The Unvanquished Memory and the Past Quotes

Does your family have any strange traditions, where no one knows how they got started? That's a little bit like the silver-polishing Tuesdays at the Sartoris household. Even if the silver doesn't need to be polished, Granny, Louvinia, and Philadelphy do so just to keep the tradition. It gives the family a sense of history.

Ringo, as a slave boy, doesn't get the same privileges that Bayard does. That's why he isn't sure whether or not he's tasted coconut cake; Bayard can remember the taste perfectly because he's had more chances to try it. Ringo would prefer to have tasted and forgotten it than to have never tasted it at all, which means that even forgotten memories are more precious than never having had the experience in the first place.

Have you ever moved away from your home? Did you take any souvenirs with you, or leave anything behind? Ringo and Bayard both feel strong connections to the land, and when they have to leave their home, they want to take some dirt along with them. And it isn't just dirt; it's filled with all the memories and spirit of the place because of what they associate it with.

Ringo is drawing a picture of the plantation before it was burned down, and the Union officer thinks it's funny at first. Art, like Ringo's drawing or even Faulkner's novel, is an important way to get in touch with memories and the past, even after they've been destroyed.

Sometimes traumatic events are so terrible that we can't remember everything about them, just sort of snapshots of the moment. That's what happens when Grumby shoots at Bayard. He knows there must have been a sound and a feeling, but all he remembers is the visual part of the memory.

Different cultures have different methods of creating memorials or using objects to help them remember important events. Burying a loved one and marking the grave is an important part of saying goodbye while holding onto memories, so the board on Granny's grave is the perfect place to nail Grumby's hand. If you have to nail a hand anywhere, better do it in a place that shows vengeance has been served, we always say.

Talk about amnesia. All of Bayard's conscious life has been spent hating the Yankees, wanting to beat the Union in a war, and hoping to drive the northerners out of the South. Now that the war is over, everyone is supposed to forget those aims and start hoping that the Yankees will come in and rebuild. We can see by the novel, though, that forgetting isn't so easy.

We kind of like Bayard's admission as a narrator here. A lot of novels let their readers know that something terrible is going to happen by letting a character have a presentiment, a feeling about the future, but here he admits freely that that didn't happen. The funny thing is that admitting he didn't have a presentiment lets the reader know that something is about to happen, namely John's death.

There was no way for Bayard to know about or be prepared for his father's death, but the fact that he's telling the story long after the fact makes it so the memory gets all bunched up, as though he could have somehow been prepared for what hadn't happened yet. He uses his careful movements and memories as proof that he was prepared.

When you make the same trip over and over, like to visit your grandmother every Christmas or go to school every day, time can start to collapse onto itself. It's like the repetition jumbles everything up, and while you're taking the familiar road you don't realize that someday you'll look back on that route like a big, old chunk of time.