40 Fun Facts About Barn Burning

Which Texas-born actor played the menacing Abner Snopes in the 1980 film of Barn Burning?

Tommy Lee Jones took the role for a PBS adaptation directed by Peter Werner, more than a decade before The Fugitive won him an Oscar.

In Barn Burning, what does Abner Snopes deliberately track across Major de Spain's expensive rug?

Manure clings to his boot because he steps in it on purpose, then ignores the house servant's order to wipe his feet before walking in.

In what kind of building is Abner Snopes put on trial at the opening of Barn Burning?

A general store serves as the Justice of the Peace's hearing room, so the hungry boy sits through the trial surrounded by food he cannot have.

Abner Snopes limps in Barn Burning because a Confederate musket ball hit which part of his body?

His heel was hit thirty years before the story opens, which places the action about three decades after the Civil War.

Which Japanese novelist reused the title Barn Burning for a story in his book The Elephant Vanishes?

Haruki Murakami's story was the main source for the 2018 film Burning, which also wove in elements of Faulkner's tale.

In Barn Burning, which broken mother-of-pearl item from Sarty's mother's dowry rides in the wagon?

A clock that stopped at fourteen minutes past two, on some forgotten day, travels with the family from farm to farm and never runs.

Faulkner set Barn Burning in which fictional county, modeled on the area around his hometown?

Yoknapatawpha takes its name from two Chickasaw words, and Faulkner liked to call it his apocryphal county.

Which 1958 Paul Newman film was built from Barn Burning and two other William Faulkner works?

The Long, Hot Summer cast Newman as the drifter Ben Quick, a role that won him the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

In Barn Burning, what does Major de Spain demand from Abner Snopes's crop to pay for the ruined rug?

Twenty bushels of corn is the charge because the rug cost a hundred dollars, a sum the Major says his tenant could never pay.

In Barn Burning, the quarrel behind the first fire starts when which Snopes family animal strays?

A hog of his kept breaking into a neighbor's field, and when the neighbor penned it and asked a dollar for its return, the barn burned.

What does hungry Sarty Snopes smell during his father's trial at the start of Barn Burning?

Cheese scents the very opening of the story, whose 116-word second sentence runs from the boy's hunger to his feelings about the trial.

Which landowner brings the arson charge against Abner Snopes in the first hearing of Barn Burning?

Mr. Harris points to the boy as a witness who knows what happened, then declines to make him testify against his own father.

Why does the Justice of the Peace dismiss the arson case against Abner Snopes early in Barn Burning?

Lack of evidence saves him, though the Justice makes his suspicion clear by advising him to leave the area for good.

What is the first name of Abner Snopes's weary wife, spoken only in passing in Barn Burning?

Lennie is what her husband calls her at one point; otherwise she is simply the mother, first seen crying in the loaded wagon.

Sarty's unnamed, ever-chewing older brother in Barn Burning is which recurring Faulkner character?

Flem Snopes is never named here, but he becomes the central figure of the three novels Faulkner later wrote about the family.

In Barn Burning, what was Abner Snopes really doing when he was wounded in the Civil War?

Stealing a horse got him wounded: he fought for neither side and went to war only for the booty, a fact his admiring son never learns.

In Barn Burning, what lesson does Abner Snopes try to beat into Sarty after the first trial?

Loyalty to blood kin is his whole creed: he strikes the boy for nearly telling the Justice what he knew, then warns that only family will stand by him.

What work does Abner Snopes do for landowners such as Major de Spain in Barn Burning?

Sharecropper families like his farmed another man's land for a share of the crop, and Sarty has already lived in a dozen such shacks.

What harsh cleaner do the Snopes women use on Major de Spain's rug in Barn Burning, ruining it?

Homemade lye does part of the damage, and a flat field stone that Abner carries to the wash pot does the rest, over his wife's pleading.

In Barn Burning, to what kind of building does Sarty liken the de Spain mansion at first sight?

A courthouse is the comparison he reaches for, and the sight fills him with a sense of peace he hopes his father cannot spoil.

The costly rug that Abner Snopes ruins in Barn Burning had been imported from which country?

France supplied the rug, a hundred-dollar import by the Major's account, and one of Sarty's sisters grumbles about its origin when she is made to carry it off for washing.

How does Abner Snopes respond in Barn Burning when Major de Spain bills him for the ruined rug?

He sues his landlord, a bold move for a tenant, and the Justice of the Peace does halve the bill while still holding him responsible.

On the final night of Barn Burning, what does Abner Snopes order Sarty to fetch from the stable?

A can of oil is what the boy runs to get, unable to disobey even though he now knows exactly what his father plans to do with it.

After breaking free on the last night of Barn Burning, what does Sarty do at Major de Spain's house?

He shouts a warning to the white man inside, gasping out little more than the word barn, then bolts back out the door.

As Sarty runs from the de Spain place near the end of Barn Burning, what does he hear behind him?

Gunshots ring out, one and then two more, and the boy cries out for his father, taking for granted that he has been killed.

Which birds does Sarty hear calling as dawn approaches in the closing lines of Barn Burning?

Whippoorwills call all around him on the hilltop, and their singing tells the cold boy that the night is almost over.

How does William Faulkner's Barn Burning end for Sarty Snopes after his night on the hilltop?

He walks on alone, and the final sentence notes that he never turns to see what he has left behind.

Which periodical first printed Barn Burning in June 1939 after other editors had turned it down?

Harper's Magazine paid $400 for the story, which Faulkner had first written as the opening chapter of a novel.

In Barn Burning, what is odd about Abner Snopes's campfires, even with stolen fence rails to spare?

They are tiny, almost stingy blazes; the narrator remarks that an older Sarty might have wondered why a man so free with other people's property kept his own fires so small.

Faulkner first wrote Barn Burning as the opening chapter of which novel about the Snopes family?

The Hamlet appeared in 1940 without the story, which Faulkner cut and sold separately; the book opens the trilogy he finished in 1959.

Which American novelist adapted Barn Burning for the CBS television anthology Suspense in 1954?

Gore Vidal wrote the teleplay and E. G. Marshall starred, four years before Hollywood borrowed the story for a Paul Newman film.

The 2018 film Burning mixes Barn Burning with a Japanese story of that name; which country made it?

South Korea's Lee Chang-dong directed it, and it became the first Korean film to reach the Oscars' foreign-language shortlist.

To which city did Barn Burning author William Faulkner travel in 1950 to accept his Nobel Prize?

Stockholm hosted a famously private man: he disliked the attention so much that his teenage daughter first heard about the prize at school.

William Faulkner, author of Barn Burning, lived most of his life in which Mississippi college town?

Oxford gave him the model for Jefferson, the county seat of his invented world, and he named his house there Rowan Oak.

Which modernist technique, a Faulkner hallmark, conveys Sarty's impressions early in Barn Burning?

Stream of consciousness shapes the sprawling, clause-heavy sentences, which pile up sights and smells as the boy takes them in.

Barn Burning, with its menacing father and bitter class conflict, belongs to which literary genre?

Southern Gothic suits a story that criticizes the old plantation order and draws Abner almost as a figure of horror.

Leaving the de Spain mansion in Barn Burning, Abner Snopes sneers that it was built from what?

Black people's labor built it, he says, and he adds bitterly that the owner now wants a poor white man's toil mixed in as well.

Abner Snopes of Barn Burning turns up earlier, running a wartime mule scam, in which Faulkner book?

The Unvanquished, published the year before, has him selling requisitioned mules back to the Union army they were taken from.

Which relative living with the Snopes family in Barn Burning sides with Sarty on the final night?

An aunt, his mother's sister, moves with them from farm to farm and urges her to let the struggling boy go.

In Barn Burning, what Christmas present did Sarty Snopes's mother save up to buy for him?

An axe was the gift, one of the few signs of tenderness in a household ruled by his father's temper.