“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 (or transmit) twice the weight which the body compassed... Then with the same deliberation he turned; 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. His father never looked at it, never once looked down at the rug.”
What in the world was he doing, walking into a strangers house solely for the purpose of tracking feces into it? This part of the story seemed to come out of nowhere, leaving me confused as to its purpose and meaning. I could not fathom, for the life of me, what was going on in Abner's head as he purposely soiled the carpet of a man I figured he had never met, since neither the boy, his father, nor the nar
rator had mentioned him before. Was he insane? From the story we already know him as a disagreeable character who in anger says things “unprintable and vile, addressed to no one,” and whose life is centered around getting even with those who offend him by burning down their barns.(¶ 13). But up to this point in the story, I felt there was always at least some type of justification for his actions, even though those justifications were in the wrong. But taking his son to the house of a rich stranger, just to ruin his carpet seemed to me to prove him an unstable lunatic.
So is he a lunatic, or do his actions serve some sort of twisted purpose? One thing I came to understand later that began to answer this question was that the man who owned this house was not really a stranger, but his landlord: the man paying him to be a sharecropper. So why bite the hand that feeds you? As the narrator
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