Essay on The Unvanquished by William Faulkner is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on The Unvanquished by William Faulkner at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

The Unvanquished is a series of connected stories set during and after the Civil War. William Faulkner published six of these seven stories individually in popular magazines, five in the Saturday Evening Post and one in Scribner's. He then revised the stories and incorporated them into a novel. Only the final story, "An Odor of Verbena," was new in the published book. Some readers find this, the least difficult of Faulkner's novels, too conventional in its romantic view of the Old South and the Civil War. The romanticism is due, at least in part, to the adolescent narrator of the first few sections, and it is undercut in the final section when the narrator is more mature.

In the first section, titled "Ambuscade," the narrator, Bayard Sartoris, is 12 years old. To him, the war is an adventure, and his father, Colonel John Sartoris, is a hero. Many of the characters in the Sartoris family were modeled after Faulkner's own family, especially Colonel Sartoris who resembles Faulkner's great-grandfather. The reader is introduced to a later generation of this family, when Bayard is an old man, in Faulkner's early novel Sartoris (1929). In The Unvanquished, Bayard experiences the Civil War with his best friend, Ringo, a slave. Their friendship transcends, as much as is possible in a slave society, the confines of race: "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 nigger any more or maybe I wasn't a white boy any more, the two of us neither" (9). Their friendship is one reason this book is sometimes labeled unrealistic. Though he is described as more intelligent than Bayard, Ringo never openly bridles at his slave status. When the other slaves flee to the North during the war, Ringo stays with the family, perhaps because he is considered one of the family. As the two boys play at war and idolize the colonel, this section takes on the humorous quality of Mark Twain's tall-tale fiction, especially when they kill a Yankee's horse and hide together from the irate officer underneath Granny's full skirt.

The grandmother, Rose Millard, also takes on a heroic quality. During the war, she develops a scheme to get mules from the Union Army with forged documents. She distributes the mules to her neighbors to help them work their devastated land but winds up getting involved with some scalawags, and it is here that the tone of the book becomes darker. One of the scalawags, a man named Grumby, murders Granny. In the section titled "Vendee," 15-year-old Bayard sets out to avenge her death. He kills Grumby, and he and Ringo nail the man's body to the door of the old cotton compress, cut off his right hand, and place it on Granny's grave. Faulkner portrays an ordered and traditional society brought to chaos and lawlessness by war. Once-loyal servants desert their masters; women, such as Granny, must take on the roles normally played by men; men kill ladies, who ought to be protected; and boys commit grisly acts of vengeance.

In the section titled "Skirmish at Sartoris," we find that Drusilla is another woman driven to unconventional behavior during the war. After her fiance dies at Shiloh, Drusilla "had deliberately tried to unsex herself " (131) in order to take an active role in the war. She dresses as a soldier and rides in John Sartoris's troop. When the war ends and she continues to live at Sartoris's estate, not as a lover but as an extra hand, Aunt Louisa, Drusilla's mother, is scandalized by the impropriety of the situation and demands that Colonel Sartoris marry her. Though they are not in love, they agree to marry to appease their female relations. As Drusilla and John Sartoris ride into town to be wed, they interrupt an election organized by two carpetbaggers, the Burdens, to elect former slave Cash Benbow as U.S. Marshal. Acting on the wishes of the white citizens of Jefferson, John shoots and kills the Burdens and gives Drusilla the ballot box to take back to the house. At Sartoris's house, they hold a sham election in which George Wyatt, a former soldier under Colonel Sartoris, writes out all the ballots. In all the commotion, Drusilla and John had forgotten to get married, much to the dismay of Aunt Louisa. The marriage is finally performed by a minister summoned to the house.

The final section, "An Odor of Verbena," begins when Bayard Sartoris, away at law school, receives the news that his father has been shot by a political opponent, Ben Redmond, in Jefferson. Bayard rides back to Jefferson with Ringo, who had been sent to summon him and who offers to help him kill Redmond. Bayard refuses all who offer to exact vengeance for him, and through his introspection, the reader sees that Bayard has matured from the 15-year-old who unquestioningly killed Grumby: "At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were" (148). Through a flashback the reader learns about some of the situation's complexity. Bayard is in love with Drusilla, his stepmother, who is only eight years his senior. Her feelings for John had never been more than admiration, and she marries him only for the sake of appearances. When, the summer before his father's death, he kisses Drusilla, Bayard is compelled by honor to tell his father. John, however, is so preoccupied with his political plans that he either doesn't fully comprehend or doesn't care. The characters compare Sartoris's dream of building a railroad to Thomas Sutpen's design, which is the subject of Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Unlike Sutpen, however, John Sartoris wants to improve the whole community, not just his own family.

When Bayard arrives at his father's house after learning of his father's murder, Drusilla greets him with two dueling pistols. Obsessed with honor and yearning for her days as a soldier, Drusilla wishes she could avenge her husband's death, but because the war is over, she is constrained by conventional feminine behavior. Although he says nothing, Drusilla senses that Bayard has no plans to kill Redmond, and she dismisses him contemptuously. But Bayard is not a coward. Perhaps he carries out what he sees as his father's last wishes, uttered the previous summer: "I'm tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end" (159). Bayard walks into Redmond's office unarmed and allows Redmond to fire at and purposefully miss him twice. Redmond then boards a train and leaves Jefferson forever. Cleanth Brooks says, "The Unvanquished is a novel about growing up--it is the story of an education" (84), and this scene with Redmond is Bayard's initiation into manhood. Unlike the boy of 12 in the book's opening section, this man no longer romanticizes violence. The novel ends when Bayard returns to the house and discovers Drusilla has left Jefferson to live with relatives in Montgomery. She has left on his pillow a sprig of the verbena she always wears, in effect retracting the harsh words she spoke to him earlier and commemorating all they lost.

Bibliography:

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963.

Creighton, Joanne V. William Faulkner's Craft of Revision: The Snopes Trilogy, "The Unvanquished" and "Go Down, Moses." Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1977.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. 1934. London: Penguin Books, 1970.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.