After delving into the mind of Faulkner in two of his texts, I’ve come to realize the manner in which he embraces fantasy. Characters in their youth who go on massive escapades through bizarre situations serve as a driving vehicle for his narrative delivery and more often than not, vignettes are told through the lens of one who is discovering Faulkner’s world, a world rooted in reality where any number of variables might interfere in the character’s objectives.
In TSAF, Quentin Jr. and her mother prove emblematic in their sense of escaping from the confines of what is socially acceptable and cause supposed “societal degradation” because of it. With regard to these female voyagers, Faulkner seems to imply that though they are flawed in ways that are taboo and inconceivable, their incentive to explore foreign, deviant horizons is a natural byproduct of their societal circumstances and by comparison to the oppressive Jason whose worldview is so narrow, we ought to admire them as the free souls that they possess.
Coincidentally, “freedom” from the bounds of society serves as an intricate theme in our latest novel, The Unvanquished, and though said freedom leads to quite the muck and mire, it also sets the stage for a fantastic voyage of two faux-brothers and their family unit. The traumatic catalyst of Bayard and Ringo shooting down a Yankee soldier leads to exodus from the houses and encounters with the unfathomable in the forms of riding alongside exotic frontier soldiers (one of whom is Bayard’s father), escorting a railroad’s worth of fleeing and even accidentally “forgetting” Granny in a wagon on the trails. At one point, Bayard has a revelation: “There is a limit to what a child can accept… And I was still a child at that moment when Father’s and my horses came over the hill and seemed to cease galloping and to float” (Faulkner 66). The scene is painted in such a way as to capture the awe of a child at beholding the remarkable nature of an unforgettable moment and in many respects, Faulkner capitalizes on this sense of boyish ambition to experience the world.
Ringo serves as an interesting specimen from which to consider Faulkner’s association with the fantastic. Ringo is a boy who is assimilated into the Sartoris family despite his opposite skin color, a concept beyond profound for its time. As the books develops, Ringo takes on a more assuming role striking bargains with rival Yankees and leading the front lines of the battlefield alongside Colonel Sartoris (67 – 68). The extent to which Ringo has availed himself of the societal standards attributed to blacks is remarkable and elevate him to a status far greater than the stereotypical nature attributed to Jim and Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Ringo is Bayard’s equal, at least to the point where they consider each other family.
Faulkner is attributed with “spinning tales with more verisimilitude than veracity” (Porter 1) and so far, TSAF and The Unvanquished have shown this to hold weight. Although Faulkner’s stretches of the imagination in these novels often venture off into the unfathomable, his use of historically relevant landmarks and time frames in his home state of Mississippi only aids in generating unforgettable moments within his character’s escapades thereby allowing him to comment on an array of themes centered around the human condition.
