Well. I thought I didn't like this story very much at all. I figured two stars, but the more I thought it over, the stronger my feelings got. I didn't have very much fun while I read it, it's true. This story is the perspective of a little boy, named after a Colonel of the Civil War (during which his father seems to have un-heroically just stolen horses), as his family is uprooted when his father gets kicked out of town for the dozenth time, for arson. His father is a horrible man, and the story is of Sarty's struggle with his loyalty to his father. This loyalty is the highest feeling of his world, and he wants to defend his father through the indefensible. And he does. But after the last upheaval, he begins to change his mind, and wishes the cycle to break. Unfortunately, he has to break it with honesty, and honesty won't do his family very much good.

It is written in a very Faulkner voice -- loose and anxious at the same time, streaming through the child's thoughts. This really works for the emotional content in the story, and was what began to win me. The characters are so awful here, it was hard to care for a while. The father is monstrous, the sisters are repeatedly called fat lazy pigs, the mother can't do a thing but cry, and the father's boss deserves everything he gets. In the mess, Sarty is understandable. And as he starts to cope with his feelings, wanting to protect his father as well as set him right, the battle is huge.

The truth is, I just can't get over the ending of this story. It is so much bigger, darker, harder than anything I expected while reading. Even though what you expect to happen happens, it becomes so much worse, so fast.

Spoiler

Instead of simply turning his father in, at the end, his father has most likely been killed, and Sarty has run away from home and is alone in the wilderness, panicked. And that is the end. Of the whole story.

It seems that Sarty may be referenced in another of Faulkner's short stories, and his brother and other Snopes relatives make up a trilogy of novels. I want to know what happens next, and perhaps what happened before, but as is always the case... I also, partly, do not.

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Edit: I've spent some more time with this story this week and I'm changing the darn rating. There's still things I don't like about it, but that doesn't mean I don't love it. I feel like I could think about it for years, and I think you should too.