Reading the Civil War and Civilities in Faulkner's Unvanquished

Authors

Peter Kuryla, Belmont UniversityFollow

Abstract

William Faulkner's novel The Unvanquished reduces the futility of the Southern cause in the Civil War to the comic image of two boys feverishly running back and forth carrying a leaky bucket from a water well. The scene in the novel moves beyond mere comic elegy for the Southern Lost Cause, becoming tragi-comic because the futility that Faulkner describes has to do with something much more stable and constant, namely the ways that the land, "that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography" being much older, resists the boys' efforts in miniature, but also scarcely listens to the reports of grownup men's artillery.

Keywords

Humanities Symposium

Recommended Citation

Kuryla, Peter (2012) "Reading the Civil War and Civilities in Faulkner's Unvanquished," Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal: Vol. 3, Article 6.
Available at: https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium_journal/vol3/iss1/6