Many of William Faulkner’s short stories, including “Barn Burning,” are set in Mississippi in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Faulkner seeks to portray the decay of the Deep South following the social and economic turmoil of the US Civil War and Reconstruction.

“Barn Burning” addresses the struggle between social, economic, and racial classes in the South in the era after the Civil War. The Snopeses are poor tenant farmers who do not own the land they cultivate. This fact seems to cause resentment in Abner Snopes, which is a contributing factor in his arsons and other dangerous acts. Moreover, Snopes refers negatively to the Black people in the story, threatening them, physically harming them, and belittling them. Snopes’s behaviors speak to a need to inflict suffering upon the only people considered less than himself: Black people and those who were formerly enslaved. Snopes attempts to prop himself up socially and economically through attacks on those “beneath” him. Of course, Snopes also attacks those who are socially and economically above his station, which implies that he is a man at odds with and angered over his social and economic standing in post-Civil War Mississippi.