The Man Who Was Almost a Man

Another coming of age story? The thing that really striked me about Wright's story The Man Who Was Almost a Man was it's lack of detail. Wright never really describes the setting of the story in great detail (compared to someone like O'neil). I feel that this only adds to the desolate landscape and the overall atmosphere of the story. Wright only tells us that our narrator is a young farmer walking through a field. The bleak and almost apocalyptic atmosphere of the landscape is used to describe the nature of the world and of the people at the time, as well as the void that our character, Dave, longs to fill by "becoming a man." The gun in the story represents the power that Dave needs to gain the respect he feels that he deserves. We see in the story that he clearly isn't ready to fire a gun when he has to force himself to do it. "Hell, he told himself, ah ain afraid. The gun felt loose in his fingers; he waved it widly for a moment. Then he shut his eyes and tightened his forefinger." Dave ruins this when he accidently shoots his boss's mule in a very sad and gruesome scene. When confronted about the dead mule, Dave lies. One thing about being a man is owning up when you make mistakes, and Dave doesn't seem capable of doing this yet. The story ends with Dave convincing himself that he is capable of being a man. In a fit of rage, he runs off into the woods where he hid the gun and fires off the rest of the barrel. Believing that he now has the power to be a man and to gain respect, he hitches a ride on a nearby train to escape the prison that he has made for himself. But, does Dave really become a man this easily? He now has the power to, "Kill anybody, black or white". Wright is saying that having great power isn't what makes a man, it's what he does with this power. "Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man..." (For some reason, I can't post this without blogger running all the paragraphs into one large paragraph. Sorry that it looks so ugly!)

Barn Burning

Above all, I think Barn Burning is about the relationship between a father and his son. Abner Snopes appears to be a pyromaniac and has some anger management issues. He continually beats his children and forces them to do things for him that people would these days find unnatural. During the height of the climax of the story, Abner, in a fit of rage, decides to burn down his boss's barn with the help of his two sons. What kind of a parent would involve their own children in such terrible crimes? Abner tells his sons to fetch the oil to help burn the barn down. His son, Sarty Snopes, does what his father tells him to do, but he realizes that what his father is asking is not morally right. This speaks volumes about the relationship between a father and his son during the time period. A child looked up to his father and felt that he was more of an authority figure then he was a loving parent. Someone told me about how their grandfathers used to say to their children "I don't want your approval, I just want your respect." These days fathers still have their authority and commanding rule, but a child also knows when his or her father is doing something that is morally wrong. Few parents who have problems of some sort rarely involve their children. Sarty's rebellion against his father could be looked at in a couple of different ways, but I personally feel that it is his "rite of passage" into the adulthood. The ending of the story shows Sarty fleeing his family and "never looking back." Which symbolizes his departure from the controlling ways of his father and the shelter of his family. He is a man now.