The unexpected Hero

The Unexpected Hero

In William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”, the development of the main character, Sartory Snopes, plays an important role in the story’s development and climactic ending. All of the other characters in the story are flat and unchanged by the sequence of events and crisis’ depicted. Mr. Snopes, his wife, their children (except Sartory), and Mr. Snopes employers are the same people at the end of the story as they are in the beginning. They have neither changed their behavior nor grown as individuals. However, Sartory Snopes, the youngest in the Snopes family and the main character of the story, is the one example of a round character who grows in awareness and comes to reject his father. This change in character may be traced from his thoughts and actions in the courtroom, to his plea to stop his father from burning another barn, to finally his rebellion against his father’s authority as he runs to warn Major de Spain.
At the beginning of the story, S...