"The Unvanquished" by William Faulkner, A Wonderful Novel of The Civil War And Reconstruction!

"The Unvanquished" by William Faulkner was originally published in 1934 and has been a staple of many college classes in Southern Literature, Civil War Literature, and general American Literature ever since. It is one of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County novels and features several key figures in the saga of his mythical county: John Sartoris, John Sartoris Jr., Ab Snopes, and others. The novel covers both the period of the Civil War and of early Reconstruction. The protagonist is John Sartoris, Jr. who is about 12 years old when the novel begins and a full grown adult at the end. His slave Ringo is also a major figure in the novel. The two are just a few months different in age and literally grew up together much like brothers, but clearly also a slave owner and a slave. Their relationship is a major key to everything in the novel. They are inseparable, literally bound at the hip. That relationship, as Faulkner portrays it, is both an indictment and an apologia for the entire slave holding culture of the south. The two work together to attempt to murder the first Union officer they ever see using a musket which resides on most occasions over the mantel in the main room of the Sartoris mansion. They are still together at the end of the novel as young Sartoris goes to confront his father's former business partner and killer. The novel is the basis of a strong argument about the much vaunted code of honor of southern gentlemen, and parts of it are said to have been a fictional portrayal of some events which took place in the life of an actual Faulkner ancestor. The individual chapters of the novel, seven in all, were originally published as short stories and the book is sometimes drawn into the perpetual argument among students of literature about just where a collection of short stories with common characters ends and a novel begins. In my opinion, it is a novel and that argument should have been ceased many years ago. For an example of a collection of such short stories with common characters fails to fulfill the requirements of a novel I suggest that you read "The Hawk's Done Gone" by Mildred Haun which is a fine book but not quite a novel. You could never find two better books to read in order to fully comprehend that argument, and to help put an end to it also. As the book progresses, John Sartoris, Jr. and Ringo progress from being two boys playing war in the dust near the slave quarters to become two young southern men, both black and white, who have survived both childhood and the Civil War to become very typical white slave holding and black slave men who are still, at least in their own eyes, brothers. John Sartoris, Sr. looms over the entire novel as a larger than life Colonel in the Confederate Army and as the head of the Sartoris family although he is not present on the plantation most of the time as the novel progresses. He is both a patriarch and a symbol of the failed Confederate effort. He is a role model for his son in the most traditional of senses, and is the axis on which much of the novel moves. His mother-in-law, Granny is a major character of the novel, maintains order at home while the elder Sartoris is off at war, and is dearly beloved by her grandson, the Sartoris slaves, and most of their neighbors. She concocts a plot to use a letter signed by the commanding Union officer in the area to confiscate over two hundred head of mules, disburse them to the poor, both black and white, in the area of the plantation, and is eventually caught in the scheme along with her grandson and Ringo. Ringo is both the brains of much of the operation and a loyal servant and man Friday to his young master and companion. Drusilla, a young female distant cousin of the elder Sartoris is a young woman who loses her fiancee to the Union forces and seeks to avenge his death by utilizing her talents with both guns and horses to assist the elder Sartoris and his troops in their doomed war. Her mother uses the old southern mores about what "good women" are supposed to do and be in order to force her to marry the elder Sartoris because she has spent many weeks riding, fighting, and hiding in the woods with him and his troops as a young single woman. This is a powerful novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction by a man who lived his life in the shadow of his own ancestors who had fought and lost in the effort. It addresses multiple issues which have arisen for several hundred years in the south: slavery, male and female relationships, rich versus poor whites, Union versus Confederate, young southerners living in the oversized shadows of their elders, and the dominant question since Lee surrendered, "just how do southerners go on living after the war?"

Mass Population Movements And William Faulkner

I am in the process of reading "The Unvanquised" by William Faulkner. As I sometimes do, I found a quotation in the middle of the book which I am compelled to write about today. This is that quotation below:

"...he nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there--one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarty of earth and home and start out, they don't know where, empty handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom."

"The Unvanquised" the book from which I drew that quotation is a fairly well known book by William Faulkner which was published in 1934, minety-one years ago, long before anyone on earth imagined that Russia and Ukraine would now be more than three years engaged in a war of aggression which was started, perpetrated, and perpetuated by Vladimir Putin and Russia, no one else. As a result of that war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have been forced to feel one of "those impules inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people". As a result, just as Faulkner in his book was describing the mass exodus of African American slaves from the defeated south after the Civil War had ended. But Ukraine is not now, and has never been defeated in the last three plus years of this war. Yes, many of their people have become refugess for a variety of reasons within the greater reason of having been faced with the possibility of death if they remained in Ukraine. They have picked up and left all security and familiarity they have ever known, started out empty handed and blind to everything except a hope of a safe future in some other peaceful country and the overwhelming and inexplicable doom they have known quite well ever since the day Putin declared his war of aggression and invaded their country. They have traveled to dozens of other countries around the globe, some simply to cross the borders of Ukraine into Poland or another much safer European nation. Others have traveled across the planet and hundreds of thousands of them have come to America over the years of war chasing that hope. From January 20, 2021, until January 20, 2025, those people who came to America had that hope while living in a country which was compassionate, welcoming, and rational in its approch to them and their forced exodus from home. Now, from January 20, 2025, their hope has been destroyed and, once again, all they can see is that doom which they fear so justifiably. America is now in the hands of the worst TRAITOR in the history of the world, TRAITOR Trump who is working daily to attempt to force Ukraine and its democratic government to surrender to their attacker and surrender much of their country, their land, and their hope to that attacker, that dictator Vladimir Putin and to his Russian Agent, the TRAITOR Trump.

I was stunned as I read that quotation above from William Faulkner and realized just how applicable it is to the treachery of TRAITOR Trump who has abandoned ever promise the United States made to the Ukrainian people and their democracy in order to support his Russian master. Just a few days ago in Alaska, the world watched as TRAITOR Trump kowtowed to Vladimir Putin and his design to destroy Ukraine and its democracy. We watched the world's worst dictator being welcomed to American soil by the world's worst TRAITOR and would be dictator, TRAITOR Trump. We watched as the two of them attempted to decide the fate of a sovereign nation and its people without a single representative of their interests in the room. We watched the attempted murder of the nation of Ukraine in order for TRAITOR Trump to appease and attempt to legitimize his Russian owner. Just yesterday, we watched the President of Ukraine being ignored by TRAITOR Trump as he disembarked from his plane at the airport in Washington, DC, after TRAITOR Trump had rolled out a red carpet for their would be destroyer and dictator in Alaska. But Ukraine does have allies across Europe in several countries, the European Union, and NATO. But can Ukraine and their supporters actually win this conference room war against them? We don't know. But what we do know that they cannot win it if the American people also surrender to Putin and TRAITOR Trump. We must not do that. We must support Ukraine and their fledgling democracy. We must be the nation our Founding Fathers intended us to be.

Short Story or Vignette???

Since the time I entered Upward Bound at Alice Lloyd College when I was about 14, I have known and been friends with a fairly large number of published authors.  During my first summer in that program, I met and became friendly with Albert Stewart and William Howard Cohen both of whom were major American poets.  Albert Stewart was also the founder of Appalachian Heritage Magazine and a mentor to numerous young writers throughout his career.  William Howard Cohen was an internationally recognized expert on Haiku and served as the American Cultural Delegate in the area of poetry at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Cohen was also an outspoken and highly effective environmental advocate who fought bravely and well against strip mining in Appalachia. He also mentored numerous young writers in both Eastern Kentucky and Florida where he lived the last years of his life.  I have always been extremely proud to have known and been friendly with both men.  During that first Upward Bound summer, the program directors also brought Harry Caudill to speak at one of our assemblies.  His strongly negative book about Appalachia, "Night Comes To The Cumberlands", was still in the height of its popularity and he was considered by many to be an expert on Appalachia.  I can say that I met Caudill and I can also say that I am proud that, as a native Appalachian, I was not pleased with him and still am not.  I have said all the preceding, a rather long winded introduction, in order to say this once again, I have known and been friends with a fairly large number of published authors, learned a great deal from them both about life and writing.  And that brings me to the title of this article, Short Story or Vignette???

Which is it, a short story or a vignette is a question which is frequently asked by readers and writers about short works of fiction.  It is also a question which should be asked even more frequently, especially by the numerous people who mistakenly believe they are writing short stories.  As a result of having known the writers I have known, I have come to regularly either buy or be given books by many people some of whom are genuine writers and some of whom only wish to be but have managed to make it into print anyway.  I have in my possession at this time several books written and published by people I know and labeled as short story collections.  A sizable portion of those "short story collections", most of them self-published through vanity presses, do not contain a single actual short story and are, instead, collections of vignettes some of which could have been turned into short stories by a skillful writer, and others which Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, or William Faulkner could not have stretched enough to make them an actual short story.  That brings us to the key question I hope to address in this article.  What is the difference between a short story and a vignette?

A commonly used definition of the term "short story" runs something like this:  the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no shorter than 1,000 and no longer than 20,000 words. An actual short story should contain these five essential elements, characters, plot, setting, conflict, and theme. An equally common definition of the term "vignette" runs something like this: a brief, evocative account, description, or episode.  A less common definition of the term "vignette" runs something like this: a vignette is a cute little story which, on a good day, might include one or two of those key elements of a short story but never by any stretch of the imagination will a vignette contal all five.  By that I mean that a vignette is something a first grader might tell her mother when she returns home from school. Two or three old men sitting in the local country store, gas station, or barber shop swap vignettes.  Old, blue haired widows do the same in beauty shops, meat markets, and boutiques.  While I almost never say anything this personal or negative to any of my friends and acquaintances who have produced collections of vignettes which they insist on forcing to masquerade as short stories, I really do not like buying, borrowing, or being given such collections of vignettes which a vanity press has managed to make a buck on while perpetuating the misbegotten dreams of the people who cranked them out on a PC or antique Underwood in the lonely silence of their home.  

It is also interesting that, for a skillful writer, it is not necessary to produce a work the size of "War And Peace" in order to tell a good story with all five of those key elements, characters, plot, theme, setting, and conflict. While I despise what is now known and inordinately popular as "flash fiction", I also recognize that it is possible to tell a great story with a bare minimum number of well chosen, well organized words.  The best example of this I can think of is the classic Kate Chopin short story, "The Story Of An Hour".  This incredible little masterpiece of roughly a thousand words contains every one of those five key elements and perfection to boot.  With an opening sentence of less than thirty words, we meet the central character, Mrs. Mallard, learn that she has a heart condition, that she is/was married, that her husband is dead, and that someone cares enough about her to "break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death."  Then the story goes on in the remaining 950 or so words to work in a couple of absolutely masterful twists in which she weeps loudly and publicly in the company of her family and friends, retreats to her bedroom where she realizes with great joy that she is "Free!  Body and soul...free!" and then, as a combination of that great joy and her aforementioned heart condition, she dies without her family and friends ever knowing how happy she was to anticipate that freedom.  That my friends is a short story.  And I haven't even mentioned that in those thousand words, Kate Chopin threw in a train wreck.  

I am not completely opposed to vignettes and often use them myself, sometimes in the middle of what I believe are short stories I produce, sometimes in country stores, gas stations, and barber shops with my illiterate friends, and even at rare times in beauty shops.  As an addendum to this little article I will also insert a short list of some of my other favorite short stories and suggest that you read them sometime if you haven't already.

Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Parker's Back by Flannery O'Connor

Ugly by Guy de Maupassant

A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner

Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway
A View Of The Woods by Flannery O'Connor