The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature

Barn Burning" Faulkner

William Faulkner's short article "Barn Burning" is the tale of a south man compelled into a role by society. Ab Snopse, a man who assisted both the North and the South, is plagued with his non-allegiance and failure to accept authority. When Ab arrives into conflict with his boss, he finds himself taking control from the authority number, and reverting back to his mercenary ways. Having no allegiance, Ab makes the move from helping hand to the enemy by burning down barns (Meyer, 2002, 194-203).

Along with many of Faulkner's short stories, "Barn flaming" is set in the invented Mississippi shire of Yoknapatawpha. During the restoration of the South, the time time span following the municipal conflict, the only thing that kept the South living and running where the recollections of fallen champions and the belief that the South would someday retrieve the status that it had one time held. Families like the Sartorises and the de Spains were glorified and praised for respects that their family members had achieved throughout battle.

We Came All the Way: Obejas

Obejas' name, with its jokey pledge of comic cross-cultural coming-of-age accidents, misleads. Her collection comprises seven parts individual memoirs and term papers as well as short fiction all discovering the outsider's agony and existential angst, all shot through with irrepressible wit and dark humor, but all finally unhappily tragic, glimpsing little wish of redemption or insightful change either for the exact protagonists portrayed or for men and women generally. Whether she chronicles the obsessions of a broken-hearted, jilted lover endeavouring unsuccessfully not to circle the block of her ex-girlfriend's apartment, or the humiliation of being offered pledged, unwashed clothing as part of the alternately boring and troubled "processing" into the U.S. as a political refugee from Castro's Cuba, Obejas' prose moves us. These writings of the disenfranchised are for any spiritual immigrant, huddled and yearning to be free (Meyer, 2002, 587).

Nighttime Fires: Barreca

In the short article "Barn flaming" by Faulkner, Abner Snopes was the furious and controlling dad of the protagonist. He was an hard-hitting, brutal and acrid man who worked as a sharecropper and destructively burned barns. Abner had a powerful yearning for revenge against the socio-economic scheme and burned barns as a means of getting even with the upper class. He certainly viewed himself as a contravened victim in a humanity where the aristocratic class prevailed. Abner was unable to accept pressure from an authority and by burning what they owned, he felt he took power away from them (Meyer, 2002,769).

My Papa's Waltz: Roethke

In Theodor Roethke's 'My Papa's waltz' the reader finds a horrid experiance, the beating of a child by his father, which is notified in a way of a loving and beutifull promenade - the waltz. The feeling one get from reading this verse is that the narrator, at smallest at the time in which the verse is in writing, does not gaze at this know-how as certain thing bad. He endeavours ...