Narrator’s Use of Language and Memory in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished :: Faulkner’s The Unvanquished Essays

Narrators Use of lecture and Memory in Faulkners The UnvanquishedIn the Unvanquished, a fluctuation of southern masculinity is developed through the narrator using expression and the device, or should I say vice of memory. Fairly early in the novel, the reflective standpoint of the narrator becomes obvious, and a certain sense of retelling the story, non just telling it as it happened, prevails. This use of memory is not ineluctably selective but it does show the processing of perceptions of the narrators childhood. As readers, we first get the sense that we are hearing the story from a much older Bayard when he drops comments like I was just cardinal then I didnt know run I didnt even know the word (Unvanquished 5). If he was just twelve then, he could be just fifteen or sixteen when retelling this story, assuming the hot air that adolescence creates, leading to such thoughts as I was just a chaff then. However, the second pull up stakes of the statement reveals a much old er and wiser example, the voice of someone who has had time to think out such abstractions as triumph and failure. Furthermore, the almost obsessive description of the father in the first part of the novel seems like the narrator comes to terms, much later in life, with how he viewed his father as a man. He was not big (9) is iterate twice on the same pageboy. He was short enough to hold his sabre scrape the steps while ascending (10), yet he appeared large and in command, especially when on his horse (13). The shape and surface of a man being an important part in shaping masculinity, I think Baynard grappled with his fathers physical presence as substantially as his tenuous position as a attractor in the Confederate Army. Other telling moments are on page 66 when Baynard postulates what a child can accept as straightforward in such incredible situations and on page 95 with his declarations on the universality of war. (Possibly he is an old man now and has lived to see othe rwise wars.) Upon realizing the distance between the setting of the story and age of its narrator, the reader is agonistic to consider how memory and life itself have affected the storytelling.Another way to contemplate the development of masculinity, one that calls upon the southern gentleman to be well educated and verbose, is the use of dialect in the story.