This essay establishes the legitimacy of the 17.35 percent revised descriptions1 in the first six chapters in The Unvanquished (1938), updating the interpretation of Bayard Sartoris' vendetta avoidance in the final seventh chapter of "An Odor of Verbena." The rewritten parts and his avoidance, whose juxtaposition seems to be far-fetched at a first glance, can be viewed as interdependent from the perspective of the framework of The Unvanquished in which "you set [a conflict] up, then solve it" (John Faulkner 212). According to Blotner's Biography, the revision of the six stories, which were carried from 1934 to 36 in the popular magazines, and the newly written final chapter, "The Odor of Verbena," were intended "to complete what 'Ambuscade' had begun"(379-81). If the solution is his avoidance, it is cogent to think that the embellishments "unify the material" (Carothers 86) in the six short stories and bridge the material in the first six chapters with his performance in the final seventh chapter. The validity of the revised portions relies upon whether or not they contribute to our understanding of why Bayard chooses to disarm himself when dueling with Ben Redmond.
     However, any coordination between the revised pieces and his pseudo-revenge is difficult to construct, if the latter is construed as a reconciliation of the past with the present that has been discussed. For example, the interpretation of Bayard's "no bloody moon"(247) as the emphasis on the absurdity of "a endless feud of an eye for an eye" or his evasion of "the sin of pride and the overweening assumption of privilege" (Creighton 82), would make some of the additions appear "stylistic inconsistencies" (Ferguson 162) or redundant references to race problem (Creighton 83). Therefore, finding a meaning of his vendetta avoidance that coordinates with the revised sections is a potent approach to the legitimation of the revised pieces in The Unvanquished.

     The new meaning of his disarmament emerges from understanding his appreciation of the deeds of John Sartoris during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, which he has seen in the previous six chapters. His disarming is due to not just superiority of morality over the relic of a vendetta, but his comprehension of the motto which is clearly stated by John,

You are doing well in the law, Judge Wilkins tells me. I am pleased to hear that. I have not needed you in my affairs so far, but from now on I shall. I have now accomplished the active portion of my aims in which you could not have helped me; I acted as the land and the time demanded and you were too young for that, I wished to shield you. But now the land and the time too are changing; what will follow will be a matter of consolidation, of pettifogging and doubtless chicanery in which I would be a babe in arms but in which you, trained in the law, can hold your own --- our own. Yes. I have accomplished my aim, and now I shall do a little moral housecleaning (231-2).

     Faulkner revised the six short stories to underscore the principle that his vendetta avoidance is built on the motto behind his father's deeds. They are significantly revised to show not that he was not always brave and brilliant but that he was trying to conform to the time and the place at which he was. The most salient revised portion which illustrate this principle is found in the initial part in The Unvanquished, as follows (the words underlined below are the rewritten parts in the excerpt, thereafter),

Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment. To Ringo and me it lived, if only because of the fact that the sunimpacted ground drank water faster than we could fetch it from the well, the very setting of the stage for conflict a prolonged and wellnigh hopeless ordeal in which we ran, panting and interminable, with the leaking bucket between wellhouse and battlefield, the two of us needing first to join forces and spend ourselves against a common enemy, time, before we could engender between us and hold intact the pattern of recapitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a shield between ourselves and reality, between us and fact and doom (3-4).

They tore the track up so we couldn't do it again; they could tear the track up but they couldn't take back the fact that we had done it. They couldn't take that from us (98-9).

    It is deduced that what Ringo did with Rosa Millard also contribute to the vendetta avoidance of the 24-year-old Bayard in the seventh chapter, from his comment on Ringo,

[Ringo] had outgrown me, had changed so much that summer while he and Granny traded mules with Yankees that since then I had had to do most of the changing just to catch up with him (216).

"Cokynut cake, Granny." He said coconut cake every time because we never had been able to decide whether Ringo had ever tasted coconut cake or not. We had had some that Christmas before it [the Civil War] started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn't remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived (19-20).

I either looked out or dreamed I looked out the window and saw (or dreamed I saw) the lantern (40).

"Come on here, Loosh," Philadelphy said from the woodpile. There was something curious in her voice too --- urgent, perhaps frightened. "If you wants any supper, you better tote me some wood." But I didn't know which, urgency or fright; I didn't have time to wonder or speculate, because suddenly Loosh stooped before Ringo or I could have moved, and with his hand he swept the chips flat (5).

it was as if his redcornered eyes had reversed in his skull and it was the blank flat obverses of the balls which we saw (5).

He was almost close enough for me to have touched him and he did not see us at all; all of a sudden he was just kind of hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running and was inside been cut out of tin in the act running and was inside the cabin and the door shut black again almost before we knew what we had seen (22).

"You see you cant keep up with them and that they aint going to wait for you," Granny said. "Do you want to die here in the road for buzzards to eat?" But she didn't even look at Granny, she just squatted there.
     "Hit's Jordan we coming to," she said. "Jesus gonter see me that far" (84-5).

When I looked back she was still standing there, holding the baby and the bread and meat Granny had given her (85).

Faulkner, at least in The Unvanquished, appears to be trying to show that the sudden mass emancipation by force of arms in the Civil War was worse for the slaves, in the long run, than the sort of emancipation which McCaslins stood for (Meriwether 77).

"one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they dont know where, empty handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom" (81).

I was against compulsory segregation. I am just as strongly against compulsory integration" (Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters 86).

     Running throughout the revised descriptions in The Unvanquished is the motto, which Bayard learns and inherits from his father, that to be unvanquished, you have to adapt yourself to a coordinate of time and place at which you are. On the basis of this motto, he chooses to disarm himself when dueling with Redmond, as well as changes his attitude toward or insight into actuality. Consequently, he updates his perceptions of what he has seen in the previous six chapters. The updated perceptions give rise to the 17.35 percent rewritten portions in The Unvanquished, which help us understand the meaning of Bayard's vendetta avoidance based on the motto.
    In the second half of the first six chapters in The Unvanquished, which were less revised than the first three, the motto has already appeared; for example, "I've quit sleeping" (100) of Drusilla, and "Being born too soon and dying too late" (173) of Uncle Buck. Bayard sees the "suffering" (229) in the eyes of Drusilla because she holds onto the moment at which Gavin Breckbridge, her fiance, passed away during the Civil War. Her words, "I've quit sleeping," implies that she clings to or is preoccupied with the time of his death, though she should adapt, according to the changing time. However, it is not easy to switch to a new occasion, when sufferings are too awful, like the deaths of Breckbridge and Rosa Millard. In such a case, there is nothing for it but to let those sufferings go and to try to adapt yourself to the present time. This awareness, which dawns on Drusilla after Bayard's vendetta avoidance is beautifully accomplished, compels her to move away to another land. She should have realized that it is Bayard who properly follows his father, not herself who offers him a pistol. The same is true of the words of Uncle Buck. For it is no use denouncing Ab Snopes for having inducing Millard to frighten the coward, Grumby.
     This sort of transcendental point of view is also represented in an episode included in the first three chapters. There, Uncle Buck and Buddy play a game of poker "in which the victor could know that he had earned his right, the loser that he had been conquered by a better man" (50), to choose which one of them would go with John to the war. In short, the rivals take a detached way to leave no seeds of future trouble between them. Bayard also employs the same method as a device to assuage the bitterness of reality in exploring the causes of his failures. His father and he attribute his failures to the fact that he was "too young" (231). He could not comprehend why his father was trying to outdo Yankees during the war because he was "just twelve then" (5). The reason why Bayard shrunk back from the front when he encountered a surprise attack led by his father and his troop is that "There is a limit ... to what [a child] can accept, a limit in time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible. And I was still a child at that moment ..." (66). Being too young is a useful excuse to allow you to remain detached from anguish. As this is not the revised part, the death of Rosa Millard, one of his greatest failures in The Unvanquished, is attributed to the fact that Bayard "was just fifteen" (153). Moreover, it seems that the motto was important for Faulkner because it not only justifies The Unvanquished as a potboiler but also sublimes the dilemma he had been experiencing about his great grandfather into something acceptable to him. One way or the other, the motto is the crux of The Unvanquished.