A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "The Unvanquished"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "The Unvanquished," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840279

Book preview

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The Unvanquished

William Faulkner

1938

Introduction

The Unvanquished is an early novel by William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize winner and one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, arguably the most important writer from the American South. It tells the story of the Sartoris family during the American Civil War and the following period of Reconstruction. It realistically depicts the violence and racism of that era. Unlike many of Faulkner's better-known works, The Unvanquished does not have an experimental narrative style and is comparable, for instance, to a work like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Similar in style and theme, The Unvanquished uses gothic and romantic tropes of honor and violence in order to subvert the American culture of the time.

The first six chapters of The Unvanquished were originally published as short stories in the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's magazine between 1934 and 1936. They were collected in a revised form together with the newly written last chapter and published as a novel in 1938. The Unvanquished is one of Faulkner's books set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County that form a larger structure linked by common characters. In particular, Bayard Sartoris, the narrator of The Unvanquished, who is twelve years old at the beginning of the novel, also appears in Faulkner's 1929 novel Sartoris (republished in the form Faulkner intended in 1973 as Flags in the Dust), which tells the story of Bayard's old age and death.

In a letter to the editor of Life magazine, Faulkner described his background this way:

My family has lived for generations in one same small section of north Mississippi. My great-grandfather held slaves and went to Virginia in command of a Mississippi infantry regiment in 1861. This could as well be a description of the fictional Sartoris family as of Faulkner's own. Similarly, Bayard Sartoris's birthday falls in September and may well have coincided with Faulkner's own. Faulkner's writing was firmly fixed in his southern identity and in his family identity. Nowhere is this more true than in The Unvanquished, which seems to set the tone for the idealized vision for southern culture he later had occasion to outline in a number of articles and letters to the editor he would publish during the birth of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Author Biography

Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and before he was five, his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived the rest of his life. His mother and grandmother were artistic and fostered his aesthetic development. During World War I, Faulkner was found to be too short for service in the American armed forces but joined the British Royal Flying Corps. He did not see any combat.

After the war and after attending the University of Mississippi in Oxford for three semesters, Faulkner worked as a journalist in New Orleans and focused his creative activity on poetry that is today overshadowed by his fiction. Faulkner came under the tutelage of