Absalom, Absalom!

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Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by 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.

[edit] Plot summary

Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in the Virginias who comes to Mississippi with the twin aims of becoming rich and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson and by Rosa Coldfield, 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 an apparently hazy 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 is something of an indentured servant with him. Sutpen buys a large plot 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 plans 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 while there, he married an octoroon named 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 finds out he has been deceived (which is his own interpretation of events), he renounces the marriage as void and abandons his wife and child. The reader also later learns of Sutpen's childhood with an abusive father, where young Thomas learned both that money was power and that lack of money meant that despite being a white man, he would be treated like a black slave.

When Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to marry him, Henry flies into a rage, repudiates his birthright, and takes Charles to New Orleans, where they join the Confederate Army and fight in the Civil War. During the war, Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is also part black. After wrestling with his conscience over a period of years, 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, having lost both of his sons, becomes an alcoholic. 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. 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 starting a Sutpen dynasty rested on whether Milly gave birth to a son. Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside. An enraged Wash Jones kills Sutpen and Sutpen's newborn daughter, and is then 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 a slave woman named 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.

[edit] 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 never past but is always present and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

• Quentin Compson, a main narrator, also appears in Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury.

• The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest proper sentence in English. It cites a sentence from "Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words.

• Faulkner's short story "Wash" tells the story of the birth of Sutpen's illegitimate granddaughter 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).

[edit] More Information

ClassicNotes's articles on Absalom, Absalom!

Categories: Accuracy disputes | 1936 novels | Historical novels | William Faulkner novels | Gothic novels | Incest in fiction