Non-Chronological Narration Technique Used in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished :: Unvanquished Essays

Non-Chronological Narration Technique Used in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished The novel The Unvanquished is a about a young boy’s coming of age story, as seen through the eyes of the grown man that he is to become. The great advantage of this form of narration is the ability it grants Faulkner to be able to reach forward and backward through time unrestrained in order to pull the type of significance and lesson from this boy’s story that can only be seen upon reflection. Despite surely being a technique borrowed from the author James Joyce, William Faulkner was arguably the first to realize what this disregard for chronology could offer to a story of values of masculinity. By looking back on what it means to be a man, as opposed to forward, William keeps the lessons of manhood clear and concise, as opposed to the vague and confused path a boy must in actuality take. From the very first lines we see the stark contrast between protagonist and narrator, and the important role it plays. The story opens with the two youthful friends, Ringo and Bayard, fantasizing about the battle in Vicksburg they believed their hero and Bayard’s father, Colonel Sartoris, was fighting. As they stage their own imitation though, the narrator’s tone is completely opposite of the idolatry of the children. He says of their mock Vicksburg landscape, that it was â€Å"possessing even in miniature that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment.† In this way the narrator has completely laid bare the naivety of the children in getting caught up in the passions of their limited and ultimately insignificant struggles, and even more importantly, the ignorance of the man whom they attempt to emulate. While the story is one of confederate pride, embodied in spirit by the character of Bayard’s father, the narrator is the voice of tempered reflection. He describes the futility of the south’s plight through the metaphor of the children playing. He says of their miniature battle of Vicksburg, â€Å"[It was] the very setting of the stage for conflict a prolonged and wellnigh hopeless ordeal in which we ran, panting and interminable, with the leaking bucket between wellhouse and battlefield,†¦ to join forces†¦against†¦time, before we could engender between us and hold intact the pattern of recapitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a shield between ourselves and reality, between us and fact and doom.