Unnamed Confederate Soldiers

Besides the named characters who serve in the Confederate States Army - Thomas and Henry Sutpen, Sartoris, Bon, and so on, and the specific units they serve in - Confederate soldiers appear in a number of ways in the novel. First, as the "figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" whom Rosa Coldfield writes poems about (13): "maimed honor's veterans . . . fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, who carried the pride and the hope of peace in honor's vanguard as they did the flags" (120). Less romanticized versions of these men appear as the units that pass through or bivouac in Jefferson (64), some of whom loot Rosa's father's store (65), and the wounded "self-fouled bodies of strange injured and dead" who are treated in "the improvised hospital" in Jefferson (99). Somewhere between these representations is Quentin Compson's vision of "the ragged and starving troops without shoes, the gaunt powder-blackened faces . . ., the glaring eyes in which burned some indomitable desperation of undefeat" (154).