Faulkner’s novel
The Unvanquished is not generally regarded as one of his greatest works, but it is the best introductory access into the labyrinthine wilderness of characters, themes, and geography of Yoknapatawpha County. This novel evolved from a series of related short stories that in the final effect, lacks the depth and unity of Faulkner’s better works. Yet, here in these stories, the reader meets the Sartoris, Compson, McCaslin, Sutpen, and Snopes families. Here in these stories, the tensions between races, the contrasting ante-bellum and post-bellum worlds, and the grander Faulkner themes of the “fierce pull of blood” (“The Barn Burning”) and “the human heart in conflict with itself” and the "old verities"(Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech) appear.
The Unvanquished bears the distinctions of epic literature in its setting within a world undergoing change, in its grand symbols (such as the plantation houses, railroads, horses, and guns), and its development of a hero whose journeys are spatial (leaving from and returning home), developmental (from youth to manhood), and moral (from childish gunplay to true courage). Bayard Sartoris, the hero, finds that his education in life entails a journey through the underworld in ways reminiscent of Dante. Randall Stewart commented on Faulkner’s theological tendency, saying, “There is everywhere in his writings the basic premise about Original Sin; everywhere the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. One also finds the necessity of discipline, of trial by fire, in the furnace of affliction, of sacrifice and the sacrificial death, of redemption through sacrifice.” [Randall Stewart,
American Literature and Christian Doctrine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 142] Along with the Christian epic tradition, Bayard resembles the classical epic heroes. Like Achilles, Bayard grapples with mortality and honor; like Telemachus, he has to achieve manhood in his father’s absence, while yet in his shadow; and like Aeneas, Bayard rescues the dying remnants of a passing civilization (the ante-bellum South) with a vision of one better. Self-identity is Bayard’s quest. He is, as he is repeatedly reminded, both John Sartoris’s son and, upon the death of his father, the Sartoris.
The Unvanquished is structured around three defining confrontations with killing. The first killing is childish comedy. Bayard and his close friend Ringo, a family slave, are playing out the war his father is fighting. Attempting to shoot a Union officer, they succeed in killing his horse. They hide under the skirt of Bayard’s feisty grandmother, Rosa Millard. That mixture of fun, danger, and adventure is heightened when Granny and the boys get involved in commandeering mules from the Union army. Her actions bring her into a working alliance with the untrustworthy Ab Snopes. When Granny confronts an outlaw gang and its leader, Grumby, she is killed.
This leads to Bayard’s second confrontation with killing. With Bayard’s father off fighting in the war and Granny now dead, the responsibility for killing Granny’s murderer falls on Bayard. Up to this point, Bayard’s experiences have included the protection of Granny’s skirt, Ringo’s superior skills, and the legacy and recurring presence of his father. As a young boy, he has, from a safe distance, been more a narrator than participant in events. But in the fifth portion of The Unvanquished, titled “Vendee,” Bayard faces a world of which Cleanth Brooks says, “there are no constituted authorities to whom he could appeal had he wished.” [ Cleanth Brooks,
The Yoknapatawpha Country (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990, 1963), 85]Bayard is still a youth (age 15), but is confronted with the code of retribution, and fulfillment of his task is found only by his descending into the underworld.
As Virgil accompanied Dante, Uncle Buck McCaslin, a leader of the “dirt farmers,” guides Bayard and Ringo into this descent. Uncle Buck once hailed Bayard saying, “By Godfrey, there he is! There’s John Sartoris’ boy!” He then ambiguously describes Col. Sartoris as the ideal fighting hero, but also as a coward and a horse thief. Col. Sartoris represents the protection of the Southern order, but the failure of that old order is growing apparent. Uncle Buck had once told Bayard, “You got a long road. Take care of your grandma, boy, or John Sartoris will skin you alive. And if he don’t, I will.” (
The Unvanquished, 54) Bayard’s road proves to be long, leading through the underworld, and Uncle Buck fulfills his part by going with him there.
Bayard, Ringo, and Uncle Buck enter into the underworld at Granny’s funeral. Her grave, with the fresh red dirt clods dissolving in the rain, marks the entrance into their journey. Although rheumatic, crippled, and elderly, Uncle Buck initiates events at the burial in pointing Bayard to his mission. Uncle Buck is the only one with a pistol, and while he proves ineffective at using it, his guidance is essential. While the boys keep thinking that capturing Ab Snopes is the goal, Uncle Buck directs them toward the actual killer. Knowledge of the real evil or the real goal is essential for the hero.
“Vendee” is filled with dark and gloomy images of woods, rain, and cold. In the rain at the funeral, Bayard notices that it would be “days and weeks and months before it [Granny’s grave] would be smooth and quiet and level with the earth.” (159) For many days and nights, the three travel “along known roads and the unknown (and sometimes unmarked) trails and paths.” (163) Ringo notches a stick each day for forty days, a Biblical allusion, but even that time is not enough for this wilderness journey. Like the descending levels of Dante’s Inferno, the scenes encountered along the way image a greater aspect of the evil they are facing. Among such images are the ashes of burned homes, a lynched black man, and a woman exhorting them to find and kill the outlaws.
One night a stranger warns the three to capture Ab Snopes and leave Grumby alone. As he rides off, he shoots and wounds Uncle Buck, and this injury, along with his other ailments, later force him to return home. But Uncle Buck’s presence is still needed. Two key events fulfill his role. After a cold and icy night, they happen upon a snake, a moccasin, frozen in ice, reminding the reader of Dante and Virgil’s finding Satan, the great Serpent himself, frozen in ice. Uncle Buck rightly announces that it is a sign. Shortly after this, they capture Ab Snopes. Bayard attacks Snopes, but Snopes’s life is spared. Uncle Buck is then able to leave Bayard and Ringo, but not before giving them the gun and pointing them again to their mission, saying “Catch them! Catch them!”(176)
More traveling in the cold and the rain ensue before the two boys finally reach Grumby, now abandoned by his men. In the fight that follows, Bayard shoots and kills Grumby. His body is taken to the old compress where Granny had been killed, and there it was, to use Uncle Buck’s words, “pegged out on the door to it like a coon hide, all except the right hand.”(186) Bayard and Ringo had severed the hand that killed Granny and fastened it to her grave.
At Granny’s grave, the boys emerge out of the underworld. Bayard notices that the ground is now almost level. He says, “And then we both began to cry. We stood there in the slow rain, crying. We had ridden a lot, and during the last week we hadn’t slept much and we hadn’t always had anything to eat.” Like Jesus in the wilderness, Bayard has faced hunger and deprivation. Like Dante emerging from the Inferno, he weeps. He mourns the loss of his grandmother for sure, but also the loss of his own youth, the playful world, and innocent life he had once known.
The sadistic nature of Bayard’s killing and dismembering Grumby contrasts strongly with the final confrontation with killing in this book. Cleanth Brooks noted that Bayard had been “gently nurtured.” He said, “The killing and mutilation of Grumby thus measures the stress of the times and their pressures on Bayard. But we cannot realize fully the impact of the episode on Bayard’s mind and spirit until we have read the last section of the novel.” [Cleanth Brooks, 86-87] In the last section, Bayard confronts the man who killed Col. Sartoris, while he (Bayard) was away studying law. By grace and courage, Bayard refuses to kill his father’s killer and thus ushers in the rule of law. But this final stage of Bayard’s growth—this time of courage—is built upon his time in the underworld.
Randall Stewart said, “The greatness [of Man in Faulkner] is measured by the distance between the heights he attains and the depths which he descends or, but for the grace of God, might have descended.” [Randall Stewart, 142]Bayard reaches heights because his journey to the underworld carried him to the depths. Just as eternity sets time in perspective, so the underworld sets the real world in perspective.
The Unvanquished begins with Faulkner portraying comedy at its height; it ends with his portrayal of courage and manhood at its height; tying these two together is the journey through the depths of the wilderness, into the underworld.
