Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William
Faulkner, published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during, and after the Civil War, with the focus of the story on the life of Thomas
Sutpen.
Plot summary
Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in West Virginia who comes
to Mississippi with the complementary aims of becoming rich and a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in
flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson, Rosa
Coldfield, and his father, with events told in non-chronological order and often retold by different people with differing
details, resulting in a peeling-back-the-onion way of revealing the true story of the Sutpens to the reader. Rosa initially
narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen’s.
Quentin's father then fills in some of the details to Quentin, as well. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate at
Harvard University, Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details
as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers.
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French architect who has been somehow forced into working for
him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native
American tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen’s Hundred, including an ostentatious
mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he
ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man’s daughter, Ellen
Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for
tragedy.
Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets a fellow student who
is a few years his senior named Charles Bon. Henry brings Bon home for Christmas, where he and Judith begin a quiet romance that
leads to a presumed engagement. However, Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop
the proposed union.
Sutpen had worked on a plantation in Haiti as the overseer, and after subduing a slave
uprising, was offered the hand of the plantion owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon, who bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen had not known
that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he found out he had been deceived (which
was his own interpretation of events), he renounced the marriage as void and left his wife and child (though leaving them his
fortune as part of his own moral recompense). The reader also later learns of Sutpen's childhood, where young Thomas learned that
society could base human worth on material worth. It is this episode that sets into motion Thomas' plan to start a dynasty.
While Henry, possibly because of his own incestuous designs on his sister, is initially jealous of Charles, he eventually
accepts Charles suit of Judith. When Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to
marry him, Henry refuses to believe, repudiates his birthright, and accompanies Charles to his home in New Orleans. They then return to Mississippi to enlist in their University company where they
join the Confederate Army and fight in the Civil War. During the war, Henry wrestles with his conscience until presumably resolves to allow the
marriage of half-brother and sister until Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is also part black. At the conclusion of the war,
Henry enacts his father's interdiction of marriage between Charles and Judith, killing Charles at the gates to the mansion then
fleeing into self-exile.
Thomas Sutpen returns from the war and begins to repair his home and dynasty. He proposes to Rosa Coldfield, his dead wife's
younger sister, and she accepts. However, Sutpen insults Rosa by demanding that she bear him a son before the wedding takes
place, and she leaves Sutpen's Hundred to begin her forty-three years of hate. Sutpen then begins an affair with Milly, the
fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, a squatter who lives on the Sutpen property. The affair continues until Milly
becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. Sutpen is terribly disappointed, because the last hope of repairing his Sutpen
dynasty rested on whether Milly gave birth to a son. Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside. An enraged Wash Jones kills Sutpen,
his own granddaughter and Sutpen's newborn daughter, and is in turn killed by the posse that arrives to arrest him.
The story of Thomas Sutpen's legacy ends with Quentin taking Rosa back to the seemingly abandoned Sutpen’s Hundred plantation,
where they find Henry Sutpen and Clytie, herself the daughter of Thomas Sutpen by a
slave woman. Henry has returned to the estate to die. Three months later, when Rosa returns with medical help for Henry, Clytie
starts a fire that consumes the plantation and kills Henry and herself. The only remaining Sutpen being Jim Bond, Charles Bon's
half black grandson who remains on Sutpen's Hundred.
Analysis
Like other Faulkner novels, Absalom, Absalom! allegorizes Southern history; the title itself is an allusion to a
wayward son fighting the empire his father built. The history of Thomas Sutpen mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation
culture. Sutpen's failures necessarily reflect the weaknesses of an idealistic South. Rigidly committed to his "design", Sutpen
proves unwilling to honor his marriage to a "black" woman, setting in motion his own destruction.
Akin to the modern detective story, Absalom, Absalom! also juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright
speculation, with the implication that any and all narratives--any and all reconstructions of the past--remain irretrievable and
therefore imaginative.
By using various storytellers/narrators expressing their interpretations of the facts, it alludes to the historical cultural
zeitgeist of the old South, where the past is always present and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and
retell the story over time, which give the story a strong magical-realist element.
The use of Quentin Compson as the primary perspective (if not exactly the focus) of the novel makes it something of a
companion piece to Faulkner's earlier work The Sound and the Fury, which
tells the story of Quentin and the Compson family. Although the action of that novel is never explicitly referenced, the Sutpen
family's struggle with dynasty, downfall, and potential incest parallel the familial events and obsessions that drive Quentin to
suicide.
Influence
Faulkner's method of revealing the truth of the story in stages that are out of time order and that differ based on who is
telling the story has been imitated numerous times in film and print.
Other
- The title refers to the Biblical story of Absalom, a son of
David who rebelled against his father (then King of Kingdom of
Israel) and who was killed by David's general Joab in violation of David's order to deal
gently with his son. Another parallel to the biblical is that Absalom had his half-brother murdered for raping Tamar, his sister
(and half-sister of the rapist). In Faulkner's version it is not rape, but seduction.
- The 1983 edition of the Guinness Book of World
Records has an entry for what it claims is the "Longest Sentence in Literature". It cites a sentence from Absalom,
Absalom! containing 1,300 words.
- Faulkner's short story "Wash" tells the story of the birth of Sutpen's illegitimate daughter to Wash Jones' granddaughter,
and of Jones' murder of Sutpen, and then his own granddaughter, and his great-granddaughter (whereupon he sets fire to the house
the mother and child are in).
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