Barn Burning
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40 free Barn Burning trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
William Faulkner's Barn Burning packs a whole moral education into a few days in the life of a ten-year-old boy. Sarty Snopes has to decide whether he owes more to his violent, resentful father or to his own sense of right and wrong, and the story follows him from one makeshift trial to a night that changes everything. This quiz covers the story the way a class does: what happens and in what order, who the Snopeses and the de Spains are, the small details that carry the big themes of class, family and justice, and how Faulkner tells it. A few questions step outside the text to the author's life, how the story first reached readers, and the film and television versions it inspired. It is written for students preparing for a reading quiz or a test, teachers who want ready-made multiple-choice questions, and readers checking how closely they followed the plot. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the set for a class.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Texas-born actor played the menacing Abner Snopes in the 1980 film of Barn Burning?
Tommy Lee Jones
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.
Q 02In Barn Burning, what does Abner Snopes deliberately track across Major de Spain's expensive rug?
Manure
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.
Q 03In what kind of building is Abner Snopes put on trial at the opening of Barn Burning?
A general store
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.
Q 04Abner Snopes limps in Barn Burning because a Confederate musket ball hit which part of his body?
His heel
His heel was hit thirty years before the story opens, which places the action about three decades after the Civil War.
Q 05Which Japanese novelist reused the title Barn Burning for a story in his book The Elephant Vanishes?
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami's story was the main source for the 2018 film Burning, which also wove in elements of Faulkner's tale.
Q 06In Barn Burning, which broken mother-of-pearl item from Sarty's mother's dowry rides in the wagon?
A clock
A clock that stopped at fourteen minutes past two, on some forgotten day, travels with the family from farm to farm and never runs.
Q 07Faulkner set Barn Burning in which fictional county, modeled on the area around his hometown?
Yoknapatawpha
Yoknapatawpha takes its name from two Chickasaw words, and Faulkner liked to call it his apocryphal county.
Q 08Which 1958 Paul Newman film was built from Barn Burning and two other William Faulkner works?
The Long, Hot Summer
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.
Q 09In Barn Burning, what does Major de Spain demand from Abner Snopes's crop to pay for the ruined rug?
Twenty bushels of corn
Twenty bushels of corn is the charge because the rug cost a hundred dollars, a sum the Major says his tenant could never pay.
Q 10In Barn Burning, the quarrel behind the first fire starts when which Snopes family animal strays?
A hog
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.
Q 11What does hungry Sarty Snopes smell during his father's trial at the start of Barn Burning?
Cheese
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.
Q 12Which landowner brings the arson charge against Abner Snopes in the first hearing of Barn Burning?
Mr. Harris
Mr. Harris points to the boy as a witness who knows what happened, then declines to make him testify against his own father.
Q 13Why does the Justice of the Peace dismiss the arson case against Abner Snopes early in Barn Burning?
Lack of evidence
Lack of evidence saves him, though the Justice makes his suspicion clear by advising him to leave the area for good.
Q 21The costly rug that Abner Snopes ruins in Barn Burning had been imported from which country?
France
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.
Q 22How does Abner Snopes respond in Barn Burning when Major de Spain bills him for the ruined rug?
He sues his landlord
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.
Q 23On the final night of Barn Burning, what does Abner Snopes order Sarty to fetch from the stable?
A can of oil
Q 14What is the first name of Abner Snopes's weary wife, spoken only in passing in Barn Burning?
Lennie
Lennie is what her husband calls her at one point; otherwise she is simply the mother, first seen crying in the loaded wagon.
Q 15Sarty's unnamed, ever-chewing older brother in Barn Burning is which recurring Faulkner character?
Flem Snopes
Flem Snopes is never named here, but he becomes the central figure of the three novels Faulkner later wrote about the family.
Q 16In Barn Burning, what was Abner Snopes really doing when he was wounded in the Civil War?
Stealing a horse
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.
Q 17In Barn Burning, what lesson does Abner Snopes try to beat into Sarty after the first trial?
Loyalty to blood kin
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.
Q 18What work does Abner Snopes do for landowners such as Major de Spain in Barn Burning?
Sharecropper
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.
Q 19What harsh cleaner do the Snopes women use on Major de Spain's rug in Barn Burning, ruining it?
Homemade lye
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.
Q 20In Barn Burning, to what kind of building does Sarty liken the de Spain mansion at first sight?
A courthouse
A courthouse is the comparison he reaches for, and the sight fills him with a sense of peace he hopes his father cannot spoil.
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.
Q 24After breaking free on the last night of Barn Burning, what does Sarty do at Major de Spain's house?
Shouts a warning
He shouts a warning to the white man inside, gasping out little more than the word barn, then bolts back out the door.
Q 25As Sarty runs from the de Spain place near the end of Barn Burning, what does he hear behind him?
Gunshots
Gunshots ring out, one and then two more, and the boy cries out for his father, taking for granted that he has been killed.
Q 26Which birds does Sarty hear calling as dawn approaches in the closing lines of Barn Burning?
Whippoorwills
Whippoorwills call all around him on the hilltop, and their singing tells the cold boy that the night is almost over.
Q 27How does William Faulkner's Barn Burning end for Sarty Snopes after his night on the hilltop?
He walks on alone
He walks on alone, and the final sentence notes that he never turns to see what he has left behind.
Q 28Which periodical first printed Barn Burning in June 1939 after other editors had turned it down?
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine paid $400 for the story, which Faulkner had first written as the opening chapter of a novel.
Q 29In Barn Burning, what is odd about Abner Snopes's campfires, even with stolen fence rails to spare?
They are tiny
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.
Q 30Faulkner first wrote Barn Burning as the opening chapter of which novel about the Snopes family?
The Hamlet
The Hamlet appeared in 1940 without the story, which Faulkner cut and sold separately; the book opens the trilogy he finished in 1959.