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Essay on Narrators in Faulkner’s Barn Burning and The Unvanquished

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Narrators in Faulkner’s Barn Burning and The Unvanquished

“Barn Burning” and The Unvanquished present very different ways to tell a story. In “Barn Burning,” Faulkner uses a third person, limited omniscient point of view that allows him to enter the mind of the story’s protagonist, Colonel Sartoris Snopes. In this point of view, the narrator establishes that the story took place in the past by commenting that “Later, twenty years later, he was too tell himself, ‘If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have it me again.’ But now he said nothing” (8). The narrator of “Barn Burning” develops Colonel Sartoris as a child by describing his relationship with his father; no matter how many times Ab Snopes burns a barn or …show more content…

One of the most interesting elements of this backward gaze is its self-awareness. In contrast, for instance, to Willa Cather’s romantic, idealistic narrator in My Ántonia, whose authority Cather undercuts in the novel’s introduction, Faulkner’s narrator in The Unvanquished constantly reminds us that the story he is telling is a memory and that as a memory it is inevitably flawed—he has to fill in its blank spots and he recognizes that and he is thinking through the events of the story with a mind that is very different than the one that experienced them.

This is beautifully apparent early in the novel as he explains that he can now describe the events of the story with language that was not available to him as a child. After Loosh destroys the model of Vicksburg that Bayard and Ringo were playing with, the narrator remarks, “Loosh squatted, looking at me with that expression on his face. I was just twelve then; I didn’t know triumph; I didn’t even know the word” (5). The narrator again recognizes the gulf of language that now separates him from his childhood experiences when he writes, after learning that he and Ringo had killed a horse rather than a man, ““I didn’t know horrified astonishment either, but Ringo and Granny and I were all three it” (29). As the novel moves forward from these confessions of the narrator’s childhood linguistic limitations, Faulkner uses other techniques to reinforce the fact that this narrator is an adult

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