Sartoris attends a courtroom hearing in a country store where his father Snopes is accused of burning Mr. Harris's barn.

The judge dismisses the case against Snopes for lack of evidence but orders the family to leave the county.

A boy from the crowd attacks and injures Sartoris as the Snopes family exits the makeshift courtroom.

Snopes prevents his wife from tending to Sartoris's wounds and hurries the family away in their packed wagon.

Snopes strikes Sartoris and demands the boy pledge absolute loyalty to family blood above everything else.

The Snopes family arrives at the grand manor estate of their new employer, Major de Spain, to work as tenant farmers.

Snopes deliberately steps in horse manure and tracks it through Major de Spain's manor house, ruining an expensive rug.

Snopes and his daughters use harsh lye and a stone to scrub the rug, destroying it further despite Mrs. Snopes's protests.

Major de Spain demands Snopes pay 20 bushels of corn as compensation for the destroyed rug.

A Justice of the Peace rules that Snopes must pay only 10 bushels of corn for damaging the rug.

Snopes orders Sartoris to fetch oil, revealing his plan to burn Major de Spain's barn in retaliation for the court's ruling.

Snopes commands his wife to physically hold Sartoris back while he carries out the planned barn burning.

Sartoris breaks free from his mother's grip and races toward the de Spain house to warn them about the fire.

Abner Snopes is shot and killed during the confrontation that follows Sartoris's warning to the de Spain household.

Sartoris sits alone on a hillside, grief-stricken but no longer afraid, before rising and walking into the spring night.

The story begins in a makeshift courtroom where Abner Snopes stands accused of burning a neighbor's barn, forcing his young son Sartoris into a conflict between loyalty and truth. After the case is dismissed, the family relocates to a new farm, but Snopes immediately provokes their wealthy landlord, Major de Spain, by deliberately ruining an expensive rug. A second court appearance fails to satisfy Snopes, and his refusal to accept the ruling pushes him toward another act of arson. Sartoris, unable to stay silent, breaks free from his family and races to warn the de Spains, betraying his father to prevent the crime. The confrontation ends with Snopes shot dead, leaving Sartoris alone on a hillside to grieve and then walk away from the life he has always known.

The headline events driving Sartoris's impossible choice between family and justice.

In the store-turned-courtroom, Sartoris is surrounded by the smell of food and cheese while struggling to remain loyal to his father.

Mr. Harris describes to the court how a recurring hog dispute with Snopes escalated before his barn was burned.

Harris calls Sartoris to the witness stand, placing the boy in the impossible position of testifying against his own father.

The judge declines to cross-examine Sartoris after seeing how visibly torn and grief-stricken the boy clearly is.

Snopes openly insults the judge and the court before turning to walk out with his sons.

The Snopes family's battered belongings — including Lennie's ornate but broken and stopped dowry clock — are piled in the wagon.

Sartoris reflects on the family's long history of forced moves, hauling the same ruined possessions from farm to farm.

Snopes builds a small, controlled campfire during the family's journey, which young Sartoris watches with quiet unease.

Sartoris's two large, indifferent sisters ride in the wagon without any apparent concern for the family's precarious situation.

Major de Spain rides to the Snopes property to personally deliver the stained rug and demand it be cleaned.

Mrs. Snopes begs her husband to stop ruining the rug during the cleaning, but Snopes ignores her entirely.

Snopes publicly refuses to accept the court's reduced fine and declares he will not comply with the ruling.

Sartoris privately hopes the court-ordered fine will be sufficient punishment to end his father's pattern of destructive revenge.

Snopes dresses in cold, deliberate precision before setting out to carry out the planned barn fire.

After the night's violence, Sartoris experiences grief and despair without the terror and fear that had defined his life under his father.

While the main plot hinges on Sartoris's ultimate choice, the story is filled with secondary moments that reveal the full weight of life under Abner Snopes. The opening courtroom scene is rich with detail — Harris's testimony, the judge's reluctant mercy toward Sartoris, and Snopes's contemptuous departure all establish the pattern of conflict to come. The family's worn possessions, particularly Lennie's broken dowry clock, and Sartoris's reflection on their many forced moves paint a picture of accumulated suffering. Smaller scenes — the campfire during the journey, the sisters riding in passive silence, Major de Spain personally delivering the rug — fill out the narrative between the headline events. By the time Snopes makes his final cold preparations for the barn burning, the family's powerlessness and Sartoris's private despair have been fully established, making his eventual break all the more significant.

The supporting scenes and overlooked moments that give the story its texture and weight.

Sartoris instinctively identifies his father's legal accuser as his own enemy, revealing the depth of his conflicted sense of loyalty.

Sartoris stands before the court knowing he would have lied under oath to protect his father, confronting his own capacity for injustice.

The narration reveals that Snopes fought in the Civil War as a free agent loyal to no cause except personal gain and plunder.

Sartoris observes his father's stiff, absolutely undeviating footsteps — a physical sign of calculated, cold-blooded precision in all he does.

Snopes tells Sartoris that sticking to your own blood is all a man has, framing loyalty as survival rather than love.

Sartoris first beholds de Spain's grand manor and believes its peace and dignity will make it impervious to his father's destructive impulses.

Snopes forces his way into de Spain's manor without permission, a deliberate act of contempt for the social hierarchy the estate represents.

Sartoris observes that his father approaches de Spain's estate carrying a quiet, invisible 'ravening and jealous rage' hidden beneath a rigid exterior.

Sartoris recognizes that his father's hostility toward de Spain is rooted in envy and class resentment rather than any legitimate grievance.

Sartoris imagines all the accumulated grief — the rug, the fire, the terror — finally balancing out and disappearing forever after the court ruling.

Sartoris feels himself 'pulled two ways like between two teams of horses' as his father's final plan makes silence morally impossible.

Sartoris's loyalty breaks entirely when his father orders the oil, and he makes the irreversible decision to choose justice over blood.

Sartoris bursts into the de Spain house crying out his warning, completing his conscious break from his father's world.

Gunshots ring out in the darkness behind Sartoris, signaling the fatal and irreversible end of the confrontation he set in motion.

Sartoris walks into the spring night realizing the terror of his father is finally gone, replaced only by grief and inherited despair.

Beneath the surface action of 'Barn Burning' runs a current of revelations and turning points that trace Sartoris's slow awakening to his father's true nature. From his instinctive identification of his father's enemy as his own, to the narrated backstory revealing Snopes as a self-serving Civil War mercenary, the story steadily dismantles Sartoris's idealized image of his father. Key scenes — Sartoris sensing his father's controlled rage while approaching de Spain's estate, recognizing that envy drives Snopes more than justice, and inwardly hoping punishment will change him — show a conscience quietly outgrowing its conditioning. The emotional turning point arrives when the accumulated grief and despair overcome Sartoris's loyalty at the moment his father calls for the oil. His decision to run is not impulsive but the culmination of every doubt he has suppressed, and the aftermath leaves him carrying grief without the fear — changed permanently by his choice.

The key decisions, hidden truths, and emotional shifts that define Sartoris's moral awakening.