Today I'm getting ready to teach William Faulkner's "Barn Burning," a masterpiece of inner conflict. Here's a list of tensions I came up with in this short story:
--obligations of Law, Right, Family
--Free Will v. Biology/Fate/Determinism
--Class
--Peace v. Conflict
--Family v. Others
--Self
--Adult Sarty v. Boy Sarty
--Family v. Sarty
--Time
--Future
--Chaos v. Order
One of my favorite passages in all of literature comes from this story:
"this the old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it came to him. I could keep on, he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again. Only I can't, I can't..."
Now some links.
A few comments on The Glass Menagerie at the the Guthrie.
Some comments on Robert Frost's poetry
My own comments on an A.E. Housman poem at a different blog.
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