Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner

4 ideas

1. Sutpen's design and its self-destruction

   As a poor white boy in Virginia, Thomas Sutpen was turned away from a planter's front door by a Black servant, and he resolved to build a dynasty that no one could ever turn from the door. He carved Sutpen's Hundred out of Mississippi land with enslaved labor, but he repudiated his first wife and their son Charles Bon when he learned she had Black ancestry. The rejected Bon later came to court Sutpen's daughter Judith, and Sutpen's other son Henry killed him at the gate. The dynasty ends in 1910 with the house burned and only Jim Bond, Bon's mixed-race grandson, left alive, so the design was undone by the racial exclusion it was built on.

2. The design as abstraction overriding persons

   Sutpen treats his life as a plan that requires specific components: land, a house, a wife of acceptable lineage, and a legitimate male heir. People who do not fit the plan are discarded rather than dealt with. Because the plan counts only roles and ignores relationships, each discarded person comes back as a force the plan cannot absorb.

3. History as contested reconstruction by listeners

   The past reaches the reader only through narrators who each have their own grievance, loyalty, or need. Rosa Coldfield needs Sutpen to be a demon, and Mr. Compson needs the story to be fatalistic tragedy. Quentin and Shreve fill in the gaps with invented motives, so the most plausible explanation, that Bon was part Black, is partly inferred rather than documented. Read this way, any account of the past records what the teller required to be true as much as what happened.

4. Inherited guilt binds those who retell it

   The novel shows the South's founding sin of slavery and racial caste continuing into later generations through the act of telling it. Quentin cannot narrate Sutpen's story from a safe distance. By the end he is compulsively insisting that he does not hate the South, which shows that inheriting a history means being implicated in it, not only knowing about it.

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