U questions

  1. The text opens with a seemingly sentimental scene of two boys playing war games in the yard with improvised materials, a scene that would not be out of place, say, in Tom Sawyer. What are some of the elements that interrupt this scene, revealing layers of significance and underlying antagonisms that are invisible to us at first?

  2. What do you notice about the Sartoris family? Who are its leaders, and what is its structure? How does it diverge from our expectations about families in the antebellum South?

  3. One of the subplots of the second and third chapters concerns the desire of enslaved people for freedom. What are some of the ways this desire is articulated? How does this desire look and feel different according to who is doing the talking/looking? What are some of the impediments to a meaningful freedom for enslaved people in the wake (almost literally) of the Union army?

  4. The other major subplot of this part of the novel also concerns property: the desire of the Sartoris family to recover its seized property, human and inanimate. How do they recover their property? What does Faulkner’s subtle humor throughout this section tell us about the clash of values that pertains between the Sartorises and the Union officials they negotiate with?

  5. The rest of chapter three depicts a business venture of sorts, in which Granny, Ringo, and Bayard form a little corporation. What does their org chart look like? What is their business model? Who profits from their work? What are some of the ironies that are wrapped up in this entire venture?

  6. Bayard spends most of "Vendee" split between outward-focused heroic action and, more often, inward-focused discursive thought. How does Faulkner convey this split though literary form? How might Bayard's inner process link him with the reader's own activities in trying to assess the who/what/when/where of this chapter?

  7. What is the referent of the "Skirmish" of the penultimate chapter? Is there more than one skirmish? How do the subplots converge at the end of the chapter, and what does this convergence say about the "Redemption" of the South after the 1875 collapse of Reconstruction?

  8. How does the novel end? What does Bayard's compromise with antebellum models of white masculinity as embodied by John Sartoris tell us about the contours of the emergent New South of the late 19thC? What "remainders," in the mathematical sense, are left over in this closure? What are we do with with characters like Loosh, Ringo, and Drusilla, and the desires they embody?