A preoccupation with sleep permeates much of the first four parts of The Unvanquished. This focus seems to serve a couple of different functions in the text. First, it appears to highlight the degree of trauma that Bayard and Ringo experience during the war years by drawing attention to the myriad points at which they are jolted awake by some new war-related episode, such as the numerous moves of the trunk filled with the Sartoris silver. Sleep, then, is viewed as both a temporary escape from the war and as a source of fear of what is yet to come. Sleep therefore appears to Bayard to be a permeable border between a somewhat normal world (as normal as their world can be in wartime) and the world of direct contact with the war, and the line between sleeping and waking is often blurred in the novel. A prime example of this occurs in the following text, which marks the moment at which Ringo and Bayard, barely awake as they continue their flight from the Union forces who accosted them the day before on the road to Memphis, are intercepted by unknown assailants who prove to be Bayard’s father and his men: “Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken so suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else”

A second dimension of the fixation on sleep is its association with a lack of power or knowledge. Those who indulge in sleep are portrayed as being vulnerable during a time in which vulnerability was a dangerous thing. Bayard describes how Granny and Ringo, while carrying out their mule theft and reselling scheme, would strike their targets at supper time because the soldiers would often be sleepy and therefore not at their most perceptive.

Additionally, Drusilla underlines what she sees as the positive aspects of forgoing sleep: “‘Why not stay awake now? Who wants to sleep now, with so much happening, so much to see?” (100). And for Ringo and Bayard, Loosh’s apparent lack of sleep appears to deepen the wisdom that they have already ascribed to him in terms of his knowledge of the current state of the war. As they follow him in an attempt to gain access to the information he has, they see him “with that look on his face again which resembled drunkenness but was not, as if he had not slept in a long time and did not want to sleep now” (22).

Bayard and Ringo attempt to increase their war-related knowledge by forgoing sleep in order to listen to war stories told by Bayard’s father and by Drusilla. Upon Colonel Sartoris’s brief return at the beginning of the novel, they are thwarted in this desire, so they instead sit on the stairs, in a state somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, listening to Sartoris speaking to Granny in secret about the state of the war. Bayard states, “Perhaps it was the dark or perhaps we were the two moths, the two feathers again … because suddenly Louvinia was standing over us, shaking us awake” and “…I knew we had slept on the stairs for some time” (18). Bayard’s repeated characterization of himself and Ringo as moths (as he does earlier in the first section: “the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers rising above a hurricane” (7)) reveals his desire to be able to rise above and to be omniscient observers of all that is going on around them, although his choice of moths also implies fragility in the face of great peril. In another instance, Bayard seems to be struggling with feelings of inferiority to Ringo. As they are traveling toward the railroad at Hawkhurst, which Bayard is careful to remind us he has seen while Ringo has not, Bayard appears to be keeping close tabs on Ringo as they travel as if to ensure that he does not acquire any knowledge that Bayard does not have and appears satisfied that he spends much of the trip asleep:

I took the parasol and he laid down in the wagon and put his hat over his eyes. ‘Call me when we gitting nigh to Hawkhurst,’ he said, ‘so I can commence to look out for that railroad you tells about.’ That was how he travelled for the next six days–lying on his back in the wagon bed with his hat over his eyes, sleeping, or taking his turn holding the parasol over Granny and me and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad which he had never seen though which I had seen that Christmas we spent at Hawkhurst. (81)

The railroad in The Unvanquished initially appears to be part of the terrain, dividing physical territory as well as serving as a marker of superiority in Bayard’s personal relationship with Ringo; however, as the railroad comes into view as it is, not as it is remembered, it instead represents contested narrative space—of the social order as well as of the war itself. When Bayard initially describes the railroad, he emphasizes its significance as a marker of his superiority over Ringo, his black slave play-fellow. This is already a friendship that reflects an ambiguity of the racial social order, yet what serves to distinguish between the two is not “the difference in the color of [their] skins” but “what one of us had done or seen that the other had not” (81). For Bayard, the trump card is the sight of “a railroad, a locomotive” (81). Further, the railroad seems to be defined by its structural integrity and order. As Bayard describes his first sighting of the railroad with Cousin Denny and Granny, “it was the straightest thing I ever saw, running straight and empty and quiet through a long empty gash cut through the trees…straighter than any river, with the crossties cut off even and smooth and neat” (87). The sight of the railroad is awe-inspiring in part because of its meticulous maintenance of order in defiance of a kind of wild (untidy?) nature that surrounds it: it is “straighter than any river,” and runs “straight and empty and quiet…through the trees”; its ties are “cut off even and smooth and neat.”

This beauty of order is something withheld from Ringo, the black character, to whom the railroad is a symbol of (his) lack. However, as Bayard narrates Ringo’s perspective, he links the sight of the railroad to motion itself, which becomes intertwined with an idea of racial progress. It is “the rushing locomotive” that stands in for “the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among [Ringo’s] people, darker than themselves…seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage” (81). The railroad then symbolically represents a rupture within the continuity of their enslavement, a sight of a “bright shape” to which “nothing in their heritage” could prepare them. The associated adjectives apportioned to each perspective are also telling: for the whites, the railroad is of a measured progress that is, above all, noticeable in its order; for the black community, the railroad pushes forward, even before there is thought of a destination. When Ringo excitedly searches for sight of the railroad, Bayard notes that the sight is one “he would have to find in order to catch up with me and which he would have to recognise only through hearsay when he saw it” (86). Ringo’s knowledge of the railroad is as “shape”less as the dream of freedom for the slaves, but it does not diminish his commitment to seeing (experiencing) it.

Yet what they find is not the railroad that Bayard once saw, but its obliterated ruins, the neat rails and tracks reduced to “piles of black straws heaped up every few yards” with “each rail…tied…around a tree” (88). The destruction of the railroad splinters the tracks and uproots the rails; the movement of the train is permanently stopped. For Bayard, it not only disrupts the power dynamic he has with Ringo, but the very narrative of the war itself. Bayard himself feels determined to find out what happened to the railroad in part “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). The earlier dynamic seems to have been confused, if not upended; Bayard himself is unclear about whether they are on even standing after the glimpse of the destroyed railroad, or if there is now ground he needs to regain. As they learn the story of the destruction of the railroad, it mutates again: representing neither progress nor order, but negative narrative space. The space of the railroad becomes a focal point for Bayard and Ringo both who “waited and watched that railroad which no longer existed, which was now…a few threads of steel…annealing into the living bark, becoming one and indistinguishable with the jungle growth…but which for us ran still pristine and intact and straight and narrow as the path to glory itself” (96). While Bayard imagines that it “ran still pristine” for “us,” it’s difficult to imagine Ringo included in that “us.” The ideal railroad that Bayard recalls no longer stands; in its place, the sight that remains is of a single moment, existing “inside the scope of a single pair of eyes and nowhere else, coming from nowhere and having, needing, no destination, the engine…arrested in human sight” (98). The railroad remains frozen in place, sourceless and without any continuing direction; the destructive moment of rupture yields not change and progression, but a vacuum.