North and South, Blue and Gray, Union and Confederacy: the Civil War is what The Unvanquished is all about. It's from the perspective of the losers, which means it gets pretty violent, pretty quickly. We're talking burning down houses, killing little old ladies: the horrors of war are alive and well in this novel.
The violence doesn't just end lives; it also changes the ways of life. Granny, for example, alters her whole moral system to survive. Not to mention the whole freeing-the-slaves thing, which took a lot of the plantation owners off of their high horses (and literal horses) and gave them a taste of life in a dirt-floor cabin.
Questions About Warfare
- How does Faulkner's use of a real war, with real-life heroes, villains, and battles, affect the reading experience of The Unvanquished?
- Is there a real difference that you can find between the Northern and Southern soldiers? Who does Bayard seem to sympathize with more, and how do you know?
- Why do you think that Faulkner chose to focus his writing on the South during the Civil War, instead of during the Great Depression?
- How does the experience of war violence as a child affect the man that Bayard becomes?
Chew on This
There is no real difference between the Union and Confederate soldiers as individuals; Faulkner reveals the basic humanity that they all have in common.
Even though Bayard is a Southerner, he seems to have a secret appreciation for the Northern officers during the war.