What is honor? There is no exact way to classify honor or to qualify what exactly honor is. However, honor can be easily recognized when a person possesses that wonderful quality. William Faulkner in The Unvanquished portrays both honorable and dishonorable characters and to the reader they stand out like neon signs. Honor plays a crucial role in The Unvanquished and is a vital part of how each character is viewed. Granny is a very honorable character even though she does things that seem dishonorable until the entire situation is analyzed fully.
The character that comes across as the most honorable in The Unvanquished is Granny. She takes it upon herself to be sure to both protect and look over Bayard and Ringo. One of the spots in the novel is where Granny exhibits this honor is when she attempts to procure some horses from Union troops and does not even carry a weapon. She does not carry a weapon because she believes that they would never hurt a woman, even if she was not on their side. She said, "And now I am taking no risk: I am a woman. Even Yankees do not harm old woman" (pg. 153). Even though Granny did die it was not a dishonorable death. She had died courageously and doing something that she viewed as honorable, providing her family income and giving the towns people livestock through the horses.
Granny was not always the most honest person or law-abiding citizen during the novel; she did steal horses, mules, silver, and African Americans from the Union troops but her intentions were entirely honorable. Granny's motivation for taking the mules was not for revenge but was "for the sake of food and clothes for [God's] own creatures who could not help themselves; for the children who had given their fathers, for wives who had given their husbands, for old people who had given their sons." (pg. 147). She knew it was a sin to steal and she knew that Bayard and Ringo helping her meant they had sinned as well; she did a very honorable thing and took their sin upon herself.
He not only drew an explicitly detailed drawing of a locomotive, but he soon became an honor-roll student. ... For example, "the Negro companion of the aristocratic white boy is named Ringo in The Unvanquished and Alex Sanders in Intruder in the Dust, but their characters are almost identical"(Volpe 16-17). ...
