The Unvanquished Themes

In the novel The Unvanquished, the narrator, Bayard Sartoris, unleashes some serious admiration for his Confederate officer father, John. With the passage of time, however, that admiration starts t...

North and South, Blue and Gray, Union and Confederacy: the Civil War is what The Unvanquished is all about. It's from the perspective of the losers, which means it gets pretty violent, pretty quick...

The Sartoris plantation, the main locale of The Unvanquished, is sort of a microcosm of the slaveholding south. There are the owners, John Sartoris; his mother-in-law, aka Granny; and his son Bayar...

It takes courage to ride a bike without training wheels or go to summer camp in the next state over. That's not exactly what the kids in The Unvanquished have to summon up, however. Whether it's Ya...

The difference between how boys are supposed to act and how girls are supposed to act is still a pretty stark line; people who cross it might find society looking at them funny or even shunning the...

The Unvanquished is narrated from a point way past all the events it describes. We're digging into the narrator, Bayard's, memory and his version of history. The novel is filled with moments where...

It's common to associate duty with the military, and there's enough warfare flying across the pages of The Unvanquished to bring tons of soldierly duty to the front. But there's more to it than jus...

It won't get you into heaven, but sometimes being bad is necessary. Granny will tell you all about it. She's a prim and proper Southern belle, but she is reduced to mule-theft and all sorts of tric...