An Ex Basketball Player by John Updike

Revonda HenryPat Dansby
English 1302
18 February 2003
A Characterization of Sarty Snoops in William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”
Sarty, whose real name is Colonel Sartoris Snoops, is a poor ten-year old boy is described by Faulkner as being “small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as story scud” (Giola 163). Undoubtedly, the wildness in his eyes is caused by the grief and despair he experiences in his struggle to reconcile his own innate honesty with his loyalty to his father. Faulkner demonstrates Sarty’s struggle to reconcile these two qualities in three distinct occasions during the story when he is faced with making a decision between doing what he knows is morally right or standing with his family against a society which his father despises ( O’Brien 1).
The first occasion occurs in a trial being conducted in a small-town genera...