『정복되지 않는 자들』

The Unvanquished: the Civil War of Their Own

William Faulkner's The Unvanquished, published in 1938, deals with the unfinished Civil War past, centering around the growth of Bayard Sartoris’ individuality and manhood, his Southern identity. Although the actual scenes of the War itself are rarely present in the text, the War is present not just in the memories of the War of their own in which characters fight his or her own ‘small’ battle at their homefront, but also in the forms of a product of mythic or private imagination and of gender battles over the War's ‘lost cause.’ Looking into the Civil War, the unfinished past, Faulkner dramatizes historical/realistic distance as well as cultural discrepancy between the War itself and the representation of the War as an imaginative product. Although the ‘mythic’ and violent past of Civil War, represented by Colonel Sartoris, Drusilla Hawk, or Granny Millard, has persistently impinged upon the modern South, it is Bayard’s moral introspection and newly developed historical consciousness that give the future and hope for the new era of the South. Bayard, critical of the values of the old South both romantic and violent, needs to redefine his Southern identity for the new modern South, resolving the problematic relation between the past and the present. The key for Bayard's challenge for the change touches the very core spirit of American identity, his practical mind, flexible moral judgment, and indomitable courage.