“I been hearing about niggers all my life,” Ringo said. “I got to hear about that railroad” (91).

As the Mississippi country collapses into the anarchy of war and the first throws of White Southern decay and Black diaspora take root, several motifs begin to appear in the narrative of The Unvanquished that tell of the future tensions to come. Most notably, as the above quotation suggests, the motif of railroads and machinery comes out into stark contrast against the backdrop of the otherwise rural setting. The railroad “was the straightest thing I ever saw, running straight and empty and quiet through a long empty gash cut through the trees and the ground too” (87). Its forceful thrust of presence literally destroys the natural space it invades, cutting away organic history and leaving a seemingly empty zone into which any possible future can be projected.

Ringo’s preoccupation with the railroad, and his refusal to accept the word “niggers” suggests the racial coding the motifs begin to adopt. Ringo’s statement can be read as more than a mere topical pass, and adumbrates a desire to leave the stigmatizing power of the word, along with its history and signifying power, and a move toward undiscovered future potential. Needless to say, the railroad also presents the opportunity for transport out of the south, and symbolically, the self that is formed in that a space.

While the railroad itself seems to be the work of Southern engineers in a futile effort at war mobilization, it is nonetheless destroyed by white rebel guerrillas. The disembodied voice that inhabits the protagonist (a fourteen-year-old child), describes the futility of the destruction of the tracks,

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).

Faulkner’s language here is laden with romantic imagery of knighthood and honor. It stands in direct opposition to the instrumental, goal-orientated logic of industrial capitalism. The act of sabotage, as it is conflated with the knight’s duel, appears aimless and self-referential, “the deed done not for the end but for the sake of doing.” It has no purpose other than to affirm an old code that perpetuates a notion of an identity at odds with the changing times. Such a gesture perhaps reveals the future self-defeating attitude of the white southern identity. Unwilling to adopt the Yankee modernization, but as a result, unable to move forward, stymied by its own reluctance to relinquish the outmoded notions of itself.

Bayard’s need to hear about the railroad likewise reveals the white racial perspective on these encroaching changes. “I had to hear about the railroad too; possibly it was more the need to keep even with Ringo (or even ahead of him, since I had seen the railroad when it was a railroad, which he had not…” (93). His desire to hear is not motivated by the potential opportunity the railroad offers, as it does for Ringo, but more driven by an anxiety of being left behind, to at least “keep even,” if not “even ahead of him.” For southern blacks, modernity promises a future to project form into (versus the negative space of slave history), whether good or bad it seems unclear. For southern whites, it poses an obstacle, an ambivalent growth that may threaten to disrupt and dismantle what was once considered unimpeachable.

[#2]

“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.” (TSAF, 180). The opening lines of Jason’s chapter clearly sets the tone for his views on women and his attitude towards his sister Caddy and niece Quentin. What Jason lacks or has missed out on in his personal life, he makes up for in how he treats or has treated the women in his life. Jason is a person who is filled with resentment and hostility and this trickles into his need to control the family, for appearances sake, as well as his need to control and set an example for his niece.

Multiple times throughout the chapter, Jason makes an effort to control the actions of his niece and it’s often through the lens of violence or coercion. For example, “I grabbed her by the arm. She dropped the cup. It broke on the floor and she jerked back, looking at me, but I held her arm.” (TSAF, 183).  Jason’s incessant need to control his niece is caused by the lack of discipline his mother provides in the house. The only way Jason thinks that his niece will behave is if he can control her via violent acts of discipline, however this repeatedly backfires on him, which causes his anger and hostility to build.

Not only does Jason use physical violence, but he verbally abuse her as well, “You can scare an old woman off, but I’ll show you who’s got a hold of you now.” (TSAF, 184). Jason’s verbal attack at his niece is not only threatening but it’s a reminder, that men are superior to women. Or that men have the ability to control the way a woman acts and behaves; that a woman’s behavior is a reflection of the male head of house. However, despite the fact that Jason is the acting male of the house, his mother still holds the power to much of the actions that take place. Jason only acts or stop when his mother intervenes,  “Then I heard Mother on the stairs. I might have known she wasn’t going to keep out of it. I let go.” (TSAF, 185). Although Lady Compson might have control in the house, Jason appears to be frustrated by the lack of discipline his mother provides for Miss Quentin. Jason’s frustration for the lack of discipline that his mother provides, fuels his own hostility towards the treatment of his niece.

Jason’s  control also contributes to his need to keep up appearances and to preserve his family’s reputation that is slowly deteriorating. For Jason, the opinions of others is important to how he defines himself as a man. If the man of the house can’t control his household, then it reflects poorly on his character; it makes him look weak and Jason wants to appear put together and in control. Due to Caddy’s actions in the past, which was the catalyst for the destruction of the Compson family, Jason’s only hope for preserving the family reputation is by preventing Quentin from making the same mistakes as her mother. Jason repeatedly reminds Quentin that he will not allow for her actions or behavior to effect the family and that he will do everything in his power to keep her from destroying what is left of the Compson name, “Everybody in this town knows what you are. But I won’t have it anymore, you hear? I don’t care what you do, myself,” I says. “But I’ve got a position in this town, and I’m not going to have any member of my family going on like a nigger wench. You hear me?” (189).  Jason has no emotional attachment to his niece. His only relationship to her is out of obligation for his own personal perseverance and his overall need to save the family name from being completely tarnished.

“That’s the trouble with nigger servants, when they’ve been with you for a long time they get so full of self importance that they’re not worth a dam. Think they run the whole family.”(207) Jason’s sense of white supremacy over African Americans is clearly voiced throughout his section. He expresses it bluntly and never changes his views till the end section. For him, anyone different in color, religion or gender is considered inferior. His remarks here with reference to Dilsey who is supposed to be a mother figure to him embodies his belief of the ultimate white supremacy. This is a result of a typical Southern upbringing with a mother blessing all his actions “You have always been my pride and joy.”(225)

The male white supremacy notion and its accompanying materialistic feature are predominant in Jason’s section. “What this country needs is white labor. Let these dam trifling niggers starve for couple of years, then they’d see what a soft thing they have.”(191) In his opinion, whites are the ones who provide niggers with food and he fails to see how African Americans contribute effectively in society. In fact, he is incapable of seeing anything good coming from anyone but a white American man. His conversation around Jews and Armenians sums it all. “A bunch of dam eastern jews” , ” It’s just the race. You’ll admit that they produce nothing.”, ” I’m an American.”, “Not many of us left.”(191)

However, it is his views around women that perplexes me the most. The famous opening lines ” Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”(180) I wonder if Caddy didn’t fall into incest, will Jason’s views be the same? From the lake scene, we always see him bitterly addressing women ” Just because you are fourteen, you think you’re grown up, don’t you…You think you’re something. Don’t you.”(41) ” Caddy and Jason were fighting in the mirror”(64) However, his constant contemptuous remarks assures the reader of his fixed stance “Like I say you can’t do anything with a woman like that, if she’s got it in her. If it’s in her blood, you can’t do anything with her. The only thing you can do is get rid of her, let her go on and live with her own sort.”(232) His section even ends with the same line “Like I say once a bitch always a bitch.”(263)

Moreover, Jason in The Sound and the Fury is often times connected with Macbeth in Shakepeare ‘s famous play Macbeth :

[Macbeth:] To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth, Act V, Scene v)

However, can we consider Jason a reflection of Macbeth in the Sound and the Fury ? Is he the ” poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”? True, he could release his fury at the end hitting Luster and Queenie and driving them back, but he had lost his life, his dreams, his hopes and is to be heard no more. Yes, he can be considered a less bloody reflection of Macbeth, yet he defies Shakespeare’s line of ” signifying nothing” for he carries the burden of the Southern failure in proving the male white supremacy. Only the materialistic aspect remains ” I don’t want to make a killing; save that to suck in the smart gamblers with. I just want an even chance to get my money back.”(264)

The family silver at the heart of the first half of The Unvanquished is chiefly characterized by its movement – it is buried under a tree, unburied, carried upstairs, carried downstairs, hauled away by mule, hauled back again, reburied, dug up, and in the end finally multiplies from one into ten chests of silver. In this process of movement and proliferation, the silver represents something larger about what the South stands for: what at first seemed to be representative of a sentimental, individual family history is revealed to be representative of wealth on a much larger scale, built on a foundation of slavery and violence.

At the beginning of the novel, the silver represents family history, of a sort; both valuable but also of some sentimental value. There is perhaps nothing more evocative of family history than silver, and the Sartoris family silver includes knives and forks and a table service. The family ate with the silver knives and forks instead of “the kitchen knives and forks” (14); it was this that separated them from the men and women working in the kitchen. That these were once in regular use by the family is suggestive of how close the past can be – that the same implements that the family once ate with are now nearly all that remains of this history, especially as the family faces the Yankee army. In the face of the incoming obliteration, it is the silver that could, even after houses are burned down and men killed, connect the family back to this history. (It seems that in Faulkner, even if the family still has relevance and money at the time of writing, we are always looking back at it through the lens of its future irrelevance.) Granny’s attempt to save the silver becomes a useless but still admirable indication of her willingness to fight for this family history, and to save the family from penury.

But of course, at the heart of this wealth is the fact that, like so much wealth, it is built on the foundation of violence and slavery. When Loosh walks away with the silver to freedom, the following exchange reveals the corruption at the heart of this wealth, a corruption that until now has been chiefly elided by the excitement of the movement-driven plot. Loosh says:

“I going. I done been freed; God’s own angel proclamated me free and gonter general me to Jordan. I dont belong to John Sartoris now; I belongs to me and God.”

“But the silver belongs to John Sartoris,” Granny said. “Who are you to give it away?”

“You ax me that?” Loosh said. “Where John Sartoris? Whyn’t he come and ax me that? Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man what dug me free.” (75)

Until now, the silver’s movement has been rather exciting, and the reader has been placed in a position to cheer for Granny getting away from the Yankees with it. But here, Loosh abruptly repositions the ownership of the silver as just as valid as John Sartoris’ ownership of him.

And the meaninglessness of the family history, and of the the sentimentalism that might have marginally redeemed Granny’s attachment to the silver, is similarly revealed to be illegitimate when, with a letter, Granny becomes responsible for ten trunks of silver, which are described in exactly the same terms as the original: Granny describes “The chest of silver tied with hemp rope” (109); the General’s letter describes: “Ten (10) chests tied with hemp rope and containing silver.” The trunk was never opened; the silver itself is an abstraction. In its proliferation, though, it begins to hint at the scale of the wealth of the south. A thousand trunks of silver can’t really be comprehended. From one to ten, though: the mind can begin to grasp the scale of the wealth of the south.

That Granny accepts this commission further shows that this silver is no longer about any particular family; the trunks are essentially interchangeable. The important thing is the wealth itself, and the history of enslavement that this silver represents is emphasized by its being accompanied by 110 slaves. The General’s letter describes: “Ten (10) chests tried with hemp rope and containing silver. One hundred ten (110) mules captured loose near Philadelphia in Mississippi. One hundred 110 (110) negroes of both sexes belonging to and having strayed from the same locality” (112). The silver is purely about wealth built by agriculture (the mules) and slavery, in which the men and women who labor for it are listed after both the silver and the mules. Granny herself had listed “The chest of silver tied with hemp rope. The rope was new. Two darkies, Loosh and Philadelphy. The mules, Old Hundred and Tinney” (109). Here, at least, Loosh and Philadelphy are listed before the mules, but they still come after the silver (and they are described and named in exactly the same terms as the mules – essentially as equals).

While the silver at the beginning of the novel seems almost incidental to the plot – a sort of McGuffin – it is revealed to be practically central to it. And there is a problem of the reader’s sympathies in regards to its ownership: the default position, certainly at the beginning, is essentially pro-Granny. There seems to be no great reason that the Yankees should have it either. The silver, then, becomes a metaphor for both the wealth and history of the south, as well as the dilemma of its future: the men and women whose actual labor purchased the silver will receive nothing for it.

All quotes are from the Vintage edition.

In the early chapters of The Unvanquished, there seems to be a high value placed on dreams among multiple characters that serves as a tangible means of direction in the real. Characters not only speak of their dreams with graveness, but they act on their dreams during the waking hours, and often subject those around them to acting on them, as well. I think there is a connection between the authority the dreams have over the characters to the shifting authority dynamics brought about by the war that our characters engage with daily. The first time dreams are mentioned in the text is during a serious exchange between Ringo and Bayard regarding information on the current war movements, and John Sartoris’ whereabouts:

“‘You talking about Loosh. Who tole us to watch him?’

‘Nobody. I just know.’

‘Bayard, did you dream hit?’

‘Yes. Last night. It was Father and Louvinia. Father said to watch Loosh, because he knows'” (20). We learn in this exchange that Ringo takes dreams very seriously: Bayard did not tell Ringo at first that this information came to him via a dream, but, rather, Ringo made this jump himself, correctly. That Ringo begins his question with an authoritative, “Bayard,” gives it all the more gravity. Before hatching their plan to indeed watch Loosh closely, as the dream suggested, Ringo explicitly states why he honors dreams so highly: “‘Then hit’s so,’ he said. ‘If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dremp hit, hit cant be a lie case aint nobody there to tole hit to you. So we got to watch him'” (21). Ringo’s rationale maintains confidence in information delivered via dreams, as he seems to views it as a medium that transcends individual perspective or gain (without, seemingly, considering external influences that affect the subconscious psyche in dreams), as opposed to the unreliability of information given via another person. This first discussion of dreams comes at a minor climactic time where Bayard’s father is coming and going from the home unexpectedly, and the boys are left to figure out for themselves what really is going on. At an arguably larger climactic moment, we experience again the authority of dream information; this time, via Granny, and this time, affecting physically more characters than just Bayard and Ringo. As the Sartoris household is preparing to depart for Tennessee, Granny exercises her matriarchal authority that is fueled be a dream she has about the safeness of their trunk of silver, which is presently buried in the backyard. She insists that it be carried in the night before their departure, much to the chagrin of the others:

‘I wish you’d tell me why you got to dig hit up tonight.’

Granny looked at her. ‘I had a dream about it last night.’

‘Oh,’ Louvinia said” (39). The finality of both Louvinia and Granny’s statements here is telling, regarding the dream’s authority; Granny does not have to further explain what the dream was about to convince anyone (although Granny does detail the dream shortly after), and Louvinia does not push her for a further explanation: the dream holds enough clout on its own to function as a powerful decision making tool at this momentous pre-departure point for the household. Although moving the trunk so many times in such a short period of time may seem impractical, I would argue that the dream’s visionary “guidance” is welcomed at this time, because of the high levels of stress that the war incites in each household member, and in the nation at large.

Molly Gendelman

Professor Allred

Blog #3

Fifty Shades of Pride

Faulkner portrays pride as the secret weapon the South had during the Civil War that the North did not seem to understand. Despite ultimately losing, the South always retained a reputation of sorts for still having their pride.  In The Unvanquished, Readers pick up on pride the most in Bayard’s grandmother, Miss Rosa, but the rest of the main characters seem to have their own amounts of pride too, and during the war it seemed there was a lot to be proud of. Bayard has great pride for his father, who Faulkner makes feel is a man who radiates power and respect, “And that’s what I mean: about his doing bigger things than he was. He could have stood on the same level with Granny and he would have only needed to bend his head a little for her to kiss him. But he didn’t. He stopped two steps below her, with his head bared and his forehead held for her to touch her lips to, and the fact that Granny had to stoop a little now took nothing from the illusion of height and size he wore for us at least” (10). Bayard’s pride for his father even comes from the outside, like when he runs into Uncle Buck while on their way to Memphis. Uncle Buck says, “I wont say God take care of you an your grandma on the road, boy, because by Godfrey you dont need God’s nor nobody else’s help; all you got to say is ‘I’m John Sartoris’ boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake’ and then watch the blue bellied sons of bitches fly” (52). His father, though he does not say much, takes pride in his horse, Jupiter, for being a terrific specimen of a horse that the Northerners would desperately want. Faulkner’s initial description of Jupiter on page 8 is an example of the importance and value placed on Jupiter, and he describes the horse in detail again on page 65.
Bayard also takes pride in his home and his family’s land, another theme of sorts that southerners seem to be born with: love of their land. When on their way to Memphis, Faulkner reveals that Bayard brought dirt from home with him, “So I took the snuff box from my pocket and emptied half the soil (it was more than Sartoris earth; it was Vicksburg too: the yelling in it, the embattled, the iron-worn, the supremely invincible) into his hand” (55).
Bayard’s grandmother Miss Rosa has the most straightforward and perhaps understandable pride. She is an elderly white lady of Southern nobility, who takes pride in her family, her reputation and dignity. When Bayard and Ringo shoot the Yankees’ horse and they come in the house searching for them, Granny uses several forms of pride to protect them. She is extremely polite to the soldiers searching the house, all the while extremely calm. Even as they search her house without asking permission, she offers the Colonel who ends the search some refreshment before he leaves, “‘Louvinia,” Granny said, “conduct the gentleman to the dining room and serve him with what we have” (33). This pride in being polite and hospitable even to an enemy is a running pattern throughout the south, and Faulkner successfully uses her to portray such people during the war. Her lies about living alone are successful because she maintains a quiet dignity and relies on this unspoken but ever-present pride that Southerners seem to have without even trying. Multiple times throughout the novel, Faulkner describes how properly she conducts herself without even trying, “I looked at Granny eating, with her hat sitting on the exact top of her head and Ringo looking at me across the back of Granny’s chair with his eyes rolling a little” (38). Several pages later Faulkner repeats this, “We put the trunk into the wagon, along with the musket and the basket of food and the bedclothing, and got in ourselves—Granny on the seat beside Joby, the bonnet on the exact top of her head and the parasol raised before the dew had begun to fall—and we drove away” (45). And when yankees come to burn down their house and their servant Loosh shows them where they hid their silver, she sends Bayard and Ringo to Mrs. Compson’s for a hat, parasol, and hand mirror (78).
Ringo, despite not being white, also displays immense pride in certain ways that Faulkner highlights. For example, when trying to decide if he ever tried coconut cake or not, “Because he said that he would rather just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived” (20). To Ringo, tasting the cake and not remembering is better than having not tasted it at all, and he takes pride in thinking that he did indeed taste it.
The novel’s title is absolutely perfect for the story: The Unvanquished speaks of the pride that endured through the war, and could not and would not be destroyed.  While the people in the south may have lost the war, and perhaps a great part of their general pride, their pride in being Southerners remains unvanquished. And while I have yet to finish the story, Faulkner is leading me to think that their pride will never be vanquished.

A sense of doom enters The Unvanquished early in the first story, “Ambuscade,” as Loosh sweeps away the “living map” of the battle of Vicksburg (which we learn on page 18 the Confederates have already lost- and which, cutting off control of the Mississippi River, marks the Union Army’s advance*) that young Bayard and Ringo have built, and as Bayard’s father, John Sartoris, arrives home unexpectedly on his “gaunt horse” in his “weathered gray coat” with “tarnished buttons” and “frayed braid”(10). In TSAF we read how the sense of smell linked to powerful emotion and memory, and Faulkner uses it in this work to connect the reader to Bayard’s experience of the moment, usually the experience of loss. One of the most powerful of these moments is Bayard’s discovery of the death of Granny Rosa at the hands of Grumby’s Independents in “Riposte in Tertio.”

Our first example linking Bayard’s coming to knowledge of loss through the sense of smell comes with his father’s visit home to bury the family silver and hide the livestock: “Then I began to smell it again … that odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can probably be the worst which we can suffer” (U 10). Bayard senses that all is not well and the heroic image of his father on his once noble horse, Jupiter, begins to get smaller. By the third story, “Raid,” Bayard’s father gets smaller as he returns like a tramp in patched, stolen clothing, swordless and seems to “emanate a kind of humility and apology” (95). Each story reflects Bayard’s growing knowledge of the expanding destruction of the Civil War and with each tale told he reminds us that he knows better now and his childish beliefs in the glory of the South have been confused and reduced by experience.

As Bayard grows from boy to man, the ways of the Old South are breaking down, seen profoundly as Granny’s moral code warps to adapt to survival in wartime. She begins as the pious aunt who washes the boys’ mouths out with soap when they curse and prays for forgiveness for the lie she tells to the Yankee soldier to protect them and ends as the double-crossed, murdered mastermind of a grand scheme to steal mules, horses, and supplies from Yankee troops. Faulkner deepens the conflicted representation of Granny by having her give mules and supplies to the starving tenant farmers in church, but complicates her status by having Ringo describe her as almost considering herself as Godlike: “She cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do and then she git up and do hit. And them that dont like hit can git outen the way or git trompled” (93). How are we to interpret Faulkner’s presentation of Granny? Granny is both racially and socially unbending but morally bending. Both sides can be argued: she is the rigid (though shrinking) figure of the Old South that stands to the last for the righteous cause –or- the clearest example of the unbending, evil code of the slave South that corrupts itself to a diminished end in disgrace. I think Faulkner tips his hand a little as Bayard sees Granny getting smaller: “… she looked littler than anybody I could remember, like during the four years she hadn’t got any older or weaker, but just littler and straighter and straighter and more and more indomitable” (143). Bayard knows better now.

Granny’s end, and the end of the Old South for Bayard, comes in “Riposte in Tertio.” Bayard tries to stop Granny from her last scam, but gives up, symbolizing his letting go of her beliefs and her code of the South. Again, Faulkner uses the sense of smell to empower Bayard’s retelling of discovering his dead grandmother: “… it was the powder I smelled, stronger even than the tallow. I couldn’t seem to breathe for the smell of the powder, looking at Granny. She had looked a little alive, but now she looked like she had collapsed, like she had been made out of a lot of little thin dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord, and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and somebody had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them” (154). As the railroad made of steel had been destroyed by the Union Army to break the South apart, so the cord that holds Granny together (and that bound the trunk full of the silver that represented the wealth and class of the family) and the code of the Old South, is destroyed both from the evil within and the evil of the New South that comes with Grumby’s Independents. At the end of “Riposte in Tertio” Bayard is engulfed in the smell of loss that he knows better now represents the world between old and new.

{*In May and June of 1863, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s armies converged on Vicksburg, investing the city and entrapping a Confederate army under Lt. Gen. John Pemberton. On July 4, Vicksburg surrendered after prolonged siege operations. This was the culmination of one of the most brilliant military campaigns of the war. With the loss of Pemberton’s army and this vital stronghold on the Mississippi, the Confederacy was effectively split in half. Grant’s successes in the West boosted his reputation, leading ultimately to his appointment as General-in-Chief of the Union armies (http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/vicksburg.html)}

Note: this reading only applies to the novel’s first two chapters, “Ambuscade” and “Retreat”

The brisk flow of The Unvanquished is so hurried that the narrative’s present moment often seems to violently occupy the same space as its future events and interactions. For example, within what appears to constitute the same spatial, temporal and narrative breath, Bayard chastises Ringo for “looking behind every tree we passed for Yankees”, yet in almost the same moment, Yankee’s have surrounded the group’s wagon and Bayard notes Granny “standing up in the wagon and beating the five men about their heads and shoulders with the umbrella while they unfastened the traces and cut the harness of the mules with pocket knives”(58). To understand how the speed of the narrative operates formally in this passage, it’s important to note Faulkner’s staccato prose. He often substitutes commas for periods, in a manner that disorients the logical flow of movement. As Bayard notes upon being overtaken, “It was fast, like that”.  

Yet while the textual swiftness of The Unvanquished ushers a condition of narrative progress that rushes into the future and therefore obviates the textual past, the characters we encounter within the text appear to have a less clarified relationship to future movement. In this way, the majority of characters oscillate between attempting to move into some future space- primarily Memphis – and consistently falling back to Jefferson, their place of origin. We initially see characters oscillating between future spaces and past spaces through Marse John’s series of returns and departures to and from Jefferson. And even in his absence, Marse John’s presence either seems to haunt the home so much so that his sporadic returns are the obsession of all who await his arrival. The anxiety that exists between future and past spaces also registers in the trip Bayard, Ringo, Joby and Granny attempt to make to Memphis. Ringo’s fixation with searching for Yankees behind trees, trees that the wagon has already surpassed, intimates his obsessive view of the past and inability to depart with his origins. After the party traveling to Memphis is attacked by group of Yankees, Bayard and Ringo disband from Granny and Joby to search for the mules that have been cut loose. Yet their scattered attempt to reclaim the horses intended to take them to a new space is foiled by Marse John, who finds them in the woods and sees them back to Jefferson where Granny and Joby await them. The journey that had the group on the road to Memphis is actually a circuitous one that delivers them back to their point of origin.

Loosh is arguably the only character whose relationship to future spaces seems to break with the anxiety and inability to pursue future spaces all of the other characters face. His clairvoyance regarding the fall of Vicksburg and Corinth can be argued not only as his desire to enter future spaces, but his ability to see into future spaces. In this sense, Loosh imagines a future that divides with the spatial and temporal encapsulations the other characters experience.