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The relationship between fathers and sons is of utmost importance in both William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" (1939) and Flannery O'Conner's "The Artificial Nigger" (1955). Abner Snopes, in "Barn Burning," attempts to teach his son Sarty to be a man in the postbellum South by revealing to him the injustices of the sharecropping system. Similarly, Mr. Head, in "The Artificial Nigger," takes his grandson, Nelson, whom he has raised and with whom he has a father-son relationship, on a trip to the segregated city of Atlanta in order to reveal the perils of the urban landscape. Both stories attempt to capture Sarty's and Nelson's development from boys to men. And both fathers act as their sons' guides in this endeavor. But by teaching their sons to be men in the racially charged environment of the South, both Snopes and Mr. Head also seek, in a self-reflexive manner, to identify and to define their own masculinity- a move that necessarily truncates their sons' development. Both Snopes and Mr. Head see their southern masculine identities slipping away as the constructed binaries of black and white dissolve and begin to smudge. While indoctrinating their sons into racial ideologies inherent in the development of southern masculinity, Snopes and Mr. Head employ not only the father-son dyad but also the master-slave dialectic in their relationships with Sarty and Nelson to buttress their masculinity and position themselves as heads of their fledgling households in the developing New South.
I will illustrate that Sarty and Nelson both become the "artificial niggers" of the stories who stand in for the racial others against whom Snopes and Mr. Head define themselves. This role, moreover, is one that both Sarty and Nelson recognize and willingly perform but with different outcomes. Sarty chooses to perform the role of the "strange nigger" who warns Major de Spain of his father's plan to burn the barn, which ostracizes him forever from his family and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. Similarly, Nelson not only recognizes a reflection of himself when confronted with the lawn statue that most critics read as the "artificial nigger" of the story, but he understands that he is, in fact, the "artificial nigger" to whom his grandfather refers and to which the story's title also refers. Although recognizing his...