Absalom, Absalom!

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Absalom, Absalom!
Author	William Faulkner
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Southern Gothic
Publisher	Vintage (publisher)
Publication date	January 30, 1991 (Reissue edition)
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	320 pages
ISBN	ISBN 0-679-73218-7

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.

1 Plot summary
2 Analysis
3 Influence
4 Other

[edit] Plot summary

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, 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 flush 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 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 (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 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 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 is Jim Bond, Charles Bon's half black grandson who remains on Sutpen's Hundred.

[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 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 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 to suicide.

[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] 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).
Present is also the link to Absolon in 'The Miller's Tale', written by Geoffry Chaucer.