Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition (Initial Situation)
Toy Soldiers
The novel starts out innocently enough, with Bayard and Ringo building maps of the battles that are raging around them. They don't think of war as all that scary or dangerous—they're just waiting for John (Bayard's dad) to come home and tell them stories about it.
The innocence of the boys juxtaposed with the serious butt-kicking the South was receiving at this point shows how young and naïve they are when the novel begins. It's setting the scene for a lot of growing up to come.
Rising Action (Conflict, Complication)
Mule Thieves
After Union soldiers burn down their house and steal their slaves, mules, and silver, the Sartoris family, headed by Granny, falls into a mule-stealing scheme (the Civil War-era version of a pyramid scheme) that not only gives them some extra spending money, but also makes fools of the Yankees.
Society is breaking down; Granny, a respectable Southern woman, has bent her morals to deal with the necessities of war.
Climax (Crisis, Turning Point)
Big, Bad Wolf
Granny, like in every so-bad-it's-good heist movie, comes out of mule-stealing retirement for one last job, and it turns out to be deadly. The loss of Granny is also a turning point for Bayard, who must grow up immediately to face this loss of innocence. He's a man now. A man bent on revenge.
Falling Action
The Odd Couple
The war is over and the family is trying to reconfigure and rebuild after all of the destruction. Basically, John and Drusilla get married and simultaneously take over town politics. Guess which of those they actually wanted to do?
It would seem that with the end of the war, things would fall into a routine, which they do in a way. The problem is what that routine involves, which is what we see in the resolution.
Resolution (Denouement)
Breaking the Cycle
You ready for it? John gets murdered while Bayard is away at law school, but instead of killing the murderer for revenge (as is customary), Bayard just faces him unarmed and miraculously survives. This unravels the revenge plot, which has been repeated throughout the novel. Bayard seems to be a new kind of Southern gentlemen, one who's tired of all the murder-shmurder and is ready to start a new way of life.