John B. Padgett
Brevard College
400 N. Broad St.
Brevard, NC 28712
padgettjb@brevard.edu
A Quest for Peace: Faulkner’s A Fable
William Faulkner never tired of war as a literary subject. His earliest writings were
centered squarely on World War I, a reaction perhaps to his own failure to be a combat veteran
of that war. Later, he turned his attention largely to the Civil War in such novels as Absalom,
Absalom! and The Unvanquished, exploring the profound impact that this war had on his
region’s history and culture. However, Faulkner kept a kind of distance from the actual
battlefields of war. Even though Faulkner frequently wrote about the causes, effects, and scars of
war, only rarely did he depict actual battles as they were being fought. War in Faulkner’s fiction
is frequently a perennial presence as well as a conspicuous absence.
This “here/not here” quality is nowhere more apparent than in his treatment of the Cold
War and its impact upon the human and artistic psyche. The Cold War lends itself well to
Faulkner’s method, given its own “here/not here” status: a war fought not by soldiers bearing
weapons on a battlefield but by statesmen and politicians wielding policies and ideologies.
Beginning with his Nobel Prize speech in 1950 and continuing through A Fable, Faulkner arrives
at a stance on war that differs considerably from the gung-ho militarism of his earliest work;
whereas his earlier works had focused more on what war can do to—or for—an individual, in A
Fable, the focus is more on war’s effect on humanity as a whole. Unlike most of Faulkner’s
other fiction about World War I, A Fable is not really about the Great War as a discrete historical
anomaly; rather, it is a novel about War Itself, written at a time when a seemingly perpetual state
of war—albeit a “cold” one—had been reached.
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Faulkner began writing A Fable during some of the darkest hours of World War II. The
seminal motif he wished to explore was, What would happen if Christ were to return during war
and not be recognized? The novel is highly allegorical, patterned upon a kind of Holy Week in
which a Christ-like figure, the Corporal, is tried and executed for his attempt to end the war. The
Holy Week plot of the novel ends, as do the Gospels, with an empty tomb: an artillery barrage
has removed the Corporal’s body from the place where he had been buried. The Corporal is a
catalyst for change; he led the initial mutiny, after all, that sets into motion all the other events in
the novel. Despite this active role, however, he remains distant and elusive. We never get to see
him in action, for instance; readers of the novel are not afforded any opportunity to watch him on
the morning of the failed attack, nor are we allowed a privileged look inside his band of twelve
as he and they apparently (and mysteriously) travel throughout both sides of the war zone
disseminating a message of peace. Even his name, Stefan, is not revealed, almost as an
afterthought, until very late in the novel. And of course his final act in the novel is literally to
become “unknown”; at the end of the novel, in a chapter titled “Tomorrow,” the Corporal’s body
is literally resurrected to be re-buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris.
The Corporal, Faulkner implies, is not merely a symbol of Christ but rather Christ
himself, and so the failed attack, as a miraculous act, is perhaps beyond the realm of what can be
credibly represented in fiction. We do, however, get to witness the Runner’s attempt to prolong
the peace that the Corporal had initiated, and in some ways, this act, by someone who is clearly
human and burdened with human foibles and weaknesses, is the most significant in the novel.
We learn a little of his life prior to the war: an architect who after the war began had been
among the first to volunteer. After receiving commendations for leadership at the battles of Loos
and Passchendaele, he was sent to officers’ school and promoted to lieutenant. But the
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experience of war has changed him; he asks to resign his commission and be returned to the
ranks, not because he “love[s] man so well [he] must sleep in the same mud he sleeps in,” as his
company commander says, but rather because, as he says, he “hates” man:
‘When I, knowing what I have been, and am now, and will
continue to be—assuming of course that I shall continue among the
chosen beneath the boon of breathing, which I probably shall,
some of us apparently will have to, dont ask me why of that
either—, can, by the simple coincidence of wearing this little
badge on my coat, have not only the power, with a whole
militarised government to back me up, to tell vast herds of man
what to do, but the impunitive right to shoot him with my own
hand when he doesn’t do it, then I realise how worthy of any fear
and abhorrence and hatred he is.’ (721-22)
Like thousands of others who experienced the carnage of World War I—specifically, in his case,
the Somme offensive of 1916—he has become disillusioned, particularly in the authority granted
to him militarily to send some men to their deaths. When his request for demotion is denied, he
comes up with an ingenious plan to be demoted back to ranks by getting caught in an indecent
sexual act in public; after he is once again a private, he is given the job of battalion runner.
With the help of a Sentry and a Negro minister, the Runner plans a bold gesture to have
soldiers leave the trenches unarmed and to meet their German counterparts in No Man’s Land.
This act represents an even greater affront to the military rules of war than the Corporal’s earlier
refusal to attack; instead of the inaction of not attacking, this is an action wholly at odds with the
ordinary rules of war, and it invites an immediate retaliation—an artillery barrage which rains
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down upon the would-be peacemakers.
Despite its fatal repercussions, the act is liberating because it represents both an
individual act of choice and a coming together of men unified in that choice. The Sentry is given
choices by the Runner—to leave the trench or not, to show the Freemasonry “sign” that will
motivate others to leave the trench, or not—and though grudgingly, he chooses the path toward
peace. He issues “one last invincible repudiation,” but once he has gone over the top and made
his way through the wire to stand without fear in broad daylight in No Man’s Land, it is a
moment fraught with the potential and possibility for lasting peace:
‘Look at them!’ He did so and saw them, watched them, crawling
on their hands and knees through the gaps in the wire as though up
out of hell itself, faces clothes hands and all stained as though
forever one single nameless and identical color from the mud in
which they had lived like animals for four years, then rising to
their feet as though in that four years they had not stood on earth,
but had this moment returned to light and air from purgatory as
ghosts stained forever to the nameless single color of purgatory.…
(963)
The Sentry’s cynicism and disillusionment after four years of war melts away for the moment,
leaving only the momentary embrace of peace. The men whom he inspires to leave the trenches,
though “stained,” are nonetheless stained by “one single nameless and identical color”—they
remain individuals granted free will, choice, but they are united in their pursuit of peace; they are
“individual faces but still all one face.” The Sentry is so moved that when he realizes this
moment is about to end when generals on both sides, German and Allied, barrage them with
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artillery, he is finally able figuratively to rejoin the camaraderie and fellowship of man:
and then he knew what the other thing was even before the frantic
uprush of the rockets from behind the two wires, German and
British too.
‘No!’ he cried, ‘no! Not to us!’ not even realising that he
had said ‘we’ and not ‘I’ for the first time in his life probably,
certainly for the first time in four years.… (963)
The Sentry is killed, and the Runner barely survives, losing half of his body in the process, but it
is enough to for him to return at the end of the novel to reiterate one final time, at the Old
General’s funeral ten years after the Armistice, what it means to stand up for one’s convictions.
He represents the third member of what Faulkner termed a “trinity of conscience,” who as a
group represent three ways of reacting to the horrors and injustices of war: by nihilism, passivity,
or action. The runner, Faulkner says, is a “living scar, who in the last scene says, ‘That’s right;
tremble. I’m not going to die—never.’ i.e., there is evil in the world and I’m going to do
something about it” (Essays 271). Even though the Runner failed in his attempt to end the war,
what matters is that he not only tried, he continues to try even ten years later.
Faulkner spent ten years writing A Fable, and he witnessed a great many changes over
the course of those ten years, both in his own life and in the world around him. Upon accepting
the Nobel Prize in 1950, he succinctly characterized the Cold War in six words: “When will I be
blown up?” Despite this incapacitating fear, however, Faulkner refused to give in to it; “I decline
to accept the end of man,” he said:
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he
will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and
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faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red
and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more
sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to
accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will
prevail. (Essays 120)
Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech is itself remarkable in its manner of decrying war—here, the Cold
War and its threat of global annihilation—as a proper motivation for artistic achievement even as
he appropriates the language and images of such a war to bolster his argument. So too would
Faulkner decry war and its effect on the human spirit in A Fable, borrowing even some of the
same words and phrases from his Nobel speech. By the time he finished writing A Fable, the
conception of war had all but ceased to be thought of a discrete event with a beginning, a more or
less fixed duration, and an end; “war,” by 1954, had in essence become a perpetual state of
existence. Though the Great War had come to an end on November 11, 1918, the “peace” which
followed left unresolved issues that would lead inevitably to the far more devastating World War
II as well as the ideological confrontations, both “hot” and “cold,” that would divide the world
into two fundamental camps—capitalist or communist, American or Soviet—for three-quarters
of a century after the end of World War I. In A Fable, Faulkner attempts to identify the elemental
components, both tangible and intangible, which comprise war and to offer a strategy by which
they might be overcome: by a “puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking.”
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. Essays, Speeches & Public Letters. Ed. James B. Meriwether. 1965. Rev. ed.
New York: Random House, 2004.
—. A Fable. 1954. In Novels 1942-1954. Eds. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: Library
of America, 1994.