2 William Faulkner — "Barn Burning" (1939)

The story: Sarty Snopes, a ten-year-old in the post-Civil War American South, watches his father Abner — a resentful itinerant tenant farmer — answer every humiliation by burning landlords' barns. A makeshift justice-of-the-peace hearing (the fine; "This case is closed"); the new landlord'srug Abner ruins and is made to pay for; the final night — Sarty breaks from blood loyalty, warns the de Spain household, and flees as his father is shot, walking on at dawn "without looking back." Themes:justice vs kinship loyalty (the child's agonising choice: the blood bond against the moral law — law's oldest philosophical problem, Antigone's); dignity, resentment and class (Abner's arson as the powerless man's "law" — property crime as insurrection); the courtroom ofthe poor (the informal hearing, procedural roughness, biased economics — access-to-justice in miniature); moral development (Sarty's conscience emerging against enculturation — Sociology Unit 4's theme in fiction). Style: dense sensory imagery, free indirect discourse inside the child's consciousness — study how perspective builds truth-claims (a trial lawyer's daily problem).