The meaning behind the stiff leg

In Faulkner's short story Barn Burning, the stiff leg of Abner Snopes serves to be a metaphor that guides the action in the story. Abner had injured his leg thirty year prior in the Civil War. It is no doubt a constant reminder of the injustice and pain he witnessed and took part of. It seems likely that Abner's morale for justice can be equated with the cruelty and destruction of war.

Honesty is not a virtue for Abner. He tells his son Sartoris early on that "You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you." Therefore, he encourages Sartoris to lie in court if it means saving the family name. This appears to be the same mentality in a setting like war--no matter what the cost, save your own kind.

He makes this fact known to his son by beating him. In this scene, we first see the mention of Abner's stiff leg, which is a reoccurring theme throughout the story:

"Once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth--a shape black, flat and bloodless..."


 The first characteristic that Sartoris identifies on his father is most often the stiff leg. He can hear the stiff leg as he says, "it came down on the boards with clocklike finality, a sound out of all proportion to the displacement of the body it bore." To Sartoris, the limp encompasses his father's being which shows how Sartoris views his father as an oppressing man. Abner is not only physically wounded, but emotionally from what occurred previously in his life. His disillusioned notions of justice are usually taken out on his son.

The most telling part of the story occurs when Abner and Sartoris are in the house of Major de Spain and Abner stains their rug from the manure stuck on his stiff legged shoe. I believe this scene presents the central metaphor and meaning in the story. First of all, his stiff leg serves as a metaphor for Abner's rigid views of justice. Because the war treated him unfairly, he now tries to make up for it by believing he deserves more than he receives. It is a permanent thorn in his side. As the show of the stiff leg goes on to stain the rug, it shows how this perspective permeates into all aspects of his life--from his family, to his work and to the society he lives in. Faulkner uses effective descriptive language to convey the scene:


"And now the boy saw the prints of the stiff foot on the doorjamb and saw them appear on the pale rug behind the machinelike deliberation of the foot which seemed to bear twice the weight which the body compassed...


"The boy watched him pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the turning, leaving a final long and fading smear...He stood for a moment, planted stiffly on the stiff foot, looking back at the house. 'Pretty and white, ain't it?'"


Abner is forced to pay ten bushels of corn to Major de Spain for ruining the expensive rug, but Abner is appalled at the sentence, believing he doesn't deserve to give the major anything. What results is a tragic ending as Abner is killed and Sartoris escapes the scene, fleeting his family and previous life. The only certainty is now Sartoris will no longer be held under the oppression of his father's stiff leg.