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  • Essay / The Importance of Literary Elements in Barn Burning

    The Importance of Literary Elements in Barn Burning Understanding literary elements such as patterns, reader/writer relationships, and character choice is essential to enjoying William's Barn Burning Faulkner. Some literary elements are small and almost unimportant while others are large and all-encompassing: the mother's broken clock, a small and seemingly insignificant object, is used so carefully, to extract maximum effect; the subtle, but more frequent, use of dialect words that contain darker secondary meanings; the way blood is used throughout the story in different ways, including several direct references to familial meaning; how Faulkner chooses to write about poor and ordinary people (in fact to the extreme) and how this relates to the views of Worth and Aristotle; and finally, the relationship between reader and writer, the choice of narrator and Faulkner's point of view, and how it works successfully. One of the formal choices Faulkner uses is the clock, Sarty's mother's dowry, which does not work. In a simple way, the clock represents Snopes' poverty, being all that his parents could offer the newlyweds, and the only novelty item ever mentioned in Snopes' possession. Most importantly, though, it doesn't work, symbolizing the breakdown of their relationship and her happiness. For maximum effect, Faulkner evokes the mother's misfortune just after the clock: ... the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at about two fourteen minutes past one o'clock dead and forgotten. , which had been his mother's dowry. She was crying... (Faulkner 4) Her misfortune is justified in the story by the treatment of Abner...... middle of paper ...... creates a more complex framework of ideals and virtues than would otherwise be credible in an uneducated boy of ten. By reading carefully and paying attention to details, I was able to get much more out of this story than when I first read it. In short, this assignment greatly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the more complex and subtle techniques Faulkner used to communicate his ideas in the story. Works Cited Faulkner, William. Selected short stories by William Faulkner, The Modern Library, New York, 1993. Smith, James Harry; Parks, Edd Winfield. The Great Critics, WW Norton & Company, Inc., New York, ?.Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1993. Abrams, MH A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, Fort Worth, 1993.