Absalom, Absalom!
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.
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 then relates the story first to his father and then 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 "octocoon" (a person who is one-eighth black) 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. After the war, Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is also part black, at which point Henry goads Charles into a pointless duel in which Henry kills Charles right at the gates to the mansion and then flees.
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 Supten and Supten's newborn daughter, and is then in turn killed by the posse that arrives to arrest him.
The story 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.
Like other of Faulkner's 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 narrativesremain 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.
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, most famously in
Akira Kurosawa's film
RashÅmon and in the more recent
Memento.
*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.
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).
ClassicNotes's articles on Absalom, Absalom!
