Real Things Don't Look Realistic - Faulkner The Undefeated

When he was a child, Faulkner often listened to his grandfather tell stories about the Civil War on the front porch of his old mansion, and "The Undefeated" was mainly based on these stories.

There are various types of undefeated people in The Undefeated: the men of the South are defeated, while the women and children are still brave enough to resist the enemy. In the Civil War, although the brave grandmother lost the war of human nature, his brave spirit of helping others and sacrificing spirit is still a model for the undefeated.

It is a pity that this work has not been taken seriously. It is truly Faulkner's most understandable, readable and highest work. Brown rivers, cluttered manors, black slaves, a war between not tense but brutal horsemen! This is the unique world of The Undefeated, which is related to the United States and its history, and is also a native thing.

What is more special about The Undefeated is that, in general, novelists do not introduce reality, but only make memories. They write real or near-real events, but these things have been reviewed and rearranged in their memories (a process that of course has nothing to do with the verb tenses they use).

Instead, Faulkner sometimes wants to recreate the pure present tense, which is pure and unprocessed. The "pure present tense" is only an ideal of the mind, so the content of Faulkner's work is more vague but richer than the original events.

Faulkner has vigorously played with the concept of time in his previous works, deliberately reversing the chronological order, adding confusing things and wrong things. In this way, everyone thinks that his advantage lies in this.

The Undefeated directly and irresistibly disrupts this perception. Faulkner does not intend to explain his characters, but to show us what they think and what they do. The subject matter is extraordinary, and his narrative is so vivid that we cannot understand them in other ways.

Bovaro said, "Real things don't look realistic." In order to make the unreality seem real, Faulkner used it a lot, and achieved its goal. To be more precise, the imaginary world is so realistic that it includes things that are not real.

There are always books that can physically touch us, like approaching the sea or approaching an early morning. For me, this book is one of them.