More than just a renowned Mississippi writer, William Faulkner is the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and a short story writer. One can also place him as the twentieth century’s greatest writers for the way he made readers think and view human emotions, rethink American culture and brought the small town living to the imagination of the urban reader.
In a little over a decade, he put out masterpieces like The Sound and the Fury, Go Down Moses, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and above all, Absalom, Absalom!
Faulkner in Paris, 1925 - Photo by W.C. Odiorne
Skirmish at Sartoris
The story is from Faulkner’s collection called Unvanquished.
The Unvanquished is a 1938 novel, consisting of seven short stories which were originally published separately in The Saturday Evening Post by Faulkner. It is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. It tells the story of the Sartoris family, and is set during the American Civil War.
This story is about the rapid social changes that took place in the South immediately following the American Civil War. The narrator of the story, Bayard is less of a protagonist and more of an observer. The story deals with two conflicts.
The first is the political skirmish involving the Missouri carpetbaggers' attempts to insure that the blacks of Jefferson exercise their right to vote for Marshal. The more important skirmish, however, involves Aunt Louisa's attempts to get John Sartoris and Drusilla Hawk married.
Faulkner treats the carpetbagger theme a little more seriously, which becomes the main plot of the story. And he treats the marriage theme in a much lighter and humorous manner.
In fact, the subject of the right to vote is treated with a view to make the reader aware of the situation at the time in the country. The right for some people to vote and the denial of that right for other people is a perversion of justice, and it is this theme which more seriously undermines and destroys the primary concepts of society, upon which the first theme elaborates. In other words, if in the process of restricting voting rights we destroy the basic foundation (the family) of society, there would be no need to vote for anything.
Adapted from Faulkner archive
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