The Unvanquished Pride And Prejudice Analysis

Acceptance and beliefs are the underlying foundations of life in The Unvanquished, a novel by William Faulkner. Beliefs are structured by ideas backed with empirical evidence. Belief is divided between the ideologies of the Old and New South. The Old South believes in power and revenge while the New South believes in justice and equality. Whether being in the New or Old South, southerners are willing to murder and die for their beliefs. Acceptance throughout the novel aims at finding the “truth” during the time of a major transition in both Bayard and Drusilla’s life. Bayard and Drusilla activating accepting and fully understand that the society is changing while most of the South isn’t accepting the New South, stuck in the Old South. Bayard

As a child, Bayard believed his father was a brave, courageous, honest man. Later in his life, Bayard looks back at his idea of acceptance and belief during his childhood; “There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything given time, but to what it can accept a limit on time, at the very time which nourishes the believing of incredible” (66). Bayard understood and believed that murder was wrong, he believed that stealing wrong, but he was unwilling to accept that his own father could have done such unhonorable acts. Instead, he twists his own experience and only accepts slivers of data in order to protect the image of his father. The “ limit to what a child can accept” impacts the evidence Bayard acquired by observations and stories of his father. The “limit” causes his beliefs of his father to be skewed. Bayard as a child believed his father was a brave, courageous, honest man. Bayard interprets the data into his belief of his father being a hero since, “ a child can believe anything given time”. Unlike the act of acceptance, believing was easy. Him believing that his dad was an honest, honorable man was much simpler to accept than the alternative. This unchallenging belief in the Old South creates a veil over all of Bayard’s experiences. The veil shades Bayard from truly interpreting the data or accepting the truth about the father and his obvious crimes.
The veil is lifted when Bayard can accept the truth about his father and abandoned the Old South beliefs. John Sartoris was killed as a result of his shady business deals and murders. When Bayard returns home from university to see his dead father, the veil of southern beliefs is lifted and he can finally accept his father for who we was. In lieu of grief and sadness because of the death of