Burning Bridges......

I really like this short story by Faulker. Though it is a short story, it was a complex story because of the characters. Sartoris and his father are especially complex and the tension between the two as they interact definitely left me sympathizing for both. The difficult relationship that Sartoris has with his father is hostile yet Sartoris is completely loyal to his father. At first I thought it was because he lived in fear of his father and what he could be capable of. But as I read on, I saw it was something different. Sartoris loves his father. He loves him and so he lies for him and obeys him; hoping and praying that there is good somewhere in his father that it would surface. Faulkner allows us to see that hope, love and pleading for his father when he allows us to read Sartoris’ thoughts. “Maybe he will feel it too. Maybe it will even change him now from what maybe he couldn’t help but be” (Page 1960, Norton). He holds onto a hope that maybe his father will someday change but that day never comes. Throughout the story I see a goodness and seriousness that resides in this young boy, a seriousness that is beyond his years. When he and his family travel to another farm, he surveys the land and the house and for a moment, forgets his father and their troubles. “They walked beside a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging open between two brick pillars, and now, beyond a sweep drive, he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father and the terror and despair both, and even when he remembered his father again the terror and despair did not return. Because for the twelve moving, they had sojourned until now in a poor country, a land of small farms and fields and houses, and he had never seen a house like this before” (Page 1959). Sartoris looks at the grandeur of the scene and believes it to be safe from the deviousness and evil working of his father. “They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that’s all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the punt flames he might contrive…..” (Page 1959). When Sartoris’s father attempts to burn down De Spain’s barn, he goes against his immoral father, warns De Spain; choosing independence and right. Despite how hard Sartoris’s journey may be he chooses another path apart from his father and his family. He chooses the moral path and never looks back.