original). Then Sarty runs down the street and thus leaves his family. Before that he heard that three shots were fired. He mourns inwardly, believing that his father has been hit.

Origin and context of the work

Brandstifter was written in 1939 while working on the novel Das Dorf and was originally intended as a prologue for this work. However, Faulkner changed his mind and published the text independently in June 1939 in Harper's Magazine.

In this late story, Faulkner expands his earlier short stories Dry September and That Evening Sun to include the background of the conflict between the “poor landless white man” and the representatives of the southern aristocracy. At the same time, the dramatization of the inner conflict in the consciousness of a child protagonist, who has to break away from the authority of his father in order to maintain his own integrity, is in the foreground in terms of narrative technology. On the one hand, ten-year-old Sarty feels closely connected to his father, on the other hand, he has to reject him because of his unscrupulous, violent behavior and his amoral worldview. Barn Burning thus touches on some of Faulkner's previously published novels, in which youthful heroes such as Quentin Compson in Schall und Wahn or the young Bayard Sartoris in Sartoris have to break away from the influence of their fathers in order to be able to develop their own personalities. In contrast to the far-reaching novels, however, the events here only cover a short period of six days and are told in a narrative line in chronological order towards a decision-making situation that simultaneously forms the climax and the end of the story. The underlying temporal structure principle, according to which a phase formation takes place according to daily units, ensures a particularly clear structuring of the action with a clear alternation of tension and relaxation and at the end creates the impression of an inevitable necessity in the constantly accelerating sequence of events and events.

In his endeavor to dress his complex thematic ideas of the nature and the essence of human beings in a constantly varied form of speech and the combination of direct and indirect means of expression in an appropriate form, Faulkner develops narrative technology not only in his novels, but also in his short stories different structural forms. These are reflected as in the complementary design of two narrative and plot lines in Dry September and very centered structure of That Evening Sun . While Faulkner in That Evening Sun mainly relies on Quentin Compson's distant first- person narrative from a narrative perspective, in Barn Burning he chooses a largely personal narrative style , which, however, focuses on the consciousness of the main character. What is striking in all three of the short stories mentioned here is the diverse use and design of a pictorial-symbolic frozen moment (German: “frozen movement” or tableau) as the defining final moment of the stories.

Constant recourse to materials, figures and values ​​of the American South , which form the actual center of his literary work, connects Faulkner not only in the essential aspects of his world and human image, but also in his symbolic way of seeing and expressing himself with the most important writers and poets of American literature, especially Hawthorne and Melville .

In his novel Deutschstunde , published in 1968, Siegfried Lenz takes up central motifs from Faulkner's short story in German post-war literature. Lenz's character Siggi Jepsen is also in an extreme situation in which he is torn between his loyalty to his arson father and his own sense of justice and morality. In his novel, Lenz tries to transfer the father-son conflict that Faulkner had previously created to a specifically German generation experience.

Perspective and narrative design

The events in Barn Burning are largely portrayed as they are reflected in the perceptions and feelings of the child protagonist. This brings the drama of the inner conflict in the psyche of ten-year-old Colonel Sartoris Snopes to the fore, while the figure of his father, the arsonist Abner Snopes, appears all the more eerie and incomprehensible due to the lack of an inside view.

However, Faulkner does not choose the narrative form of a first-person narrative, which would inevitably be very limited in view of the limited horizon of experience and vocabulary of a ten-year-old, but introduces a knowing third person as the narrative figure who has a comprehensive insight into the child's consciousness. In this way, the child becomes the subject who receives the external impressions, but is at the same time the object of the description of the narrator, who can analyze and explain to the reader the perceptions and the processes in the consciousness of the ten-year-old protagonist. Instead of a child's limited ability to express themselves, the narrator can also use an extremely sophisticated narrative language without losing credibility.

The narrator comments on the boy's point of view at various points and expands or corrects his subjective point of view with objective information; He also explains the special psychological situation of the child and gives indications of the child's inability to see through more complex facts or relationships and to adequately verbalize his feelings and disordered sensations. In other places he gives Sarty's thoughts verbatim directly. Regardless of the occasional distancing or breaking of the narrative perspective, Sarty wins the sympathy of the readers, who for the most part can experience his inner drama directly.

In the course of events, three relatively closed phases can be identified. As can be seen in retrospect, the first day, a Monday, begins with the court hearing and the arson charge of Abner Snopes and ends with the family leaving for another area. On the second day, a Tuesday, Sarty accompanies his father to the house of the new employer, in which Abner deliberately soiled a valuable carpet, which he then completely ruined by "cleaning" it with field stones. This phase ends with the Major de Spain's claim for damages on the morning of the following day. After a delayed intermediate part, the events on Saturday are described, with the help of various means such as increasing narrative density, multiple structure and precise timing of the individual sections of the day, the climax of the story is also externally emphasized: In the morning, the court hearing with the lawsuit by Abner Snopes takes place against the major; in the afternoon Abner Snopes and his sons stay in the village, apparently cheerful and relaxed, only to return home after sunset. After dinner, Snopes then suddenly makes preparations for another arson attack. Events at this last stage seem to be precipitous: Sarty expresses his objections to his father, is then held by his mother, breaks free and rushes to Major de Spain to warn him, but then runs away from the Major In the direction of the endangered barn, meanwhile hears the shots, turns around and now sets out to leave the area and thus the world of the Snopeses forever.

Analogous to this three-part plot structure, the thematic development is also marked by a clear three-step process: In the first part, the son is still completely under the influence or under the spell of his father; in the middle part he hopes for a change in the desolate situation through external forces or powers, that is, the magic of a peaceful and orderly world as he believes to be found in the plantation house; on the last day he finally gains the strength to break away from the bond with his father and thus bring about a change in the situation himself. By contrasting the beginning of the narrative and the narrator, this change that the boy is going through is clearly emphasized. The initial mention of the barn fire contrasts with the arson at the end; the first trial opens the story, while the second trial ushers in the climax. In addition, the departure of the Snopes at the end of the first day corresponds to the departure of Sarty at the end of the story. The crucial difference in understanding the story is in Sarty's behavior, which turns from his initial passivity into activity at the end. His own intervention in the preparations for the second arson and his separation from the family turn out to be the outward signs of his newly found independence.

With the question of the motifs, Sarty's change directs our gaze back to his father Abner Snopes as another main character in the short story. In the few interpretations of history so far, the main focus has been on its role and character formation. Already by his name he is identified as a member of the poor whites in Faulkner's fictional narrative landscape Yoknapatawpha County and also, due to his moral unscrupulousness and carelessness for profit, as a negative counter-image to the "aristocratic" Satoris family in Faulkner 's novel of the same name from 1929, which is drawn in opposite directions embodies moral and humanistic tradition.

Individual performers such as William Bysshe Stein saw Abner Snopes as "Faulkner's Devil" very early on, based on a deep psychological interpretation of his foot injury, and understood it to be related to Melville's Ahab in Moby-Dick . From today's point of view, however, they believed to find clues for such an interpretation, which was one-sidedly exaggerated, in his conspicuous external appearance such as his black clothes and his limp; They also saw evidence and evidence of such an interpretation in his restless way of life, especially wandering from place to place, and especially in his inhuman emotional coldness and inaccessibility. In addition, various images and comparisons from the realm of the inorganic that characterize him, such as his machine-like ("machinelike") movements, his iron-gray ("iron-gray") brows or his pebble-colored ("pebble-colored") ) Eyes listed as reference marks. The aspect of the inhuman and Abner's contempt for tradition and custom were in part, for example by C. Mitchell, even seen as a kind of prophecy of the depraved mechanization of all values.

Such a one-sided or exaggerated interpretation, however, can be countered by the fact that Abner's destructive behavior is not simply an expression of senseless destructiveness, but is based on his - albeit perverted - legal awareness and his primitive private moral code of law or behavior. His multiple arson attacks are expressly not described by the narrator as mere vengeance, but rather as the only way to preserve one's integrity ("the one weapon for the preservation of integrity"), without this, however, in any form of solidarity with a particular social group or with one includes certain people.

As far as positive character traits can be found in Abner Snopes, such as his independence and his courage, which also impress strangers, these not only show Faulkner's inclination for differentiated character representation even in his short stories, but are also narrative functional with regard to the boy's bond with his father which is made so psychologically understandable. Sarty shows admiration for his father and his bravery, but ironically considers this to be demonstrated by his father's participation in the war in Colonel Sartoris' cavalry. At the beginning of the story, however, the boy is already in a conflict, which he later describes metaphorically as "being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses" (German: "as drawn between two horse teams"). This turmoil results from the moral corruption of his father and is already indicated in a way that is typical for Faulkner by the name given: Colonel Sartoris Snopes is, as it were, between two worlds that represent not only social, but especially moral or aesthetic opposites. In the course of the action it becomes clear how the boy deals with this conflict and finally resolves it.

However, the boy's decision for order, peace and justice in the end is not the same as a decision for the de Spain family or for the Sartorises: Faulkner's story is not about the superiority of one social group over another. The encounter with the Sartoris world in the form of the plantation house has a lasting impression on the boy, which is also underlined by the central position and the broad space of this scene in the short story; this impression of "peace and dignity" (German: "peace and dignity") turns out to be a deceptive illusion: The temporarily superior attitude of the people he admires is lost and their property goes up in flames. Nor can the strong sense of peace and joy that the young Sarty feels at the sight of her house shake his sense of solidarity with his father; until the end he, too, sees the major as a common enemy.

The finally changing relationship between the boy and his father does not result solely from the specific developmental condition of the boy at the end of the story; the beginning of the maturation process is prepared thematically at several points in the short story, above all through the various references to the clearly recognizable essential contradictions between father and son. Sarty experiences his own situation as a terrible "handicap" right from the start, as he does not seem to be able to act responsibly due to his young age. In contrast to this, on the background of his own amoral worldview, his father tries to convey to his son that his behavior should not be measured by the orientation towards moral values, but rather by the consolidation of the blood ties.

Ironically, however, Abner Snopes' brutal attempt to deprive his son of the right to his own free choice is what makes the boy actually decide. The decisive change is triggered by the symbolic gesture of the father, who without a word pushes Sarty away and hands him over to the mother to tie him down. This attempt at restraint brings about the boy's self-liberation, which is more than simply running away: Sarty's actions now turn out to be an expression of an awakening self-conscious and responsible personality. In this respect, with the act of self-determination by Sarty, Faulkner also takes up in this short story the human search for identity, which is decisive for his entire literary work.

Symbolism and linguistic means of expression

As in Dry September and That Evening Sun and numerous other short stories by Faulkner, the plot remains open. The extent to which Sarty's decision will ultimately initiate a new phase of life or development cannot be answered clearly. Nevertheless, the targeted use of indirect means of expression creates a corresponding conclusion to the event.

Formally re-designed as a frozen moment , the penultimate paragraph of the story represents a kind of threshold situation: When Sarty looks into the dark woods on the crest of the hill, the outer cold of the night and his inner isolation make him stiff and immobile; In a characteristic way, his thoughts still revolve around his father full of grief and despair ("grief and despair"). In the final section, on the other hand, Faulkner uses the space to place numerous symbolic signs of hope for a new beginning: the cold disappears with the rising sun; the birds singing fills the dark woods and the boy descends the hill without looking back, as is explicitly stated.

These symbolic processes are additionally emphasized in their expressive value by a series of key words that emphasize the change in the boy's inner attitude and the change in his situation in the last two sections: Is his condition initially identified by the central terms of "grief and despair" characterized in connection with the statement “he did not know”, the repeated use of the word “cure” (German: healing) ultimately points to a hopeful future.

The use of keywords is not limited to the narrative alone; the multiple designation of the father's figure and gait as “stiff” (German: “stiff”) awakens the idea of ​​the imperturbability of his actions as well as of his fateful immobility. Likewise, the repeated description of his clothing as "black" evokes associations of his person's connection with 'dark' forces.

In structural terms, the use of the three keywords “grief”, “fear” and “despair” is also striking. They produce on the one hand in connection with functional Leitwörtern as "joy", "peace", and "dignity" a linguistic opacification of the opposite worlds, between which the boy is moving but also are characterized in their changing Konsoziationen the internal development of small Sarty after.

Contrary to what the German title of the story suggests, Barn Burning is not the story of the arsonist as in the version of the novel The Hamlet . As mentioned above, the focus of the short story is largely on the boy's consciousness; the events and events are largely conveyed as they are reflected in his child's consciousness. Sarty wins the sympathy of the readers by experiencing the inner drama in his soul, while his father Abner Snopes seems all the more incomprehensible and eerie due to the lack of insight. On the basis of the child's limited horizon of perception, the painful intensity of his experience is significantly increased by the fact that, in contrast to the experienced reader, Sarty constantly hopes that his father can change. On the night after the disaster, he tries desperately to maintain the image of his father as a brave soldier, while the reader learns from the narrator that Abner Snopes' war was only about gain advantages and prey for himself.

Through commentary interventions by the narrator, the subjective view of the boy is supplemented or corrected by objective information, with the narrator looking ahead in time both in a simulative form (“Older, the boy might have remarked ...”) or by giving the reader explicit advice about the inability shows the child to grasp complex circumstances appropriately and to articulate his feelings appropriately. This underlines the childlike nature of Sarty's perspective in numerous places; At the same time, however, the narrator formulates the boy's disordered thoughts and feelings in these passages in a linguistic form that shows Faulkner's efforts to express the psychological processes in all their complexity, including subconscious impulses.

In the continuation of Sarty's thoughts, Faulkner uses the narrator to refer back to the accumulative process he often uses to shape complex psychological processes, as it is exemplarily used in the narrative technique of his novels.

There is a striking juxtaposition of different ways of speaking in these passages: the colloquial diction skilfully handled by Faulkner , which gives figures like Sarty their plasticity and differentiates them with regard to their nature, their age and their social milieu, is supplemented by a supra-personal narrative prose, which in turn finds its expression in numerous situation and function-related variants. For example, the narrator's reflections are characterized in many places by a labyrinthine sentence structure and an unusual accumulation of nouns and so-called “hard words” in order to encourage the penetrating effort to mentally penetrate the respective situation or person underline.

In those places where the situations are presented from the boy's perspective, Faulkner uses his narrative language as an extremely flexible medium that enables him to convincingly recreate the various moment-related moments of consciousness. An example of this is the presentation of the peak of tension towards the end of the story when Sarty runs away from the major's galloping horse. The intensity of tension in the situation is shown by Faulkner in a multiple subdivided sentence with a length of more than twenty lines, which expresses the boy's distress and breathlessness with a logically disordered, primarily psychologically determined sequence of reflections and sensory perceptions or psychological and physical processes. linguistically, these are mirrored further by the breaking of the syntactic order and the noticeably increased use of present participles instead of the conjugated verbs that are usually used .

main characters

There are a large number of characters in Arsonists . This list contains the most important:

Colonel Sartoris Snopes "Sarty"

Sarty is the ten-year protagonist of the story and was named after the great Civil War Colonel John Sartoris (the main character in the Faulkner novels Sartoris and The Undefeated ). He is the son of Abner and Lennie Snopes and is caught between his ambition to be morally right and being loyal to his criminal father. He eventually breaks out and leaves the family.

Abner Snopes

Sarty's father is a violent ruffian who threatens the existence of his family again and again through his reckless behavior. He does this with violence and threats. He demands absolute loyalty from everyone and urges them to perjure in court . If he feels that he has been treated unfairly, he resorts to criminal means - primarily arson - to get his way or at least get his revenge.

Major de Spain

De Spain is a wealthy landowner and Abner Snopes’s new employer, but he cannot deal with authority. Major de Spain appears in many of Faulkner's works, mostly as a hunter and a respected member of Yoknapatawpha County .

Lennie Snopes

Lennie is Sarty's mother and Abner's wife. She has a sad, emotional, and caring character. Violence and threats have not only tied her to the criminal man, but as a penniless woman she is also dependent on him. She does not actively participate in his crimes but helps him cover them up and lies for him.

Lizzie

Not much is known about Aunt Lizzie. She is an " old maid " and Lennie's sister. It is she who allows Sarty to run to the de Spains by not holding him at Lennie's calls.

Colonel John Snopes

Sarty's older brother is similar to his father, but a little quieter. He chews tobacco and never takes an active part in the plot of the story.

Mr. Harris

He is the former landowner and employer of the Snopes, who accused Abner Snopes of arson at the beginning of the short story.

Film adaptations

The story formed the basis for the film The Long Hot Summer by Martin Ritt in 1957/58 , in which Paul Newman plays the son of the arsonist.

Brandstifter was made into a short film for television in 1980 . The director was Peter Werner , the screenplay was written by Horton Foote , and the leading roles were played by Tommy Lee Jones , Diane Kagan and Shawn Whittington .

Awards

  • Faulkner's story Barn Burning was awarded the O. Henry Prize for the best American short story in the year it was published .

German language edition

Literature (selection)

  • Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 258-267.
  • Peter Nicolaisen: Hemingway's “My Old Man” and Faulkner's “Barn Burning”: A comparison. In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag Neumünster 1968, pp. 187-223.
  • Christa Buschendorf: With children's eyes: On the perspective technique with William Faulkner, Carson McCullers u. Flannery O'Connor. Königshausen u. Neumann, Würzburg 1988, ISBN 978-3-88479-299-5 .
  • William P. Nicolet: Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. In: Explicator 34 (1975): Item 25.
  • Susan S. Yunis: The Narrator of Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. In: Faulkner Journal 6.2 (Spring 1991), pp. 23-31.
  • Karl F. Zender: Character and Symbol in 'Barn Burning'. In: College Literature 16.1 (Winter 1989), pp. 48-59.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Hamlet, William Faulkner, Editor's Note, p. 408, Vintage International, Random House Inc., October 1991
  2. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 258 f.
  3. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 264.
  4. ↑ See Ute Müller: William Faulkner and the German post-war literature. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-8260-2970-7 , pp. 203 ff.
  5. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 266 f.
  6. ↑ See Peter Nicolaisen: Hemingway's “My Old Man” and Faulkner's “Barn Burning”: A comparison . In: Paul Gerhard Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag Neumünster 1968, p. 192f.
  7. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 264. See also Peter Nicolaisen: Hemingway's “My Old Man” and Faulkner's “Barn Burning”: A comparison . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag Neumünster 1968, p. 194.
  8. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 258-260.
  9. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 260 f. The quotations and interpretations mentioned by WB Stein and C. Mitchell were taken from this source.
  10. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 261 f.
  11. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 262.
  12. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 262-264.
  13. ↑ Cf. Gisela Hoffmann: Faulkner Barn Burning. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 264-266.
  14. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080417/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
  15. ↑ See Ute Müller: William Faulkner and the German post-war literature. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-8260-2970-7 , p. 203.