In researching Faulker’s treatment of food throughout his fictional universe, I used the keywords “food,” “eating,” and “kinship,” as I searched through Hunter College Library online, as well as as JSTOR, and of course the Zotero library. My research has helped me zero in on the meat of the question I am asking: how do the acts of consuming and/or rejecting food or nonfood define or reject a given kinship throughout Faulkner’s universe? I am primarily interested here in tracing and analyzing characters’ behavior regarding food and eating, as opposed to the digestive figurative language that Faulkner often uses, which could just as well be the focus of an essay of Faulkner’s treatment of food, but would lend itself perhaps less to the psychoanalytic-meets-sociological analytical lens I intend to use. I plan to limit my analysis to the four Faulkner texts in the bibliography below.

– Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text. Vintage international ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1990. In this text, Sutpen is presented as an outsider determined to attain or claim his rightful status of whiteness in Jefferson. I will examine his interactions with food and eating as embodiments of his navigation of the racial hierarchy to his socioeconomic gain. Some key instances to look at here include his hunting for food and other unconventional-to-Jefferson means of feeding himself and his “team” of foreign employees and enslaved people, and his “fight club,” or ritualistic spectacle he orchestrates in which he forces those he’s enslaved to fight one another, and sometimes to fight him too, in front of a large crowd. This spectacle, I will argue, serves to threaten the enslaved with their consumable status by boldly displaying/ embodying/ perpetuating the comparative in-consumability of whiteness. (I will also keep in mind the coming-of-age/ loss-of-innocence language often used to describe Sutpen’s developing awareness of racial hierarchy. I wonder if there is a connection here to Sutpen’s eating.)

– Faulkner William. Go Down, Moses. Vintage international ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1994. Focusing on “The Fire and the Hearth,” I will use Clough’s argument as a starting point to analyze characters’ compliance towards and subversion (or resistance as Clough calls it) of racial hierarchy through eating and domesticity. Borrowing Clough’s metonymic linking of food and its encompassing domestic sphere, I will look at the anxieties of the private domestic sphere as racial anxieties, paying particular attention to burgeoning racial awareness of brothers Roth and Henry, as well as the racial awareness and resistance to hierarchy exhibited by or embodied in Lucas, even as he accepts the possibility of his lynching (Clough, 404). ( I will also keep in mind the coming-of-age/ loss-of-innocence language used to describe the brothers growing up, to search for any relevant patterns or intersections with the coming of age/ language of innocence used to describe Sutpen in AA.)

– Faulkner William. Light in August : The Corrected Text. Vintage international ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1990. As Hasratian points out, Light in August presents two characters lacking kinship. Joe Christmas’s is one of rejection, and Lena Grove’s is one of acceptance or integration. I will study Joe Christmas’s subversive relationship to food and eating, leading up to his lynching, by which he is transformed from the subject to the object of eating in the narrative, finally becoming consumable to the white townspeople who hunt and kill him in final act of kinship, defining the white townspeople’s kinship by his murder and consumability. I will also examine Lena Grove’s compliant relationship to food, by contrast, building on Hasratian’s readings of Lena’s patterns of consumption as inverses of Joe Christmas’s. 

– Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1991. As I argued in my midterm, The Unvanquished presents a kinship between brothers Bayard and Ringo shared over food, based, however, on unequal access to that food. We see this in the brothers’ relationship, as well as “family” mealtimes that include the Sartoris family members, and those enslaved by the Sartoris family. (Not that the distinction is often clear, as Ringo demonstrates.)

– Hasratian, Avak.“The Death of Difference in ‘Light in August.’” Criticism, vol. 49, no. 1, 2007, pp. 55–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23128768. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023. This article provides a key word to my argument, kinship. Hasratian points out that community as defined by kinship is a “central preoccupation” for Faulkner (55). He goes on to argue regarding Light in August that while Joe Christmas rejects difference, Lena, another character lacking kinship, embraces or literally embodies others. We can see the pattern of these inverse behaviors in each character’s treatment of consumption. For example, Christmas’s consumption and vomiting of nonfood, toothpaste– an example of Christmas rejecting human distinction from animal– vs. Lena’s pleasurable consumption of tinned fish, or bread– embraces, embodiments of the ritual of kinship, instances of acceptance of the presence of the “other” who gives her money, or offers her food. While Hasratian focuses on Christmas and Lena as inverse experiences of difference and kinship, I will apply the word kinship, and the anthropological understanding of kinship’s reliance on food, eating as a communal ritual, to instances of characters eating, rejecting, or otherwise interacting with food, not as a way to read Faulkner’s interactions with the philosophical distinctions between human and nonhuman categories, but to read a character’s compliance with and/or subversion against the racial hierarchies embodied in the act of eating as the basis of kinship(s).

– Rosenzweig, Paul J. “Faulkner’s Motif of Food in ‘Light in August.’” American Imago, vol. 37, no. 1, 1980, pp. 93–112. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26303816. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023. Rosenzweig offers in-depth psychoanalytic readings of the appearance of food in Light in August, using terms like “positive” and “healthy” to describe some character’s relationships to food (Lena Grove, for example), while characterizing others’ relationships to food as troubled, and symptomatic of developmental delays in freudian terms (anal, oral, etc.). This is most significant in his discussion of Joe Christmas’s rejection of food and kinship, which he connects to Joe’s earlier oedipal experience in which he vomits toothpaste after witnessing a sexual encounter involving his maternal figure (the dietician.) As it was in my midterm paper, Rosenzweig’s reading will continue to be foundational to my own close readings of food in Light in August. I will rely on Rosenzweig’s framework of classifying a character’s relationship to food as “positive” vs. “negative” to categorize character’s relationships to food in my essay as “compliant” or “subversive.”

– Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. NYU Press, 2012. American studies scholar Tompkins identifies eating as a site of violence in literature, in which the thing being eaten is entirely consumed. With this foundational argument for the inherent political violence of eating in 19th century literature, I can support my psychoanalytic and historically-informed reading of food in Faulkner.

– Clough, Edward. “Violence and the Hearth: Lynching and Resistance in Go Down, Moses.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2012, pp. 391–412. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26467197. Accessed 2 May 2023. This article highlights the role eating plays in the loss of innocence, the burgeoning awareness of racial hierarchy, of brothers Roth and Henry in “The Fire and the Hearth,” arguing “what Faulkner offers in Go Down, Moses, then, is in fact an intimate analysis of the politics of the Southern home in general, and of the political resistance of African American domesticity in particular” (392).  This article also goes on to discuss the lynching of Joe Christmas in Light in August as an act in which Christmas is “cooked” into a consumable object– a reading which will be crucial to my argument that lynching is the ultimate act of kinship for white men in Faulker’s universe (399). Finally, this article discusses Black resistance to the ultimate, defining white supremacist violence, lynching, in GDM: “Precisely by facing and accepting the possibility—the inevitability, even—of lynching, Lucas is able to assert his manhood, his self-possession, his self-determined place. White Southern rhetoric framed lynching as a defense of white home and hearth; here, in an oddly empowering reversal, it is enlisted instead in the defense of black home and hearth” (404). This nuanced reading of the hearth of the home as the site for political anxiety about and also resistance to racial hierarchy will be foundational for my own close readings of eating, rejecting food, and lynching throughout Faulkner’s universe. 

In her article, “Property in “Absalom, Absalom!”: Rousseau’s Legacy in Faulkner,” Julia Simon points out Faulkner’s reference to Rousseau’s Second Discourse in the beginning of chapter 7. Speculating on Sutpen’s early life, Quentin narrates:

“where what few other people he knew lived in log cabins boiling with children like the one he was born in—men and grown boys who hunted or lay before the fire on the floor while the women and older girls stepped back and forth across them to reach the fire to cook, where the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your rifle sights, where he had never even heard of, never imagined, a place, a land divided neatly up and actually owned by men who did nothing but ride over it on fine horses or sit in fine clothes on the galleries of big houses while other people worked for them; he did not even imagine then that there was any such way to live or to want to live, or that there existed all the objects to be wanted which there were, or that the ones who owned the objects not only could look down on the ones that didn’t, but could be supported in the down-looking not only by the others who owned objects too but by the very ones that were looked down on that didn’t own objects and knew they never would. Because where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody and so the man who would go to the trouble and work to fence off a piece of it and say ‘This is mine’ was crazy; and as for objects, nobody had any more of them than you did because everybody had just what he was strong enough or energetic enough to take and keep, and only that crazy man would go to the trouble to take or even want more than he could eat or swap for powder and whiskey” (179).

As Simon (and many other critics) note(s), the passage above (emphasis mine) references this passage of Rousseau’s 1775 Second Discourse on Inequality:

“The first one who, having enclosed a plot of land, had the idea to say: This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror could the human species have been spared by someone who, by pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditches, would have cried to his fellowmen: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget that the fruit of the earth belongs to everyone, and that the earth belongs to no one”  (3:164; translated by Julia Simon).

The Rousseauian allusion in Quentin’s second-person description of Sutpen– “Because where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody and so the man who would go to the trouble and work to fence off a piece of it and say ‘This is mine’ was crazy”– depicts Sutpen, or at least a young Sutpen in rural West Virginia, as naive to the notion of capitalist ownership or property, but ironically “crazy” enough to go on to claim land of his own as an adult. Of course, unlike the hypothetical “first one” to claim ownership of land posited by Rousseau, when Sutpen eventually claims his land, he does so in what is already a “civil society” in Rousseauian terms.  He is not, then, inventing or convincing others of the legitimacy of private property itself, but legitimizing his specific claim to the specific land he wants within the society at work in Mississippi in 1833. To legitimize his claim we see Sutpen navigate and quite literally capitalize off of white supremacy.  Faulkner describes the beginning of this understanding of white supremacy and capitalism as Sutpen travels as a child out of rural Virginia: “That’s the way he got it. He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room. That is, he had begun to discern without being aware of it yet” (183). It is as if Sutpen’s coming of age, his loss of innocence,  is defined by his attunement to the racialized labor systems surrounding him. We can read Sutpen’s development from innocent child to land and slave owner as historians have read the movement from what Rousseau perhaps calls “nature,” or a society without property, to capitalism. In other words, Faulkner seems to be making a comparison here between land ownership in the U.S and primitive accumulation in general. As marxist-feminist historian Silvia Federici describes, “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in brief force” were pillars of the process of land privatization across Europe  (Federici, 62*). These too are the pillars we see in Sutpen’s acquisition of land and wealth– from his questionable travels, to his acquisition of a huge number of enslaved laborers, to the rumors that he stole his land from a Native American, to his son’s murdering of his secret, other son, and perhaps eventually even to his own bloody murder at the hands of Wash Jones. Perhaps we can read the two murders, of Bon and of Sutpen himself, to be related to white supremacist anxieties regarding paternity. As Federici and countless other historians also note, with increased land ownership comes decreased mobility and reproductive freedom for women because of the new importance of paternal lineage that came with land ownership. After learning Bon is mixed-race, Henry kills him to eliminate the threat of miscegenation between him and Judith. Wash Jones kills Thomas Sutpen because Sutpen has renounced his paternal obligation to his granddaughter’s newborn baby. In both cases, white men murder the man who threatens their socially upward intergenerational, familial trajectory (or fantasy).  

P.S. I also want to touch on something very intriguing that Simon points out: Faulker has signed himself as the sole owner and proprietor of the Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha Co., Mississippi map in the back of Absalom, Absalom. He’s invented fictional land and given himself the property rights. In doing this, I wonder how he is implicating himself in this legacy of the white supremacist violence of land ownership and generational wealth. 

*Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York : London: Autonomedia ; Pluto, 2003.

Food is an efficient, ripe window into the metonymic embodiment of historical racial and gendered hierarchies, subversions, and collective anxieties presented in Faulker’s fictional world. Throughout the Faulknarian universe, characters eat in communion with one another, food acting as the material for forging kinship among and between one another’s bloodlines. Food is the shared site of social and economic identity. In what patterns can we see characters’ eating behaviors define or embody the eater’s social identity, and relationship to that social identity– are they compliant to the social hierarchy? Subversive? In studying the behaviors surrounding food and eating in The Unvanquished, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!, we can trace the embodied racial and gendered anxieties through the bodies of Falker’s fictional world. I can perhaps also ask: how do the histories of foodways reliant on slave labor manifest physically and socially in the fictional consumption and rejection of food in Faulker’s world? 

Starting sources:

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : The Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner William. Light in August : The Corrected Text. Vintage international ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1991

Hasratian, Avak.“The Death of Difference in ‘Light in August.’” Criticism, vol. 49, no. 1, 2007, pp. 55–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23128768. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023.

Jones, Michael Owen. “Food Choice, Symbolism, and Identity: Bread-and-Butter Issues for Folkloristics and Nutrition Studies (American Folklore Society Presidential Address, October 2005).” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 120, no. 476, 2007, pp. 129–77.JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4137687. Accessed 30 Mar. 2023.

Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Duke University Press, 1995.

Rosenzweig, Paul J. “Faulkner’s Motif of Food in ‘Light in August.’” American Imago, vol. 37, no. 1, 1980, pp. 93–112. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26303816. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. NYU Press, 2012.

Further research needed: thorough investigation of US food history books, articles, etc., for relevant historical context in my reading of Faulkner’s treatment of food.

As John T. Matthews notes in Seeing through the South,  “Light in August depicts a crisis of unhoming” (159). As he also points out, pregnancy, birth, and loss of the mother all play a centered role in this depiction of a crisis of unhoming. If we see the mother as the primary home, we can see birth itself as the essential unhoming, one that in this text is often paired with the death of or ultimate separation from the mother. For example, we see this in the narrative of Joe Christmas, whose mother died in childbirth, leading him to an orphanage as an infant, and catalyzing his adult life of roaming, unsettled. We also see this in Lena Grove, who, after the death of her parents, “departed forever, ” language that suggests her own unending, perhaps existential, unhoming as a result of the loss of her parents (4). Faulker begins the book by introducing us to a pregnant (and parentless) Lena Grove as she travels hopefully to find the father of the baby she is expecting. Lena Grove is acting, then, as both a home to the unborn, and herself searching for a home. While Lena Grove herself reassures herself to remain calm, even detached, and hopeful that all will go according to plan and she will find the father of her baby, everyone around her identifies her condition (pregnant and alone) as a problem– one to which there is no solution, only pity. We see this, for example, in the treatment Lena receives from the married couple, Armstid and Martha, who give her shelter for the night. When Martha learns the details of Lena’s condition, she expresses “cold and impersonal contempt,” before gathering all of her personal savings and telling Armstid to give them to Lena and take her all the way to Jefferson (21-22). Lena Grove, while not a respectable white woman by the moral standards of her time, is ultimately protected by her womb– or rather, the role her womb occupies in the Jim Crow South. It is her reproductive labor that earns her safety. I am interested in the connections Faulker is able to make between womb, home, property, and commodity in this text. As countless historians have noted, in a time so marked by violent racial hierarchy, the womb, especially the womb of the white woman, becomes the central site of anxieties about that racial hierarchy. I think we can read Martha’s quick willingness to give away her savings to Lena perhaps not necessarily as charity, but anxiety. Anxiety for the wellbeing of a fellow woman, perhaps, but perhaps more politically, anxiety for the home or homelessness of the white baby. Lena’s unhoming and lack of husband, perhaps, evokes in Martha and other white people Lena meets along her travels a collective racial anxiety of hierarchical uncertainty post civil-war.

During our last class, I posited that perhaps Drusilla, for all her subversion of gendered expectations during the Civil War, can actually be read as one of Faulker’s characters most obedient to the confederate hegemony. After finishing The Unvanquished, I think we can see her hegemonic loyalty to the confederacy most clearly after the war, when, as Bayard puts it, “the men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States but the women had never surrendered” (188).  While in one regard, her marriage to John Sartoris signals the end of her fight to be a masculine confederate solider– Bayard refers to Aunt Louisa’s forcing the marriage as the event that “broke” Drusilla, “beat” her, and even John Sartoris agrees, “They have you beat, Drusilla,”– the union also signals Drusilla’s strengthened allegiance to the confederate hegemony that John Sartoris embodies (202-203). Engaged to Colonel Sartoris, Drusilla is ironically the most unquestionably tethered she has ever been to Sartoris’s troop of soldiers. We can see this in the action John Sartoris and Drusilla take in town on the day of their wedding. When they arrive in town, they murder the Burdens, steal the ballot box of the ongoing election, and John Sartoris appoints Drsullia as voting commissioner (206-207). When they ride back into town, Bayard describes: “It came back high and thin and ragged and  fierce, like when the Yankees used to hear it out of the smile and the galloping: ‘Yaaaaay, Drusilla!” they hollered. (210). This is the most patriotic glory, and perhaps the only moment of public recognition,  Drusilla receives in her masculine confederate efforts, and she receives it while wearing her wedding dress. 

While John Sartoris embodies the hegemonic confederate ideal– a man of honor, courage, and ceaseless dedication to fighting for the confederacy– Bayard Sartoris perhaps grows (up) to embody a new generation of southern white men post-war. In “Odor of Verbena,” we learn that as the South has acquiesced to the law of the United States after their Civil War defeat, Bayard, too has embraced the law by becoming a law student. This twenty-four-year-old version of Bayard demonstrates a willingness to forgo some of the violence that accompanies his inherited sense of confederate honor in fighting on behalf of the rebels.  He recalls the phrase “Who live shall the sword shall die by it,”  and when he arrives to confront Redmond, who took his father’s life, he chooses not to avenge his father with murder (214, 217). Bayard seems to credit this sentiment of relinquishing the proverbial sword to women in general, noting that before he left to confront Remond, Mrs Wilkins did not offer him a horse and pistol as Mr Wilkins did, “because she was a woman and so wiser than any man, else the men would not have gone on with the War for two after they  knew they were whipped” (215). Drusilla stands in stark contrast to this portrait of women as wiser than war. Perhaps, as Bayard has gained an appreciation for some feminine notion of peace, or the sanctity of individual human life, Drusilla has gained a masculine lust for glory. Or perhaps she married the colonel and inherited the ethos his son did not. We can see this when Bayard questions his father’s history of confederate violence, asking Drusilla, “But how can they [they being the whole country, according to Drusilla, who still holds to the belief that John Sartoris was fighting for some greater good of all poeple] get any good from what he wants to do for them if they are–after he has–”, and she interrupts: “Killed some of them? I suppose you include those two carpet baggers he had to kill to hold that first election, don’t you?” Bayard replies, “They were men. Human beings.” Drusilla doubles-down, “They were northerners, foreigners who had no business here. They were pirates” (223). Unlike Bayard, who has moved on to law school, considering new and conflicting ideas of honor, or righteousness, Drusilla shares in John Sartoris’s dream of eternal confederate glory. Perhaps we can read her hysterics in her final scene, her laughing uncontrollably in horror over the murder of her late husband, as representative of the monomaniacality of the confederate rebels who persisted to follow the confederate dream, even after the war was over. 

P.S.

Much comparison has been made between the role of women and the role of soldiers in the mechanics of a nation. Contemplating Drusilla reminded me of a passage in Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). In discussing the distinction between manners and morals, Mary Wollstonecraft compares women to soldiers: she writes that both women and male soldiers alike are “taught to please,” resulting in their acquiring “manners before morals,” or the appearance of prescribed morals without the ability to reason in actual morality (Wollstonecraft, 34). Of course, I am unsure if Faulker read Wollstonecraft, or made much of her work, but nonetheless her writing on women and soldiers seemed to me especially pertinent to the question of Drusilla and subversion. Wollstonecraft writes that both women and soldiers have been “thrown out of a useful station by the unnatural distinctions established in civilized life,” likening the military hierarchy to the domestic hierarchy that subjugates women to the authority of the men of the home (Wollstonecraft, 34). Here, Wollstonecraft’s likening of the social hierarchies of militaries to social hierarchies of homes suggests an important underlying assumption in her argument: usefulness to the nation requires agency. While some might consider soldiers inherently “useful” members of a nation, – as indeed Faulker’s Drusilla seems to– Wollstonecraft deems their station useless on very grounds that define their role (and women’s) in society: blind obedience. This dismissal of the usefulness of obedience in society can perhaps be considered a feminist revision of nationalism in which  “serving the country” relies not on rigid social order, but rather on the agency allowed by social mobility. With this in mind, Bayard’s intellectual engagement in questioning his father’s past is far more subversive to the confederate hegemony than Drusilla’s taking up soldier’s arms ever was. We can perhaps even read Drusilla’s masculinization, both despite and because of her rejection of the feminine role as bride and caretaker, as the ultimate conformity to confederate ideals. Just as she was expected to blindly subjugate herself to the authority of a husband, she does so, revering the authority of John Sartoris in the home and battlefield, even after his death. If a bride is supposed to be like a soldier to her husband, Drusilla has gone above and beyond in her fulfillment of the confederate ideal of a woman.

While Faulkner can surely be called a fictionist of witness– a writer concerned with a grand, historical sense of listening, watching, and recording the political moment of the American Civil War– his writing, far from monumentalizing, studies the nuances of the interpersonal relationships that mirror, complicate, and ultimately uphold their historical contexts. For example, in “Retreat,” we can see Faulker’s astute concern for the larger historical-social order of the confederacy exhibited in small, interpersonal moments, in conversation between Rosa Millard and Joby. When preparing the wagon with silver to be taken to Memphis for safekeeping, Rosa holds out a musket to Joby, commanding, “Here,” to which Joby merely looks before remarking, “We wont need hit,” (43). Joby, the senior enslaved Back man at the Sartoris household, which is currently missing its patriarch, John Sartoris, is perhaps in a position to question Rosa’s authority as an elderly white woman. When Rosa insists he put it in the wagon, he doubles down, explaining, “Nome. We won’t need nothing like that. We be in Memphis so quick wont nobody have time to hear we on the road. I speck Marse John got the Yankees pretty well cleant out between here and Memphis anyway,” to which Rosa stands in silence, “holding  out the musket until after a while Joby took it and put it in the wagon” (44). Bayard observes, “He and Granny were like that; they were like a man and a mare, a blooded mare, which takes just exactly so much from the man and the man knows the mare will take just so much and the man knows that when that point is reached, just what is going to happen. Then it does happen: the mare kicks him, not viciously but just enough, and the man knows it was going to happen and so he is glad then, it is over then, or he thinks it is over, so he lies or sits on the ground and cusses the mare a little because he thinks it is over, finished, and then the mare turns her head and nips him. That’s how Joby and Granny were and Granny always beat him, not bad: just exactly enough, like now” (44-45). It is difficult not to read much of Bayard Sartorsis’s inner narrative regarding his (ironically, in the sense that the narrator is speaking retrospectively) naive understanding of his contexts as he inherits them as Faulker’s own coming-of-age and coming-to-terms with the same inherited war, the same society, the same raveled, intimate social web just as marred as made by the violence of confederate racial and gender hierarchies. By the end of the third story, “Raid,” both Bayard and his smarter, Black counterpart, Ringo, remain awed, perhaps infatuated, with the glory of the idea of war. We can see, however, through Faulker’s close third person, the white teen churning over in his mind the ironic American ideals that uphold (both sides of) the war: on the locomotive collision, Bayard remarks, “It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time, not for material gain but for principle– honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage– the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing, put to the ultimate test and proving nothing save the finality of death and the vanity of all endeavor” (98). We cannot help but see this “principle” that is exhibited so neatly in the mind of Bayard by the machinated locomotives, exhibited messily and contradictorily by the human actors of war which they represent. The “deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing” indeed characterizes each act of war for each soldier, who relies not on grand principles, but on command. We can see this in those Union soldiers who readily surrender (by the command of Coronel Dick) over one hundred Black people running from enslavement to Rosa, to be forced back into the confederate enslavement the Union effort presumably seeks to end (110-112).