The Unvanquished (Vintage International (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest masterpieces of all time
Review: "The Unvanquished," a novel by Nobel prize winning author William Faulkner, is a masterpiece unmatched by only a few select works in the history of man. Although the setting takes place in a small American Southern town as the Civil War settled down, the novel is universal, centrally discussing the great challenge to all of man: "the Awful responsibility of time." Time catches up with the present, and then it overtakes it. How can we capture time? "The Unvanquished" asks this and many other questions. It deserves to be read. It should be read. It is the duty of any person who believes literature is important to humanity to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: The best introduction to Faulkner!
Review: Faulkner is one of my personal favorite authors. I had to read him in Eng 101 in college, and to my astonishment, I loved his work. Comparing two or more Faulkner novels is a futile effort; his voice travels on such ingenious octaves as one such as myself may never fully comprehend. This book is a great read, as well as a statement about the effects of the Civil War on the inhabitants of the South. I shall never forget the chapter entitled "an odor of verbena." It's been almost five years since I read this book, and I can still stand with the protagonist on that balcony and feel the electricity that charges the verbena soaked air. Faulkner just does that to ya :)

Rating:
Summary: The best introduction to Faulkner!
Review: Faulkner is one of my personal favorite authors. I had to read him in Eng 101 in college, and to my astonishment, I loved his work. Comparing two or more Faulkner novels is a futile effort; his voice travels on such ingenious octaves as one such as myself may never fully comprehend. This book is a great read, as well as a statement about the effects of the Civil War on the inhabitants of the South. I shall never forget the chapter entitled "an odor of verbena." It's been almost five years since I read this book, and I can still stand with the protagonist on that balcony and feel the electricity that charges the verbena soaked air. Faulkner just does that to ya :)

Rating:
Summary: Triumph of Humanity
Review: I say Triumph of Humanity in the heaviest sense and also in a bit of a double meaning. An earlier reviewer reffered to the South's decay of values as he/she perceived as being depicted in the book. I must say, however, that the reviewer has a major misconception of the book. It is, in fact, a book that takes the reader through the tired/romantic ideals of honor and revenge in the during/post Civil War era, but it doesn't stop there. The reader sees a masterfully crafted turnaround and one may even remark that he has seen the light at the end of the tunnel or may experience some kind of apocolyptic experience. When one hears "triumph of humanity" he is turned away. The phrase seems too cliche simply because of the poor standards of writing that are generally behind works labeled as such. This is where Faulkner's expertise comes in, making The Unvanquished a "triumph of humankind" for it to have been written by a fellow inhabitant of earth. You really have no excuse not to read this book if you've never heard of William Faulkner. Be sure to check out Absalom! Absalom! and then--if you're adventurous enough--endure Sound and the Fury. It is your civic duty as a member of the human race to read The Unvanquished.

Rating:
Summary: underrated masterpiece
Review: professional literary scholars underrate this novel which is actually a collection of stories but because each story occura at a later time than the one previous it comes across s a novel. This is one of Faulkner's esier to read books and is a great introduction. I also love THE SOUND AND THE FURY, AS I LAY DYING,LIGHT IN AUGUST and ABSALOM ABSALOMbut I think THE UNVANQUISHED joins those novels as five star Faulkner classics.

Rating:
Summary: A Significant Contribution to American Literature
Review: The Unvanquished, the realistic account of the tight-knit Sartoris family's struggle to survive during the Reconstruction era in Jefferson County, MS, really made an impression on me. Their plantation burned down, and Colonel John Sartoris, the paterfamilias, absent, traveling across the nation to fight for the Confederacy in battles like Vicksburg and Antitetum, Bayard Sartoris, John's son, narrates the novel from home base in beautiful and straightforward prose which is able to convey the complexities of life and its inherent victories and routs. Bayard, externally reticent but internally quite perceptive, is a great choice to narrate the novel, as he describes the day-to-day hardships and tribulations of life at the Sartoris plantation, its idyllic antebellum existence and then ensuing Reconstruction inferno. And what I truly admired was the comic relief throughout the novel, providing breathers from the very tense action-filled dramatic passages. And no one will ever forget the matriarch Grandma Rosa or her will and sacrifice to save her family under such horrible circumstances.

The Sartoris extended family, mainly the African American slaves, play a substantial part in the novel: Ringo, Bayard's closest friend and confidante, is precocious, lovable, and rambunctious, whom I found to be one of the more endearing characters in modern American literature. Looch, who abandons the Sartoris plantation after the War to "cross the River Jordan," is ambiguous and self-spoken, for Faulkner's purposes representing the African Americans' longing for freedom and a better life. Louvinia and Joby are fully imagined characters in their own right.

A significant contribution to American literature, purely as historical account it has tremendous value, although I expect some scholars have objected to Faulkner's portrait of African-Americans as "better off" in the Antebellum south. I am pretty sure you can find some articles written by literary historians on the validity of Faulkner's historical interpretations contained in the Unvanquished, whether they are more fact or fiction. But regardless, The Unvanquished is an excellent read for those who want to learn a little about the civil war but don't have time to read all those massive monographs in bookstores.

The Unvanquished is an excellent introduction to Faulkner, his other works like The Sound and the Fury or The Hamlet a little tough to read for Faulkner first-timers. To be honest, before I read the Unvanquished I was like, "Why in god's name is Faulkner's literary canon so highly regarded? Even to the extent of condemning the adulation as simply hype. But now, an eager convert, I have been enlightened as to why Oxford's favorite son is mentioned in the same breath as Papa and Fitzgerald.

Faulkner's perennial, provincial and deeply personal mythology is essential to not only the effectiveness of the Unvanquished but also to Faulkner's entire literary canon. The nefarious Snopes, who are taken up in The Hamlet (the basis for the classic film The Long Hot Summer); the eccentric and endearing Compsons, whose kinfolk (Benjy, Quentin, and Caddy among them) will be immortalized in The Sound and the Fury; and the enigmatic Sutpens whose prior generation are profiled in Absalom, Absalom, (a novel which I am very much anticipating to read) all make appearances on Faulkner's fabulous stage in The Unvanquished. The Compson family member whom Faulkner seems interested in most (all the others make in essence "cameos") is Cousin Drusilla Compson, a tomboy who dons the gray and becomes a soldier in Colonel John Sartoris' cavalry. Uncle Buck McCaslin-he, Bayard, and Ringo will eventually form a posse to find those responsible for the novel's heinous and unforgettable crime-is also a very interesting character.

The editor of the corrected text, Noel Polk, a professor of American Literature at the University of Southern Mississippi, who most recently edited a new edition of All the King's Men, deserves ample credit. Having abandoned All the King's Men initially, I am very excited about using his new edition as a new start. Polk does such good work, taking on the very arduous task of cleaning and touching up Faulkner's text and supplying very helpful notes at the end of the book as well.

Rating:
Summary: Accessible first-time Faulkner
Review: This book is actually a chain of short-stories that Faulkner wrote during the mid-thirties and then collected them in novel form. For the beginning reader who wants to read Faulkner but is daunted by The Sound and the Fury or Absolam, Absolam!, The Unvanquished gives the skeletons of Faulkner's work-- the racial interplay, the fading glory of the South, familial conflicts and the politics of Reconstruction-- without the sometime burdens of his meatier prose. It's not a lightweight book, though. It is powerful and often neglected. I wrote my senior undergraduate thesis on this novel, and close reading just proved that even Faulkner's lesser works are better than a lot of other writers' masterpieces.

Rating:
Summary: The Gateway to Faulkner
Review: This book, in my opinion, is the best introduction to Faulkner possible where the reader has a chance to become accustomed to the sentence structure (to some extent: the longest sentence in The Unvanquished doesn't seem to run for even a page, making this quite simplistic by Faulknerian standards) without having to worry about an overly confused plot. Although there are parts where the reader will have to back up and read a passage over, it is far more straightforward than others of Faulkner's works.

This story chronicles the growth of Bayard Sartoris from the child who thinks war is a game (even though it isn't all that far from him) and can't imagine the consequences when he plays his games a little too close to the Yankees (Ambuscade) into a man who, when faced with the tragedy of his father's demise, must make this decision: who lives by the sword shall die by it--is it time to change the Southern tradition of bloodshed?

It is also the story of the South as it undergoes its most severe upheaval in its history: the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the effect on its people.

In my opinion, the best way to get acquainted with Faulkner is to begin with The Unvanquished. Once you're done with that, I suggest Intruder in the Dust. Be warned, though, that the latter isn't nearly as simple as The Unvanquished and there is a sentence that (if I recall correctly) runs for five or six pages (or more, but I'm not entirely sure). The good thing, at least, is that you can get used to the confusing syntax while the plot is still reasonably clear: what is clearer than a murder mystery and story of racial injustice (which, as the reader will gather from The Unvanquished, is one of the themes with which Faulkner is concerned in almost all his works)? Once you are used to seeing things from a somewhat blurred perspective (and to dealing with that syntax and stream-of-consciousness technique), I suggest moving on to Go Down, Moses (but you REALLY need to look at a McCaslin genealogy first, and to do this you should go to William Faulkner On the Web), and the stories in this book range from fairly simple to truly confusing (The Bear: it is in this story where you will be very glad you read Intruder In the Dust first!). And finally, you're ready for The Sound and the Fury (all of this, of course, is my own opinion about Faulkner; the reader may tackle these books in any order which he or she chooses: BUT DEFINITELY START WITH THE UNVANQUISHED!)

Rating:
Summary: The Civil War and Reconstruction Faulkner Style
Review: _The Unvanquished_ is William Faulkner's majestic and stirring account of the Civil War (called the War Between the States in the confederacy) and the post-reconstruction periods told from the perspective of civilians on the Southern home front. It is a series of seven tales, held masterfully together with the help of a number of picaresque characters who appear, or whose decendants appear, in a number of other Faulkner novels. Those who criticize Faulkner as unreadable have often referred to the tendency of his sentences run on and on for several pages. Here, Faulkner modifies this style considerably, while maintaining an almost breathless style that is always holding and exciting.

_The Unvanquished_ is told from the point of view of its young narrator, Bayard Sartoris, the son of Colonel John Sartoris, the head of an aristocratic, slave-holding Jackson, Mississippi family. This novel, putting aside any unnecessary moralizing, is first and foremost the story of survival and maintainence of a way of life by any means available. If this requires otherwise good people to resort to lying, forgery, stealing, preventing newly enfranchised blacks from voting, and even committing murder for the sake of revenge, then so be it. Granny, the Sartoris family's matriarch, always has her bar of soap ready to wash out the mouths of Bayard and his slave friend, Ringo, should they ever dare use a cuss word. A good, Christian woman, Granny, with Bayard and Ringo in tow, never fails to kneel down to pray to God to beg His forgiveness for their sins.

One of the things I liked best about _The Unvanquished_ is Faulkner's treatment of women. Southern women have often been presented as dainty, delicate creatures who exist solely to marry and to be protected by their men. Faulkner turns this idea on its head by giving the story a feminist twist. To the horror of some in the novel, he allows a female member of the Sartoris family, Drusilla, to don a confederate uniform and to pretend to be a man so that she can join her uncle's regiment to fight the Yankees. She does this to seek vengence after her fiance is killed in the war. It is even suggested by one of the characters, perhaps revolutionary for a book written in the late 1930's, that this young woman may possibly have been a lesbian.

In sum, _The Unvanquished_ is very highly recommended to those who admire Civil War literature, to lovers of novels about the South, and even to those who may have previously shyed away from reading Faulkner fearing an inability to get through his so-called tangled style of writing.