Killings and Barn Burning

Justice is not a word that appears very often in the average person’s speech. This does not stop writers, or their characters for that matter, from writing about the topic. Two prime examples are Matt Fowler in Andre Dubus’ Killings and Abner Snopes in William Faulkner’s Barn Burning. Through several examples, as well as a critic’s views, it will become clear that there are many dissimilarities and congruencies between Matt and Abner.

The most obvious discrepancies between the two are the literal ones, such as setting. Matt lives in a beach town near Boston during the late half of the twentieth century. Abner drifts through the South a short time after the Civil War. While they are both fathers, Matt cares for and worries about his children [“…when his children were young…he thought of them drowning in a pond or the sea, and he was relieved

Through all of the evidence given above, it is clear that there are many differences as well as similarities between Matt Fowler in Andre Dubus’ Killings and Abner Snopes in William Faulkner’s Barn Burning. Though they were different superficially and symbolically, they were both motivated by justice. Each character did what he felt was necessary to achieve that end. This is important in life as well as in the stories.

Abner Snopes, on the other hand, represents the “New South.” He is a symbol of the downfall of the Old South after the Civil War and its industrialization. He fights against Major de Spain who represents the Old South/sharecropper way of life in which one man controlled most of the land and “leased” it out to farmers to harvest for him. Janet Carey Eldred explains this well in the following lines, “Throughout ‘Barn Burning,’ Abner reiterates the importance of blood or family ties and of the power of family solidarity in the sharecropper system. No

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