Sentence Outline. Note that every part of the outline (in red) is a direct quote from the paper! In black are teachers' comments about the virtues of the outline. 

Thesis. Bayard Sartoris journeys through Plato's cave and finds truth and goodness at the end of the novel.

Topic Sentences from supporting paragraphs. When you read each paragraph, you'll see that the body of each paragraph clearly relates to or supports the topic sentence, rather like the topic sentences all together relate to and support the thesis! 

1. In the beginning of the novel, Bayard was as ignorant as the caveman.

2. Faulkner continues to use figurative language to convey an imprisoned atmosphere similar to Plato's dark cave.

3. In Chapter 2 of The Unvanquished, Bayard is turned away from his home of ignorance to face the light of truth on his journey to Memphis.

4. Granny's dealing and stealing of mules guides Bayard out of the cave.

5. With this new realization of war, Bayard sees only the shadows of the reality at first.

6. At the end of the novel, Bayard's eyes are adjusted to the truth and what is good.

Overall. The topic sentences obviously move right through the main stages of the cave analogy. The quotations from each source - Plato, Faulkner, academic essays - are carefully selected, introduced with signal phrases, and usually there is a following comment on the significance of the quote. The Faulkner/Cave comparisons are impressive in depth and detail, clearly showing very careful reading of the novel. 

This paper won the English Department competition for the best EKU freshman essay of 1999.

Bayard Sartoris: Caveman Extraordinaire

       Bayard Sartoris in William Faulkner's The Unvanquished is enlightened from an ignorant boy unconcerned with the horrors of war to an intelligent young man who realizes murder is wrong no matter what the circumstances. His transformation is similar to the caveman's transformation in Plato's Republic. Bayard Sartoris journeys through Plato's cave and finds truth and goodness at the end of the novel.

       In the beginning of the novel, Bayard was as ignorant as the caveman. Bayard heard only the stories of war, "the cannon and the flags and the anonymous yelling."1 He didn't consider the reality: death, bloodshed, and disease. His father's stories of war were just reflections of the reality, shadows on the wall. Bayard paid no attention to the reasons behind the war. Bayard just imagined what it would be like to be General Pemberton or General Grant. Faulkner's diction in the first chapter is full of descriptive references to shadows and darkness 
similar to the description of the wall in Plato's cave. Plato described the cave and its prisoners in the following way:
 

Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself They've been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from taming their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets ... Then also imagine that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it -- statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood and every material... Then the prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.2

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       1William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York: Vintage, 1991), 15.

       2Plato, Republic, in Classics of Moral and Political Theory, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), l67-168.

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Bayard is asleep and dreaming throughout the first chapter. In one dream, he describes a cave-like experience:
 
I was dreaming, it was like I was looking at our place and suddenly the house and stable and cabins and trees and all were gone and I was looking at a place flat and empty as the sideboard and it was growing darker and darker and then all of a sudden I wasn't looking at it, I was there: a sort of frightened drove of little tiny figures moving on it, they were Father and Granny and Job and Louvinia and Loosh and Philadelphy and Ringo and me and we were wandering around on it lost and it getting darker and darker and we forever more without any home to go to because we were forever free;3

 Bayard sees the little figures and can't interpret what it means. He does not know, it's just his imagination working, or the dream. Peter Losin, a Program Officer and a National Endowment for the Humanities Lecturer, stated that "the cave is the region accessible to sight or perception.4 It doesn't take knowledge of war to imagine and dream of battles or pillaged landscapes.

       Faulkner continues to use figurative language to convey an imprisoned atmosphere similar to Plato's dark cave. Bayard stated that while dreaming about war and battles, he and Ringo "sat close together in the shadow, listening to Father."5 And after Ringo and Bayard shoot the Union horse at the end of the chapter, Bayard describes their hiding experience as "We couldn't see, we just squatted in a kind of faint gray light. 6

Faulkner clearly had Plato's rendition of the unlearned in mind when he wrote this chapter. It is clear, during this time, Bayard does not realize that Yankees are people. When seeing a Yankee for the first time Bayard thought, "He looks just like a man.7 He believed all the Yankees were bestial and inhuman; after all, they were the enemy. He doesn't realize yet that men can be good or evil regardless of their side in war.

       In Chapter 2 of The Unvanquished, Bayard is turned away from his home of ignorance to face the light of truth on his journey to Memphis. He does not become truly aware of the evils of war, but he sees the lesser light 

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       3. Faulkner, 24-25.

       4. Peter Losin, "Education and Plato's Parable of the Cave." Journal of Education 178 (1996): 51.

       5. Faulkner, 18.

       6. Faulkner, 28. 

       7. Faulkner, 25.

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symbolized by the fire in Plato's Republic. Plato described the caveman's experience to fire as follows: "The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun."8 The fire is used to observe things as they are in darkness, it's a step higher than imagining what things are really like by their shadows. When a caveman was turned to the fire, after the initial shock, he believed he knew what things were, although he hadn't seen them in natural light yet. Once again, Faulkner's diction seems similar to Plato's description of the fire. Bayard journeys to the fire after the Sartoris family mules are stolen. Bayard and Ringo go on an escapade trailing the Yankee thieves. After a while, the boys are tired and Bayard says:
 
we probably both crawled beneath the bridge already asleep; still sleeping, we doubtless continued to crawl. Because if we had not moved, they would not have found us. I waked, still believing I dreamed of thunder. It was light; even beneath the close weed-choked bridge Ringo and I could sense the sun though not at once; for the time we just sat there beneath the loud drumming, while the loose planks of the bridge floor clattered and danced to the hooves; we sat there for a moment staring at one another in the pale jonquil-colored light almost before we were awake. Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else."9

 Bayard senses the sun, the true goodness, but is faced with a paler light, the fire or a lesser reality. Then Bayard and Ringo run into a thicket to hide from the approaching horses. Bayard says, "Ringo and I had dived like two rabbits into a brier patch, feeling no thom, and lay on our faces in it while men shouted and horses crashed around us, then hard hands dragged us, clawing and kicking and quite blind, out of the thicket and onto our feet. Then sight returned."10 He describes seeing his father's horse Jupiter "standing big and motionless and pale in the dawn as a mesmerised flame."11 Bayard is tossed amidst a troop of soldiers; he sees a true part of the life of a soldier, thievery. Faulkner wrote, "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 in time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible." 12 Bayard, like the caveman, faces the fire and believes he knows the whole truth about war. In the previous chapter, the Yankees dealt with his family generously. In Chapter 2, they steal their mules, the silver, and burn the Sartoris family's house down. Bayard is confronted with the cruelties 

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       8. Plato, 169.

       9. Faulkner, 60-61. 

       10. Faulkner, 61. 

       11. Faulkner, 61. 

       12. Faulkner, 66.

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of war through the Yankees although he still hasn't experienced the extreme cruelty of war yet. 

       Granny's dealing and stealing of mules guides Bayard out of the cave. In Chapter 5, Bayard sees the light of truth, the sun, and is blinded and confused with the death of Granny at the end of the chapter. Plato's description of the journey to absolute truth is as follows:
 

And if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you'll grasp what I hope to convey, since that is what you wanted to hear about... In the knowable realm, the form of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is reached only with difficulty. 13

Bayard's recognition of what is true of war and what is good for his soul comes at the cost of his grandmother's life. Throughout the chapter Bayard realizes the problems arising with their increase in the mule business. He knows stealing is wrong and tries to convince Granny to quit the business, especially when she is on her way to approaching Grumby for his horses. He describes when he looks at the compress for Granny "there was no sound nor sign of life at all; just the huge rotting building with the gray afternoon dying wetly upon it, and then at the end of the hall a faint crack of light beneath the door."14 The light, the symbol for the truth about the evils of war, lay behind the door. Bayard opens the door and finds the body of his grandmother lying lifeless.

       With this new realization of war, Bayard sees only the shadows of the reality at first. He doesn't know whom to blame because he doesn't know who shot Granny. While Uncle Buck, Ringo, and Bayard search for Grumby's Independents, they come across a snake. "It had been warm for a week until last night. But last night it made ice and now we saw the moccasin where it had crawled out and was trying to get back into the water when the cold got it, so that it lay with its body on the land and its head fixed in the skim ice like it was set in a mirror." 15 This was the sign that told them they were near Grumby, although they only find Ab Snopes, the 'snake in the grass' that leads them to the 'snake den'.16 This is just a reflection of the sun in the water, the reflection of reality; Ab 

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       13. Plato, 169.

       14. Faulkner, 153.

       15. Faulkner, 171. 

       16. James Hinkle and Robert McCoy, Reading Faulkner: The Unvanquished. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 141. 

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Snopes is not the man they want, Grumby is the true evil who deserves punishment. Grumby really committed the murder. Faulkner describes Grumby as "a thick built man with a reddish stubble and pale eyes, in a faded Confederate uniform coat and Yankee boots, bareheaded with a long smear of dried blood on his cheek and one side of his coat caked with dried mud and that sleeve ripped away at the shoulder."17 Grumby is wearing a Confederate coat and Yankee boots. He definitely symbolizes absolute evil no matter what the side. After shooting Grumby and cutting off his hand, Bayard mourns for his grandmother and for Grumby. He slowly starts to realize the extreme horror of war, murder.

       At the end of the novel, Bayard's eyes are adjusted to the truth and what is good. He understands murdering is wrong and chooses not to shoot B.J. Redmond. Although, his refusal to shoot Redmond goes against the customs of the community and Bayard is shunned by his step-mother/cousin/potential girlfriend Drusilla Hawk Sartoris: "The person who starts to think is shown as someone who breaks the bonds of conformity to ordinary experience and received opinion, and the progress of enlightenment is portrayed as a journey from darkness into light."18 Bayard breaks the bonds of conformity to preserve his life, sanity, and goodness. In Plato's Republic, understanding was symbolized by the caveman seeing the sun's natural light. Plato stated that a cured caveman would "be able to see the sun, not the images of it in water or some alien place, but the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it."19 Bayard is able to question himself, study his soul and see what is good. "Good is an empty space into which human choice may move."20 Bayard chose not to kill. He graduated from an ignorant 
caveman to a just philosopher.

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       17. Faulkner, 178.

       18. Julia Annas, "Understanding and the Good: Sun, Line, and Cave," In Plato's Republic: Critical Essays, ed. Richard Kraut (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 152-153. 

       19. Plato, 168.

       20. Iris Murdoch, "The Sovereignty of Good," in Plato's Republic: Critical Essays, ed. Richard Kraut (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 174. 

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WORKS CITED 

Annas, Julia. "Understanding and the Good: Sun, Line, and Cave." In Plato's Republic: 

       Critical Essays, ed. Richard Kraut. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. 

       143-168. 

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. 

Hinkle, James and Robert McCoy. Reading Faulkner The Unvanquished. Jackson: 

       University Press of Mississippi, 1995. 

Losin, Peter. "Education and Plato's Parable of the Cave." Journal of Education. 178 

       (1996): 49-65. 

Murdoch, Iris. "The Sovereignty of Good." In Plato's Republic: Critical Essays, ed. 

       Richard Kraut. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. 170-178. 

Plato. Republic. In Classics of Moral and Political Theory, 2d ed., ed. Michael Morgan. 

       Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992. 32-246. 
 
 








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