In The Unvanquished, William Faulkner revisits the American Civil War from the perspective of the Sartoris family, underscoring the contradictions and anxieties that shaped the social landscape and values of the antebellum South. From the opening scene, the themes of equality, solidarity, and freedom emerge against the troubling backdrop of slavery, white supremacy, anti-black racism, war, and violence. The notion of unity beyond race, although complicated and paradoxical at times, appears in the novel through the friendship and brotherhood between Bayard and Ringo. Although the two friends cannot escape the legacy of slavery within their family and the consequences of race ideology on American society at large, their coequal dynamic implicitly subverts the hierarchical relations that uphold the institution of slavery in the war-torn South. 

From the beginning of the novel, the friendship between Bayard and Ringo highlights the ways in which the Civil War causes a rift in antebellum Southern thought, revealing its internal contradictions. For example, when Bayard reflects on the urgency of the war and its implications for enslaved Black people such as the ones who work for his family, he goes on to describe his friendship with Ringo in poetic, sentimental language: “Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny ‘Granny’ just like I did, until maybe he wasn’t a n—r anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane (Faulkner 7). Despite the oppressive power structure between the enslaver and the enslaved, Bayard and Ringo enjoy a friendship based on a form of equality and unity that transcends racial difference and hierarchy. Growing up like twin brothers, the boys are one and double, mirror images on the one hand and foils on the other. Through the acknowledgement of their relationship as equals and copartners, Bayard explicitly challenges notions of racial identity that separate them into binary positions (i.e., white/black). In such turbulent times of warfare and violence, the pair are instead described as two moths, two feathers searching for a state of freedom above the hostility and chaos around them. 

Despite this idealistic tone, the social conventions of the antebellum period and the reality of the civil war interrupts these emerging notions of freedom, friendship, equality, and cross-racial solidarity. In the scene following this reflection, Bayard stands in one stirrup with his father while Ringo holds the other and runs beside the horse (Faulkner 8). Their social positions, defined by racial and class hierarchies, are ever-present and subtly impact how the two individuals move in this scene. However, the text oscillates between these two contradictory positions, and for the most part, questions and subverts this hierarchical system. For instance, Bayard admits that “Ringo was a little smarter” than he was, and eventually, taller and more mature as he works with Granny (Faulkner 81, 126),  Although there are inherent structural limitations to Ringo’s character and position as an enslaved person, these instances implicitly challenge white supremacist and racist ideologies that lie at the heart of slavery as an institution, one that dehumanizes enslaved black people, and relegates them to an inferior position in relation to white people. In his reflections, Bayard refuses to see Ringo as a commodity despite the racial hierarchy and power structure in place. Throughout the text, he suggests that they are companions who protect and support each other: “I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep” (Faulkner 60). In this manner, the social “omnipresence” of racism and hierarchical relations is constantly challenged by the recurrent themes of cross-racial solidarity, unity, and friendship based on mutual respect and equality. 

Therefore, in the first half of the novel, the friendship between Bayard and Ringo is suggestive of a form of racial justice, a sense of freedom from the shackles of a dehumanizing and oppressive institution that permeates the nation and sows divide. That being said, however, Bayard himself appears conflicted with this understanding of race and freedom amidst the backdrop of a civil war. This conflict is highlighted in his thoughts on the symbolism of the railroad as a means of motion and movement: “It was as if Ringo felt it too…the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people” (Faulkner 81). Although Bayard first describes this impulse as “reasonless” and delusional for enslaved African Americans, his stream of consciousness reveals a certain shift by the end of the thought. He comes to the conclusion that the impulse to leave the familiarity and security of the known in hopes of freedom and the unknown, is an experience that is universal to all humans, regardless of race. Despite his reservations, Bayard humanizes the struggle for freedom, an understanding that, in many ways, is made possible through his friendship with Ringo. 

I think most of you are up and going, but just in case, here’s a little screencast I put together for my undergrad course:

In the opening lines of The Unvanquished, Bayard Sartoris and Ringo set up a “living map” of Vicksburg: “just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment” (“Amuscade,” 3). This recreation of Vicksburg is a microcosm of what Faulkner does with setting in this novel. Though it is not made explicit, the reader can infer, based on the Sartoris family’s presence in other books, that this story takes place in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi.

Vicksburg is a real place where real Civil War battles were fought, but by operating withing his own imagined county, Faulkner gives himself freedom. Often writers are too close to their subject, so they tend to lack objectivity. This, in turn, restricts their creative mobility in their own art. One of my go-to quotes is from W.G. Sebald, “The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity” (The Rings of Saturn, 19). Faulkner needed to create distance between himself and the South. Though his subject required him to assign realistic distances and timeframes in a fictional environment, he was able to navigate (and, yes, create) the historical minutiae of the South during one of the darkest periods in American history.

William Matthews sums it up quite well: “Personally, it was by living as an outsider within the world that had created him that he could represent the nuances of individual dramatic conflict with such authority and precision. Artistically, it was by subjecting his tradition-steeped Southern culture to the alienation of modernist methods for rendering time, language, consciousness, and history that Faulkner could figure out how to retell the stories of a place he knew too well (Seeing Through the South: Faulkner and the Life Work of Writing, 4).

Faulkner might induce the reader into a real trance when reading passages like Bayard’s description of his father on his god-like, “almost the color of smoke,” horse, Jupiter (“Ambuscade” 8), or when Drusilla tells the boys about the railroad in “Raid” (93–96), but this both is and isn’t absent from his imagined environs. Faulkner sets himself loose from the confines of a single place to make his setting a more, if I may, universal South, and in doing so gives himself more range not just to thread his story through the needle of history but to explore more deeply the qualities that make these characters so human. We are with him as he steps back and calls the rose by another name.

James Joyce once said that if Dublin “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book [Ulysses].” Based on my reading of The Unvanquished, I do not believe this is Faulkner’s intention with the South, the state of Mississippi, or any city in that state, but he does create a thoroughly human place where all of the best and worst parts of man exist and swirl about each other, a place where imagination is the way in, the way through, and the way out.

William Faulkner’s character of Granny in The Unvanquished serves as a fascinating study in the hypocrisy and contradictory nature of the 1800s American South. A core concern in “Ambuscade,” “Retreat,” “Raid,” and “Riposte in Tertio” is power and how people relate to it. Serving as the moral compass of the plantation during the war, Granny is the prototypical southern old lady: proper and severe. While Colonel Sartoris is away with his troop, Granny takes over and runs the plantation, thus stepping into a role usually saved for the man of the house. At no point, however, is Granny’s “ladyhood” questioned or diminished at any point in the novel despite the understanding that she is stepping into a man’s shoes. Perhaps this is because Granny serves as a custodian of the status quo and for “proper” behavior, such as calling for Ringo and Bayard’s mouths to be washed out with soap for lies, swearing, and other “ungentlemanly” activities.

However, in “Ambuscade,” Granny lies when she faces the Yankee captain hunting down Bayard and Ringo. In “Raid,” Granny pushes Union troops to return her stolen property, invoking her race, gender and class privilege, her “borrowed” male authority, and her Southern ladyhood, Granny yells at the Union soldiers, “‘I want my silver! I’m John Sartoris’s mother-in-law! Send Colonel Dick to me!” (105). Later in “Raid,” she asks the escaped enslaved people, “Who are you going to mind from now on?” to which one of the men answers after some time: “You, missy,” (115).

Faulkner tells the story of Granny’s adventures using familiar Civil War tropes: hiding under a hoop skirt, burying the family silver, and outwitting the Yankees. Bayard portrays Granny as a conventional woman through the stories. When Granny confronts the Union soldiers, the Union lieutenant says, “‘ I’d rather engage Forrest’s whole brigade every morning for six months than spend that same length of time trying to protect United States property from defenseless Southern women and n*** and children. Defenseless!’ he shouted:” (143-144). The Union lieutenant’s declaration emphasizes how the Confederate Woman is viewed with pride and condescension.

There is an overarching tension throughout “Ambuscade,” “Retreat,” “Raid,” and “Riposte in Tertio” between the masculine and feminine spheres of Granny’s life. Her masculine acquisition of power pushes her to lie, cheat and steal, but her Southern feminine moralism compels her to condemn her actions and beg for God’s forgiveness. Granny slides between these stereotypically male and female roles quite well at first. An interesting event occurs when she attempts to assuage her guilt by confessing her sins in front of her church congregation. She proclaims: “I did not sin for gain or greed…I did not sin for revenge…I sinned for more than justice…a holy cause even though You have seen fit to make it a lost cause,” (147). Granny is asking for God’s pardon for behaving like a man.

Later, however, Granny’s undulating gender roles become deadly. She miscalculates her status while operating in the male realm of violence and assumes that men will not harm her because she is an old, wealthy white woman. In her naivety, she decries, “I am a woman. Even Yankees don’t harm old women,” (153). It is this attitude and her transgression into the masculine realm that will lead to her murder not at the hands of a Yankee but at the hands of a fellow Southerner.

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).

The introduction of John Sartoris presents the reader with a figure in which just as much can be learned about through what is not said as with what is said. John is a dichotomy. He is comprised of contradiction, of said and unsaid, of appearance vs reality. The readers early interaction with John through the experience of Bayard is filled with inscrutability that leaves the reader with just as many questions as answers. On a character-level, this portrayal of John is Faulkner’s way of exploring the idea of the complexity of humanity, both for an adult and for a child. On a thematic-level, Faulkner uses this to establish groundwork for a larger struggle of perception vs. reality.

Bayard’s first description of his father illustrates his dichotomy through both what is said about him, and what is not said but alluded to: “He was not big; it was just the things he did, that we knew he was doing, had been doing in Virginia and Tennessee, that made him seem big to us” (Faulkner 9). His is described as not physically big, but appears that way because of his actions, or at least Bayard’s perception of his actions. The said here contradicts the unsaid, as the only tangible aspect of John that the reader has to work with is his lack of stature, yet is then told that his stature is the opposite of lacking, because of actions that they are told have happened but they did not experience through Bayard’s eyes. This idea itself is a further contradiction, because it is implied by Loosh and possibly confirmed by Bayard that John is not “doing” anything is Tennessee (6). Faulkner is demonstrating here the idea that humans are complex, and full of contradictions, as John is perceived as big despite no outward indication of it and knowledge implying that the actions that contribute to this perception are invented. John even makes no attempt to encourage nor discourage the perception, as he often responds to questions pertaining to it with vague interjections (10-11). Faulkner is also demonstrating the complexity and contradictory nature of how a child can view a parent. It seems that Bayard is aware of the contradictions of how he perceives his father, as he remarks on, “the illusion of height and size which he wore for us at least” (10). Not only is the contradiction of how he perceives John’s stature acknowledged, but there is also an awareness of the disingenuous and performative aspect of it. This is best illustrated when Bayard makes note of John’s attire (11), as John is wearing Union colored pants under his Confederate uniform. Ignoring the practical, likely necessary reason for this, it achieves a physical representation of a metaphor. John’s contradiction is represented by his opposing attire, and Bayard is cognizant of this, yet often rejects this awareness in favor of an idealized version of him, such as in his daydream while they build the pen (12-13). It is youthful innocence and stubbornness on Bayard’s part that fuels this perception of John, and thus functions to help the reader achieve better awareness of the dichotomies of the character and the overall struggle that is being subtly established here: perception vs. reality. This struggle will continue to be developed, especially through Bayard’s dreams, but it is in his disposition towards his father where the reader is first helped become attuned to it.

I felt disoriented inside The Unvanquished until we arrived at the narrative around the great locomotive chase in “Raid.” It felt uncharacteristically grounded and reflective, and helped contextualize much of the novel’s tone and presentation of war. The following passage particularly stood out to me: “Because wars are wars: the same exploding powder when there was powder, the same thrust and parry of iron when there was not—one tale, one telling, the same as the next or the one before” (94). Following a seemingly relentless sequence of events, this moment of pause shows Bayard’s strain in crafting a meaningful narrative out of these stray pieces. Whatever “tale” is produced is simultaneously essential to Bayard’s understanding of his circumstances and completely void of any real meaning, as the story of all wars is fundamentally the same.

Storytelling seems central to Bayard’s existence in Yoknapatawpha. He lives not just for his experience of having once seen the Hawkhurst train in action, but for his ability to regale the more-intelligent Ringo with the memory. He even considers hearing more stories about the train from Drusilla equivalent to having more experiences himself, and stays awake listening to them out of “the need to keep even with Ringo” (93). These stories, in turn, are meant to somewhat compensate for the lackluster stories of war Bayard’s father comes home with. “‘Believe me, boys; take my word for it,” his father says to him, “there’s more to it than this, no matter what it looks like. I cant prove it, so you’ll just have to believe me” (95).

Even while the train—in all its tangible grandeur—seems to thrill Bayard and ground his amorphous narrative of war, he ultimately seems disillusioned by it. Much of his imagining of war has a chivalric hue, with the “thrust and parry of iron” (94) and “poste and riposte of sweat-reeking cavalry” (95). And yet, the central moment of physical combat that lives in his mind is executed “not by two regiments or two batteries or even two generals, but by two locomotives” (96). There’s a vivid collision here between the fanciful Old South and the oncoming barrage of modern industrialization. There are shadows of classic warfare in the trains— their movement across the land reminiscent of horses and the iron rails taking the place of iron swords and armor. Their mechanical and impersonal nature, however, removes much of the romance Bayard holds onto in his reckoning of war. He may believe that the story of war is forever the same, regardless of whether the fighting is done with gunpowder or swords. But this moment of internal discord feels pivotal in acknowledging the tectonic shifts that are subtly but significantly altering the world (and the stories) around him.

Granny stood out to me as the most interesting, prominent, and humorous character of this section. She’s dainty– but she clearly runs the show. Ultimately, Granny Rosa Millard embodies a Southerner trying desperately to hold on to the propriety and tradition of the past, while also slipping (sometimes by force and sometimes seemingly on her own accord) into a more modern role amidst the hardships of war. 

While the war rages around her, she tries her best to hold on to the relics of the past. She urges the children to use decent language, and makes them wash their mouths with soap when they curse or lie (35). While traveling in desperate and dangerous situations, she repeatedly wears her very ladylike “shawl” over her shoulders, Mrs. Compson’s hat, and carries her parasol (129 and others). She prays or makes the boys pray any time they do wrong. These superficial examples demonstrate her attempt to restore decorum while the world as she knows it crumbles around her. 

Most significantly, her quest to protect and later recover the family’s silver illustrates her initial desperation to hold on to the past, particularly a past in which her family is financially secure. In “Retreat,” she insists on having the enslaved workers dig up the trunk of silver that was previously hidden, so she can sleep with it by her side before they travel with it the next morning (42). Later, during their travels, she insists on sleeping in the wagon with the chest of silver despite having an option to sleep inside a house (56). She continually insists on having physical proximity to the silver. While her literal closeness to the family heirloom demonstrates her distrust of those around her, it may also represent her symbolic need to hold on to the dwindling antebellum social order.

Ironically, it is often when she endeavors in things least traditional and least proper that she finds ways to reach out for the civilities of the past. The status quo of her time would certainly include the separation of white and black people in most matters. Despite this, she essentially begins a giant mule scam with Ringo, an enslaved, black child, as her business partner. He spies for them and he forges the letters that convince Union soldiers to give over mules. In the midst of their discussions, when Ringo calls white man Ab Snopes by his first name, something presumably black folks were not allowed to do during this time, she never misses a chance to correct him: “‘Mister Snopes,’ Granny Said” (126). After Bayard and Granny have to run through the woods to hide from Union soldiers, she corrects Ringo’s use of Ab’s name again (133). It is certainly funny to picture her covered in filth from hiding in the undergrowth, running from the consequences of her Union shakedown, correcting his choices.  She continues to keep up southern appearances, despite the fact that she is the one leading and allowing this “sinful” scheme. 

In many ways, Granny Rosa is very similar to Cousin Drusilla. They both have bravely and ingeniously fought against Union soldiers:  Drusilla, by almost running over a soldier with her horse and then threatening to kill it right in front of them in order to escape, and later riding with Satoris’ troops, and Granny, through her numerous, risky travels, hiding the boys in plain sight to protect them, and running an entire scheme against the Yankees for profit. They are powerful in their own ways, and both defy traditional gender roles. However, Drusilla accepts and seeks this defiance, while Granny clings to the norms of the past while acting in modern, brave ways. 

This internal conflict– between her modern strength and her tendency to cling to the courtesies of the past– is ultimately what kills her. Believing no man, even one in a group of frightening ex-soldiers, would hurt a woman, she ventures to their location to try to take their horses. She courageously insists she go on her own because “they won’t hurt a woman” (152). But, the world is different now: men will hurt women, the Confederacy can lose, and even the grandmother of innocent Bayard, who so far has seemed only enchanted by the actions of war, can die. She’s shot (“smell of the powder”) and killed by the men (154). Will her death be the ultimate launch for Bayard into a new era? Will it be the inciting incident for a larger transition?

Faulkner’s The Unvanquished depicts the fall of the Confederacy from the perspective of Bayard Sartoris, a boy whose coming of age coincides with the collapse of the Southern way of life around him. While the first half of the novel traverses the years immediately during and following the defeat of the South and the emancipation of the slaves, the details and experiences are filtered through the point of view of a young person working to make sense of his changing world, mirroring the experience of the reader who simultaneously must make sense of a way of life that is deeply grounded in the past. In the same way that the world around Bayard seems chaotic and foreign, Faulkner’s narrative choices emphasize these feelings within the reader as well. 

Bayard’s innocence and naivety about the changes in store for him are immediately evident in the opening pages of the novel as he and Ringo play with a map in the dirt, including a pile of sticks representing Vicksburg. When Loosh laughs at him, sweeps the map away, and says “There’s your Vicksburg,” it becomes clear that Bayard is not fully aware of the most recent news, and the reader works to catch up as well, soon realizing that Ringo, Loosh, and Philadelphy are not family members, but enslaved people (5). In choosing a young boy as his narrator, Faulkner uses Bayard’s ignorance about issues relating to race and equality to normalize the institution of slavery as an unquestionable part of everyday life. Thus, through Bayard’s perspective, it is particularly shocking when he begins to witness the breakdown of his society and the destruction of his way of life. As Bayard, Granny, and Ringo ride towards Drusilla’s home, they pass “white women and children,” whose homes have been burned down by the retreating Yankee forces, “watching [them] from the n— cabins where they lived now like we lived at home” (83). In viewing the destroyed countryside and the societal changes that forcibly accompany it, he realizes that “before it had been like passing through a country where nobody ever lived; now it was like passing through one where everybody had died at the same moment” (84). His youthful confusion in viewing the chaos around him allows the reader to recognize the degree to which the war was destabilizing in every possible way to the white South, not just economically, but socially and emotionally.   

Faulkner’s focus on the destabilization of the South also includes numerous passages that initially depict the joy of emancipation for the enslaved people only to be countered by the disorganization and pandemonium of the mass exodus of people with nowhere to go. Bayard describes Granny attempting to persuade slaves to turn back and go home, only to be told repeatedly that “Hit’s Jordan we coming to” and that “Jesus gonter see me that far” (85). While Bayard does not opine himself during these moments, there is the sense that Faulkner is suggesting an ambiguity surrounding the morality of emancipation with regards to the lack of planning or preparation on the part of the Yankee troops. From Bayard’s perspective, Granny seeks only to help them and give them an option other than aimless wandering and starvation. However, years later in a moment of reflection on the past, Bayard reconsiders these events and sees that for the enslaved people, in their moment of freedom, it was “one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they don’t know where, empty handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom” (81). In reflecting on the past as an adult man, Bayard is able to understand what he simply could not comprehend at the time: the desire for freedom outweighs any sort of logic or loyalty, even if all that one will know is the unknown. 

Bayard is not alone in his struggle to understand the changes that continue to mount around him, and both Granny and Drusilla are forced to abandon their view of life to accommodate the rapid pace of change. While Granny commits herself to the service of others, Drusilla questions what it means to live at all. Sarcastically, or perhaps realistically, Drusilla realizes that the things she once worried about like getting married and having children no longer seem to matter, because “the young men can ride away and get killed in the fine battles” while the slaves “tramp the roads all night waiting for a chance to drown in homemade Jordan,” and instead of sleeping, she can just say “Thank God for nothing” (101). Bayard is incredibly observant, and while he may not grasp the deeper meaning of Drusilla’s comment, the impact that her words have on him are profound. Like the reader, Bayard simultaneously recognizes that his world is gone forever, and that the future is anything but certain.