McCaslinsInUV

When Faulkner revised the short stories Bayard Sartoris narrates into the novel The Unvanquished, he also began to bring the McCaslin family into focus as a family. Using the episode in "Retreat" that is recalled in both "Raid" and the short story also called "The Unvanquished," when Bayard encounters Uncle Buck in Jefferson, Faulkner interpolates a long passage providing Buck with a twin brother Buddy and a father who built "one of the finest houses in the country" as part of the "big bottom-land" slave plantation that establishes their place in the county aristocracy (46-47). The given names he gives Buck and Buddy - "Amodeus and Theophilus" - will be swapped later. The father is not described. Most of the long passage describes how the brothers, after their father dies, bring unconventional and progressive changes to the old plantation: moving the slaves into the big house, introducing a kind of farmer's cooperative among the "white trash" families in their locality (49). Nevertheless both are loyal to the Confederacy, and despite their age (they are already "past seventy" in 1861, 49) seek to join Colonel Sartoris' regiment. When he loses a poker game to his brother, Buck is the one who has to stay behind. The new upper class background Faulkner gives Buck is the only change he makes in his character.