Searching For Peace In William Faulkner's Barn Burning
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Searching for peace can be a difficult task when everything around you relates to violence. Peace is essential for human development; is a form of tranquility and freedom from oppression. Promoting and teaching the practice of nonviolence could reduce the violence that consumes souls, homes, and society. In Williams Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning”, Sartoris Snopes is constantly overwhelmed by fear, agony, and despair because of his father’s practices of violence not only against his family but also the law. He knows that he must search for peace if he ever wants to be free from his unstable and unpredictable life. Throughout the story Sarty deals with his father’s brutality and ignorance which poses a struggle when trying to develop his own ideas of morality. The cold hearted side of Abner is what causes the internal conflict in Sartoris…show more content… Perhaps by leaving he can find the peace he seeks in the future: “I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face ever again” (489). However, by escaping Sartoris has found a quieter, more subtle form of living life as an “Apollonian man”. Living under his father’s unconstructive values was like living in a state of extreme fear, grief, and despair. Now, the extreme emotions that emerged over Sartoris’ early life have eased. Sartoris cannot escape entirely, but he has already achieved a kind of peace. Sarty’s Apollonian actions serve to distinguish between a culture of violence and a culture of peace; he wanted to break the roots of evil, arrogance, ignorance, prejudice and selfishness that his father was imprinting on him. “He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun” (491). Sartoris for the first time detaches himself from what was a life full of inequity to glimpse a peaceful