Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom!

is considered by many to
be William Faulkner's masterpiece. Although the novel's complex
and fragmented structure poses considerable difficulty to readers,
the book's literary merits place it squarely in the ranks of
America's finest novels. The story concerns Thomas Sutpen, a
poor man who finds wealth and then marries into a respectable
family. His ambition and extreme need for control bring about his
ruin and the ruin of his family. Sutpen's story is told by several
narrators, allowing the reader to observe variations in the saga as
it is recounted by different speakers. This unusual technique
spotlights one of the novel's central questions: To what extent
can people know the truth about the past?
Faulkner's novels and short stories often relate to one another.
Absalom, Absalom! draws characters from The Sound and the
Fury, and it anticipates the action and themes of Intruder in the
Dust. Further, Absalom, Absalom! is one of Faulkner's fifteen
novels set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County. This is the first of
Faulkner's novels in which he includes a chronology and a map of
the fictitious setting to better enable the reader to understand the
context for the novel's events. The map includes captions noting
areas where certain events take place. The map shows events
that happen in Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying,
Sanctuary, and Light in August, as well as those that occur in
Absalom, Absalom!
Despite Faulkner's roots in the South, he readily condemns many
aspects of its history and heritage in Absalom, Absalom!. He
reveals the unsavory side of southern morals and ethics,
including slavery. The novel explores the relationship between
modern humanity and the past, examining how past events affect
modern decisions and to what extent modern people are
responsible for the past.

Absalom, Absalom!
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Author William Faulkner

Country United States

Language English

Genre(s) Southern Gothic

Publisher Random House

Publication date 1936

Media type print

Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William

Faulkner, first 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.

Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born
into poverty in Western 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 and his
roommate Shreve. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and
grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the
total events of the story unfolding in non-chronological order and often 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 Sutpens. 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 Sutpens 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 mans 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 plantation 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, 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's 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 he
presumably resolves to allow the marriage of half-brother and sister; this resolution
changes, however, when Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is 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 Sutpens 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 is 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.

Absalom, Absalom! 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 Faulkner's 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, as well
as an underlying exploration of the process of myth-making and the
problematization of truth.
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 the Compson family, with
Quentin as one of the main characters. 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 and
Miss Rosa Coldfield to witness the burning of Sutpen's Hundred.

Influence & Significance

Absalom, Absalom, along with The Sound and the Fury, helped Faulkner win the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Its groundbreaking out of order storytelling, and
frequent use of stream of consciousness often has had many critics calling
Faulkner a pioneer of the modernist movement, along with other authors like
James Joyce.

Trivia

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 story is that Absalom had his half-brother
murdered for raping Tamar, his sister. Faulkner's novel substitutes a
seduction for the rape.
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 (in reality, author James
Joyce holds this record for a sentence in Ulysses which exceeds 4000
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).