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

Narrators Use of Language and Memory in Faulkners The UnvanquishedIn the Unvanquished, a version of southern masculinity is developed through the narrator using dialect and the device, or should I judge vice of memory. Fairly early in the novel, the reflective standpoint of the narrator becomes obvious, and a certain sense of retelling the story, not just telling it as it happened, prevails. This affair of memory is not necessarily selective but it does show the processing of perceptions of the narrators childhood. As readers, we first get the sense that we are perceive the story from a much older Bayard when he drops comments identical I was just twelve then I didnt know triumph 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 grandiosity that adolescence creates, leading to such thoughts as I was just a kid then. However, the second part of the statement reveals a much older an d wiser voice, the voice of person 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 repeated twice on the same page. He was short enough to have his sabre scrape the steps while ascending (10), yet he appeared large and in command, especially when on his horse (13). The shape and size of a man being an important part in defining masculinity, I think Baynard grappled with his fathers natural presence as well as his tenuous position as a leader in the Confederate Army. Other telling moments are on page 66 when Baynard postulates what a child can accept as true 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 other wars.) Upon realizing the distance betwee n the setting of the story and age of its narrator, the reader is forced to upset 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 intention of dialect in the story.