Adolescence and the Liminal: Barn Burning, Indian Camp and Coming-Of-Age - Research Paper Example

Adolescence and the Liminal: Barn Burning, Indian Camp and Coming-of-Age [ID 12/21 Robert Harris, an educator and English scholar, defines a coming-of-age story thusly: A type of novel where the protagonist is initiated into adulthood through knowledge, experience, or both, often by a process of disillusionment. Understanding comes after the dropping of preconceptions, a destruction of a false sense of security, or in some way the loss of innocence. Some of the shifts that take place are these: * ignorance to knowledge * innocence to experience * false view of world to correct view * idealism to realism * immature responses to mature responses (2010) Similarly, Esther Lombardi declares, “A coming-of-age story or novel is memorable because the character undergoes adventures and/or inner turmoil in his/her growth and development as a human being. Some characters come to grips with the reality of cruelty in the world--with war, violence, death, racism, and hatred--while others deal with family, friends, or community issues” (2010). Both Hemingways Indian Camp and Faulkners Barn Burning transparently fit these criteria, but the stories have very different trajectories and symbolisms. While both Indian Camp and Barn Burning are coming of age stories, Indian Camps trajectory of responsibility has to do with the institutions and culture surrounding the phenomenon of death as well as the phenomenon itself, while Barn Burning has to do with realizing the limitations of ones parents and transcending them. In Indian Camp, Nick enters the story at an unknown age, but presumably as a younger teenager. He is young enough that his father feels that it must be explained that “This lady is going to have a baby”, but old enough that he knows what this means. But by the end of the story, Nick has been exposed to a trifecta: Death, birth and the connected sexuality, and pain and violence of a sort (Tetlow, 1992, pg. 53-55). He is exposed to the horrible blood and death of the Indian fathers suicide: “He pulled back the blanket from the Indians head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets”. He is exposed to sexuality and its costs by the birth of the child and by the relationship between the Indian woman and her husband. He is exposed to birth and its potential costs and dangers, and his father has to explain that not all births are that perilous. He is exposed to violence, to the way knives and razors both help and hurt. This is far too much for a kid to take in. Nicks father could be accused of callousness when he says, “But her screams are not important. I dont hear them because they are not important”. But this would be a superficial reading of the character and is at odds with not only the storys locus being Nick and his growth but also the general admiration Nick expresses for his father in the tone of the story (e.g. never calling his father by name, asking his father to explain truths of death and life, etc.) So why does Nicks father not care? Simple: If he cares about the mothers screams, it will distract him from doing what is necessary. The screams are irrelevant, not important, to him, not to others. Nicks father is transparently concerned with the fate of the woman, and is sensitive not only to her but to the Indian womans husband. But he must steel himself, and teach his son to do the same. Nicks failure to take this to heart, to ignore the irrelevant, ends up harming him deeply. Nicks father is thus teaching an important lesson: In life, horrible things will happen. We are distinguished not by avoiding those things, but by facing them. This emphasizes Hemingways own personal philosophy of “grace under fire” (Young, 1964; Carlos, 1972; Jackson, 1989). Further, it shows that Nick is preparing his son for a career, for coming into his own as a man. “"See, its a boy, Nick," he said. "How do you like being an interne?” Nicks father is carefully trying to expose his son to the real world, to the difficulty of working and to the mortality of people, while also showing him how to adopt a trade. Hemingway gives us clues as to the nature of Nicks father in the narrative by the pronouns used for him. At the beginning of the story, it is “Nicks father”. But when Nicks father says, “I will be back in the morning”, it becomes “the doctor”. Nick is perceiving at some level that his father is two different people: The man who has raised him, and the doctor who aids others. This understanding that ones parents are not simple and one-dimensionally ones parents is common for coming-of-age stories, and permeates both Sarty and Nicks realizations in their respective stories. Hemingways unadorned style that sticks entirely to the facts and does not describe except at key moments the feelings and internal worlds of the characters is actually essential to the meaning and understanding of the story, and is not just a coincidence of authorial design (Young, 1964, pg. 6). Note the above description of the mans suicide. The very fact that it is a suicide is left to the reader to deduce: All that the reader knows is that a man has had his throat slit, that the razor is facing upwards, that blood is still everywhere. The sheer denotative power of the paragraph could indicate murder, or an accident, or suicide. But it is the statement by the doctor, Nicks father, to take Nick out afterwards, combined with the observation that they “Ought to have a look at the proud father. Theyre usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs...I must say he took it all pretty quietly", indicates what truly happened. The reason Nick is not exploring his own internal world until the end of the story, and why he is not privy to everyone elses internal world, is because he is in shock. Nick is only understanding the literal events that are happening, the literal positioning of objects and the flowing of the blood. He cannot quite piece together yet the underlying meaning of the events he is witnessing. He is unaware of the deeper import of everything. The child born will now have no father. The woman will not have her husband. The community will be torn apart and injured by this suicide. Nick will have a lot to think about in the coming years. Nick is also seeing an underlying racial conflict emerging (Strong, 1996; Meyers, 1996). While Amy Strongs argument that Nicks father represents some kind of conquest of the savage and this is the true explanation for the death seems to be a stretch, certainly there is a racial undertone between the white doctor, child and uncle, and the Indian camp. The very fact that the camp is turning to an outsider for medical assistance, an outsider of authority and expertise, is indicative; so too is the fact that it is called a “camp”, not a people, a nation or even a reservation. The death of the father seems to be an indication of the loss that the Aboriginal peoples felt inflicted upon them by generations of white outsiders, and the way that they are slowly disintegrating as a community. In any respect, no matter how the symbolism plays out, Nick is certainly also realizing many important things that even adults often forget: Different communities have different cultures, needs and practices; not everything is like what one knows. Certainly, the exchange between Uncle George and the woman is rife with symbolic interactions. “Later when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, "Damn squaw bitch!" and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him. Nick held the basin for his father. It all took a long time”. Nick and his father are there to provide service, but they are also outsiders, and they themselves are far more hostile to the people they are trying to help than they know. The atmosphere is ripe with suspicion, pain, uncertainty and mistrust. Further, Nick is becoming aware of class and status differences. He is seeing the deference everyone pays to his father. He is seeing that, here, suicides are performed by razors and complex medical procedures have to be performed “with a jack-knife”, sewed up “with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders”. He is seeing that some communities have desperate poverty and limited resources, and that his father has to deal with these things in his work. Of course, Nicks belief that he will not die might be more than simple escapism. He entered the den of adulthood, of death and pain, but his father navigated through it successfully. While the Indian man died, he died of his own volition: The woman was saved. Nick feels protected by his father. Many adults still feel that they are in their parents shadow, embraced and protected. And Nick knows that there is a whole set of things going on with death besides the mere phenomenon itself. "Is dying hard, Daddy?" "No, I think its pretty easy, Nick. It all depends." Nick knows that dying varies, that it can be terrible or easy. He also knows that a community has to go through a whole process with death: Figuring out why it happened, burying the body, etc. He knows this by Uncle George staying behind, handling that process. Nick may have known that death happened before, in an abstract sense, but now he knows that it means and what people have to do to cope with it. Meanwhile, in Barn Burning, Sarty is coming to terms with the limitations of his father, with socio-economic costs and the psychological impacts they have, with injustice, with crime and property damage, and with the risk of death and prison. A growing field of scholarship notes that in Faulkners work in general and Barn Burning in particular, the “villains” of the stories, in this case the antagonist of Abner Snopes, are themselves victims of broader social processes and changes. Abners barn burning, both of the landlord and the attempted burning of Major de Spains barn, is a rebellious backlash against those who he feels have wronged him. The South was changing at the time: Racial conflicts were hitting their peak, World War II would change things, etc. Abner is a man lost in this. While Abner feels superior to the black men he interacts with, the interaction in the doorway, when the black servant tells Abner to “wipe yo foots” and that he doesnt belong in the house, shows that Abner is in fact lower class than a black man, and Sartys own interactions with black men, common to Faulkners work, as equals and mentors underscores this fact. Abner is at the bottom of the totem pole: Below people he thought he would always be above (blacks), below landlords, below employers, able to be cheated at a moments notice. He lashes out the only way he knows how. Nonetheless, Abners burning is villainous, destructive and harmful. Abners relationship with his wife is strained: He is “stiff” and unpleasant. His wife begs for him not to force the sisters to lye the carpet: “He could smell the harsh homemade lye they were using; he saw his mother come to the door once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair; he saw his father turn, and he fell to with the axe and saw from the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground a flattish fragment of field stone and examine it and return to the pot, and this time his mother actually spoke: "Abner. Abner. Please dont. Please, Abner.” He is keenly sensitive to the injustices he faces but not to the injustices he commits, the cruelty he inflicts on his family and on his community. Sarty realizes that his fathers method of responding to what is done to him is wrong. It aint right to hurt others, no matter how they treat you, he might say. He may be loyal to his father, but he wont help him do something wrong. He resolves this dilemma by running, by stopping the barn burning but by doing nothing else that might cause his father to be imprisoned or harmed. This moral battle shows that Sarty is learning the right lessons by avoiding his fathers influence. Karen Bernardo summarizes, “It would be easy to say that Sartoris, in the end, must make a choice between right and wrong, between the "peace and dignity" represented by the de Spains with the squalor and misery of the Snopes family, but it is more than that. At the story’s beginning, when Sarty was ready to testify that his father did not burn down that barn, he would have done it because a son’s job is to stick to his father. At the story’s end, he warns Major de Spain that his father is about to burn down his beautiful plantation, even though he knows that this will bring his family down once and for all, even though he knows that this means he will never be able to go home again. This is heavy knowledge for a boy -- but Sarty is able to do it because he now sees that he is not his father, and the route he wants to travel in the world is nothing like his father’s path”. It is important to note how much Sartys perspective on reality, his perception of who is good and who is bad, is colored by his fathers hate. "Hey?" the Justice said. "Talk louder. Colonel Sartoris? I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris in this country cant help but tell the truth, can they?" The boy said nothing. Enemy! Enemy! he thought; for a moment he could not even see, could not see that the justices face was kindly nor discern that his voice was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris: "Do you want me to question this boy?" But he could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while there was absolutely no sound in the crowded little room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time. Faulkner makes clear that, racist prejudice aside, the judge is fair and kind. Objectively speaking, Sarty should trust him. But by this point, Sarty mistrusts everyone besides the family. Abner blames landlords, blacks, his wife, his sons and daughters, everyone but himself for his own situation, and lashes out at anyone who dares say different. Sarty is so poisoned by this toxic atmosphere of hate that he cant even see the truth: That others in society, even those who might be adversarially positioned in class or status struggles against his father and his family, are not bad people. The judge is forced to rule in Abners favor, but nonetheless exiles him from the community: “"No!" Harris said violently, explosively. "Damnation! Send him out of here!" Now time, the fluid world, rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat, the fear and despair and the old grief of blood: "This case is closed. I cant find against you, Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this country and dont come back to it". Consider what this means. Sartys testimony makes it so the judge cannot proceed, and though he knows that Abner must be guilty, he lets the family go. This is an objective sign that the judge is fair, yet Sarty cannot see this. When Sarty rejects his fathers hate, he rejects this preemptive judgment of people. Just as with Indian Camp, racial tensions underscore the narrative of Barn Burning. In the opening paragraphs, we hear about “strange nigger[s]” who offer prescient warnings that come true, of “wood and hay kin burn”. The judges dismissal of this information, as legally justifiable as it may be, is yet another dismissal of the virtue and wisdom of African-Americans. But while this particular black man sought to help a rich white neighbor, the black man in the doorway looks down on Abner and relishes the ability to dress down a white man. In rejecting his fathers toxic hate, Sarty is rejecting this distortion of reality too: The way prejudice warps ones mind. One of the key differences between the stories is the difference between Abner Snopes in Barn Burning and the parental figures in Indian Camp, Uncle George and Nicks father. Abner Snopes is a horrible man who Sarty must transcend. The one thing that Sarty idolizes about his father, Abners war record, is a misconception: “[H]is father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did: for booty - it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own”. The key to understanding Barn Burning is that Sarty faces the same moral dilemma twice. At the beginning of the story, he makes a decision that might be considered conventionally moral: He is told what to do so he follows it. He protects his father and perjures himself. But at the end, he chooses something different, something post-conventional (Crain, 1985). Sarty is taking a new perspective: “At stage 4, people want to keep society functioning. However, a smoothly functioning society is not necessarily a good one. A totalitarian society might be well-organized, but it is hardly the moral ideal. At stage 5, people begin to ask, "What makes for a good society?" They begin to think about society in a very theoretical way, stepping back from their own society and considering the rights and values that a society ought to uphold. They then evaluate existing societies in terms of these prior considerations. They are said to take a "prior-to-society" perspective” (Crain, 1985). Sarty is taking a “prior-to-society” perspective: He is realizing that, no matter what his society might say about obeying adults, it is wrong in this instance.4 Ironically, however, in Indian Camp, Nick faces the costs of adulthood... and turns away. Hemingway biographer Philip Young argues that Nick becomes a “badly scarred and nervous young man” as a result of facing the death and birth at the camp, the blood and gore. At the end of the story, it seems that he retreats into fantasy and escapism: “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing; he felt quite sure that he would never die”. He has seen something that has caused him to be terribly afraid, something that is viscerally real and whose import he is still understanding. This has led him to dissociate, to deny the risk of his own death. Over time, the Young character in subsequent stories develops as a very limited person (Young, 1964; Tetlow, 1992). Meanwhile, Sarty runs away from home. This might be viewed as an adolescent contrivance, a mere attempt to escape... except that it is doing something, not simply retreating into his fathers bosom. Sarty knows at some level about the import of what he is doing, and why: The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing - the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back. Sarty is conscious of the time and the place. He is conscious of the path is taking and conscientious of the environment around him, of the paths of flora and fauna. This is not some panicked run from home, some adolescent escapism. Sarty is making a calculated decision, and an unambiguous one: He does not “look back” at the life he is escaping. Thus, it is ironically the boy with the transparently worse difficulties, the one dealing with his fathers actual criminal and violent acts, who transcends them, while it is the boy who, despite seeing some horrible, was supported by his father, who is mired by them. In a real sense, Nick does not come of age, while Sarty does: Nick fails his trajectory, his coming-of-age. “Coming of age” stories are by necessity about liminal spaces, in-betweens, adolescence that lies along the path of childhood to adulthood. Nick is stuck in the liminality between death and life, between birth and life, between being a child and assisting and becoming a man with an occupation and a job to do. Sarty is stuck in the liminal space between familial obligation and moral obligation. At the end of the stories, Nick remains stuck in the river between the camp and the world, but Sarty finds his own path. Sarty escapes his father, literally and figuratively; Nick does not. The stories highlight that the key to becoming ones own person is to become a different person from ones parents. Works Cited Bernardo, Karen. “Wiliam Faulkners Barn Burning”. http://www.storybites.com/faulknerbarn2.htm Crain, W.C. Theories of Development Practice. Prentice Hall. http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm Faulkner, William. Barn Burning. Harpers. 1939. Harris, Robert. “A Glossary of Literary Terms”. Virtual Salt. February 5, 2010. Indian Camp. Ernest Hemingway. http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/4/hemingway/camp.htm Lombardi, Esther. “Top 9 Coming of Age Novels”. About.com. 2010. http://classiclit.about.com/od/novelbookreviews/tp/aatp_comingofag.htm Meyers, Jeffrey. "Hemingways Primitivism and "Indian Camp"". In Benson, Jackson. The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. 1996. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45479-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=9ps69UBMNqcC&dq=decoding +papa&source=gbs_navlinks_s. Retrieved 2010-01-30. Strong, Amy (1996). "Screaming Through Silence: The Violence of Race in Indian Camp and The Doctors Wife". The Hemingway Review 16 (1). Tetlow, Wendolyn (1992). Hemingways In our time: lyrical dimensions. Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses. ISBN 8-8387-5219-5. http://books.google.com/ Retrieved 2010-03-08. Young, Philip (1964). Ernest Hemingway (1973 ed.). St. Paul MN: University of Minnesota. ISBN 0- 8166- 0191-7. Zender, Karl F. "Barn Burning." A William Faulkner Encyclopedia. Eds. Robert W. Hamblin and Charles A Peek. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999. 28-9). Read More