Barn Burning Comparison

I liked both of these stories very much. I like stories, books, and movies that end like these two stories. I like to use my imagination to think about what happened after the story ends. Sometimes, I even think of more than one ending, one good and one tragic. The first thing that can be compared in these two stories is the reason why each boy ran away. In the “Barn Burning” it is the fault of Abner Snopes, Sarty’s father that Sarty was forced to run. Old man Snopes is a cruel, abusive man who often beat Sarty. Whenever Abner Snopes got mad at anybody, he took out his anger on them by burning their barn. They always had reason to be unhappy with Abner, because Abner just wanted a miserable man. Abner made Sarty lie for him and say that he did not burn the barns. Abney would beat Sarty and tell him that he had to do it because they were family. Faulkner expresses it like this: “you’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you” (803). Another difference in the two stories is that Sarty shows courage by telling Major de Spain about his father burning his barn even though he knew he would not be able to …show more content…
Dave is seventeen and he causes of his own troubles. Dave gets the idea that owning a gun will make him a man, but from the moment he gets one, he gets in trouble with it. He runs away because he is in all this trouble, and he does not want to face it as a real man. Even Joe at the catalog store says, “You ain’t nothing but a boy. You don’t need a gun” (Wright), but he sells it to him anyway. Dave is betraying his family when he runs away and still thinks that the gun will man him a man (Wright 907). His family should be ashamed of him because he will not stand up like a man and take the consequences for being