Absalom,

Absalom!
Study Guide by Course Hero

Absalom, Absalom! is told in the past tense.

What's Inside
ABOUT THE TITLE
The title Absalom, Absalom! refers to the story of King David
j Book Basics ................................................................................................. 1 and his son Absalom in the Old Testament of the Bible (2
Samuel). While the novel's narrative does not follow the biblical
d In Context ..................................................................................................... 1 story precisely, it includes parallels such as sibling incest,
fratricide, and rebellion against the father.
a Author Biography ..................................................................................... 3

h Characters .................................................................................................. 4

k Plot Summary ............................................................................................. 8 d In Context

c Chapter Summaries .............................................................................. 13
Absalom, Absalom! is a story of the American South spanning
g Quotes ........................................................................................................ 30 from the early years of the 19th century through the Civil War
and on through Reconstruction to the narrative present in
l Symbols ..................................................................................................... 33 1909. This crucial period of Southern history entails a host of
influences and issues the novel takes up.
m Themes ...................................................................................................... 34

e Suggested Reading .............................................................................. 35

Southern Culture and
Economics
j Book Basics
In the pre-Civil War period, the Southern economy was based
on agriculture. Rich plantation owners derived their wealth
AUTHOR
from the labor of chattel slaves. Large-scale agriculture
William Faulkner
(especially cotton crops) and the wealth it brought depended
YEAR PUBLISHED on slave labor. Slavery and racism—and all the evils that
1936 attended them—infuse Absalom, Absalom! with much of its
underlying conflict and tragedy.
GENRE
Drama Wealthy white Southern women of this era were treated as
delicate greenhouse flowers whose purity and fragility had to
PERSPECTIVE AND NARRATOR be protected. The code of honor that underpinned every rich,
The story shifts among the voices of several different respectable Southern family was based, at least to some
narrators, each of whom has a different view of the events they extent, on the inviolable purity of its women.
describe; there is also some omniscient narration.
The Civil War (1861–65) began after the anti-slavery candidate
TENSE Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 and the South
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
seceded from the United States. The devastation of the Civil
War largely destroyed the Old South. Plantation land was
confiscated or rendered useless for agriculture. Slavery was
abolished, so the labor needed to work the land was
unavailable. With most Southern men off fighting during the
war, Southern women formerly considered too fragile for work
now often had to engage in hard labor, including farming, to
keep from starving.
In 1860 the population of Mississippi was 55 percent black, and
the plantation economy was totally dependent on slave labor.
Mississippi was the second state, after South Carolina, to
secede from the Union to create the Southern Confederacy.
Mississippians suffered greatly during the Civil War, which left
their state in physical and economic ruin.
Racism, Miscegenation, and
the "One-Drop Rule"
Miscegenation refers to mixing (especially in sex or marriage)
between people of different races, primarily between whites
and blacks. Miscegenation may result from the intermarriage
of black and white persons, but it also encompasses any form
of interracial sex. Because enslaved women were considered
property to be used in any way their owner saw fit, enslaved
women could be and often were raped by their owners; mixed-
race children were often the result. The 1860 census counted
588,532 mixed-race persons in the United States. White slave
owners might claim paternity and care for the offspring they
fathered with their female slaves, though most often they did
not.
Different words were used to designate the amount of black
"blood" a person of mixed race had. A mulatto was a person
with half white and half black blood, such as the offspring
arising from a recently arrived African slave and a white slave
owner. A quadroon was a person who was one-quarter black;
for example, a person with one black grandparent. In this novel
several characters are referred to as octoroons. An octoroon
is a person who has one-eighth black blood; for example, a
person with one black great-grandparent. Octoroons or people
with less black blood could often "pass" for white in general
society because they were so light skinned.
The United States is the only nation whose history involved
laws tied to the "one-drop rule," which applied only to people
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In Context 2
with African American blood. In essence the one-drop rule,
adopted as law in many Southern states beginning in 1910,
stated a person was considered black if he or she had even
"one drop" of black blood or the most remote black ancestry.
The one-drop rule, and in some cases laws prohibiting
miscegenation, have historically been applied only to blacks.
The one-drop rule and the obsession about miscegenation is a
direct outgrowth of the South's culture of racism arising from
its history of slavery.
Mixed-blood characters, particularly octoroons, play a pivotal
role in the tragedy of Absalom, Absalom! "Passing" for white
while having black blood could have devastating
consequences. The curse of the South, as frequently
mentioned in the novel, is the legacy of slavery and a persistent
and virulent racism that cannot look beyond race as the key
criterion for one's place in society. In this way readers can
think of the novel as a modern-day Greek tragedy. Its
characters are caught in the social and cultural trap of
Southern society. They are "cursed" primarily by the South's
age-old demons—slavery and racism—which make them fated,
tragically, to act in ways that lead inevitably to their downfall.
Readers should be aware that, as a novel of the antebellum
South, the word nigger is used frequently in the novel, as it was
in ordinary speech of that time and place. William Faulkner
often uses the word to denote a gross racist insult. He uses
the words black and Negro when a general designation is
intended.
The Biblical Absalom
The title Absalom, Absalom! refers to the biblical story of King
David's son Absalom as told in 2 Samuel:13–20. The Old
Testament story recounts how Absalom has his older brother
Amnon killed because Amnon had raped their sister, Tamar.
Absalom then flees his father's lands and goes into exile. After
a few years, King David misses Absalom and calls him back
home. Absalom's house and family are returned to him, but he
is denied any position at his father's court. Absalom then
begins a program of winning the "hearts and minds" of the
populace. At the same time, he challenges his father's
reputation, and the people begin to grumble about King David.
When David is away, Absalom foments a rebellion and takes
over as king. Meanwhile, David is assembling an army to regain
his throne. During the ensuing battle, Absalom and his forces
are defeated; Absalom subsequently dies. The Bible states
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
King David mourned more for Absalom than he had for Amnon.
The biblical story is not a direct match to the narrative of this
novel, but it has sufficient parallels that Faulkner thought the
title appropriate. The similarities include sibling incest,
fratricide, and rebellion against the father. In the novel Charles
Bon most closely represents Amnon, Henry embodies some of
Absalom, and Judith is similar to Tamar. Thomas Sutpen is, of
course, King David.
When it was published, Faulkner described Absalom, Absalom!
as "the best novel yet written by an American." Critics have
called it "the greatest Southern novel ever written." Yet
Faulkner wanted to broaden the meaning of his story beyond
the South. The biblical reference in the title elevates the story
of an ambitious and ruthless, but otherwise anonymous, figure
like Sutpen to the status of a noble figure like King David. This
is not unlike how Joyce's "mythic method" in Ulysses arguably
elevates Leopold Bloom to the level of an epic hero.
Shifting Narrators
The novel is written as a story told primarily to and by Quentin
Compson, whose grandfather was a close friend of the main
character, Thomas Sutpen. The story told to Quentin is also
the story told by him—for example, to his college roommate,
Shreve. (Late in the novel, Shreve, too, relates what he
imagines happened at various points in the story.) The history
of the Sutpen family is told to Quentin by various individuals
who knew, or believed they knew, what had happened to cause
the tragedy that befell this family. Each narrator tells his or her
own version of the story or part of the story. Thus the narrative
is framed by the different characters, each with their own
knowledge and understanding of events. The narrative is built
up in layers, each layer provided by another narrator. One
character may narrate her version or experience of events
(and feelings about these events), while in a later chapter
another character tells a new and different, sometimes even
contradictory, version of the same events.
For example, Mr. Compson tells a large part of the story to his
son Quentin; Compson heard the story from his own father,
General Compson. Quentin relates what he heard from his
father to his roommate, Shreve. By the end of the novel, the
facts of the Sutpen family history come into clearer focus.
However, the interpretation of the family history—what the
characters make of these facts—is relative, because the past is
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Author Biography 3
lived and remembered differently by different narrators.
Stream-of-Consciousness
Technique
Some of the novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness
technique, which presents the narrative in an uninterrupted
flow of seemingly rambling thoughts or spoken words that
attempt to capture actual thought and speech. Stream-of-
consciousness writing is often nonlinear and may not be
logical, as the human mind rarely produces thoughts in a
straightforward and logical way. But this technique is highly
evocative. For example, Miss Rosa hates Sutpen and
everything he did and stands for. Her feelings pour out of her in
her stream-of-consciousness narration. Through this
technique, the reader gets a vivid and intense sense of the
characters and events in the story.
Stream-of-consciousness writing can be hard to follow. The
narrator's thoughts may veer off the main subject and wander
to other things. A narrator may fail to make clear who or what
he or she is talking about. In Absalom, Absalom! the confusion
produced by the use of the technique is intentional; the author
intended for meaning to build cumulatively.
a Author Biography
Early Life
Nobel Prize–winning author William Faulkner was born William
Cuthbert Falkner on September 25, 1897, in New Albany,
Mississippi. (He later changed the spelling of his last name.)
When Faulkner was five years old, his family moved to Oxford,
Mississippi, where he would spend most of his life. The oldest
of four boys, Faulkner read widely, wrote poetry, and loved to
draw, but as he grew older, school began to bore him, and he
dropped out in 11th grade. During his teens, Faulkner fell in love
with a vivacious and charming girl named Estelle Oldham.
When Estelle agreed to marry another man, Faulkner was
heartbroken. He decided to move to New Haven, Connecticut,
to live with Phil Stone, a poet and literary mentor who had
recognized Faulkner's tremendous talent and helped him hone
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Characters 4

his writing skills. To continue his literary studies, Faulkner

enrolled at the University of Mississippi. He published his first Later Career and Recognition
poems and short works in the student newspaper, but he soon
lost interest in coursework and dropped out after three Beginning in 1932, Faulkner worked intermittently as a

semesters. screenwriter for a number of different film houses over the

next two decades; his work included screen adaptations of
novels by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler. At the

Growth as a Writer
In 1924 Phil Stone helped Faulkner publish a book of poetry,
The Marble Faun. Two years later, another literary mentor,
writer Sherwood Anderson, helped Faulkner publish his first
novel, Soldiers' Pay, about a wounded aviator returning home
after World War I. Anderson then encouraged Faulkner to start
writing about his native Mississippi—a suggestion that inspired
Faulkner's greatest literary successes. His first well-known
novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), was set in
Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional place very similar to
Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner grew up. The
Sound and the Fury centers on the Compson family, a once-
wealthy Southern family in decline. Written in an experimental,
often stream-of-consciousness style, with a fine ear for
Southern speech, the novel wasn't immediately successful, but
same time, he continued publishing novels and short stories,
including The Hamlet (1940) and the collection Go Down,
Moses (1942). Eventually, critics caught up to Faulkner's
prodigious talent, and he began to amass literary prizes. He
was awarded the 1949 Prize in Literature, and he won the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice: in 1955 for his World War II
novel A Fable (1954) and (posthumously) in 1963 for his last
novel, The Reivers (1962), a coming-of-age novel about a boy
from Yoknapatawpha County.
Faulkner was an alcoholic for much of his life and was
hospitalized periodically for the disease. An avid horseback
rider, he fell several times while riding in his later years,
sustaining injuries that left him physically weak. A final fall
resulted in a heart attack, from which he died on July 6, 1962.

h Characters
over time it brought Faulkner great critical praise; in 1998 the
Modern Library ranked the novel sixth on its list of 100 best
novels of the 20th century.

In 1929—the year of the stock market crash and the beginning

of the Great Depression—Faulkner reunited with Estelle
Oldham, who was now divorced with two children. Faulkner
and Estelle quickly married, and Faulkner took a job at the
University of Mississippi power plant to support his new family.
The couple would go on to have a daughter, Alabama, who
died only a few days after she was born.
Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying (1930) during the early days of
his marriage. He claimed he wrote it in six weeks, between
midnight and 4 a.m., without revising a word. Although he may
have been exaggerating a bit, the resulting novel eventually
was recognized as every bit the "tour de force" he proclaimed
it. Like The Sound and the Fury before it, As I Lay Dying, Light in
August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are set in
Yoknapatawpha County. The Compson family from The Sound
and the Fury reappears in Absalom, Absalom! This novel
focuses on Thomas Sutpen and his family and explores the
effects of racism and miscegenation on Sutpen's ambition to
create a great Southern plantation dynasty carrying his name.
Thomas Sutpen
Sutpen is a ruthless and cold man with a mysterious
background. He's fixated on carrying out his calculated
"design" to establish a rich and powerful family dynasty on
Sutpen's Hundred. He gets rich growing cotton with slave
labor. His past actions and his later plans to correct these
mistakes inevitably destroy him. The devastation of the Civil
War in the South and his own desperation for an heir seal his
tragic fate.
Ellen Sutpen
Ellen Sutpen is a pure and respectable daughter of a
Mississippi Methodist minister. Thomas Sutpen marries her not
for love, but because she gives him the respectability he
craves. Her marriage to the cold and distant Thomas Sutpen
leaves her withdrawn. When she learns about Sutpen's past
and realizes how it will affect her family, it kills her spirit and

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Characters 5

eventually takes her life. is not known. He is adored by Henry Sutpen and forms a tragic
relationship with Judith.

Judith Sutpen
Quentin Compson
Judith grows up as a pure and protected daughter on the rich
Sutpen plantation, where she leads a sheltered life. Her brother Quentin Compson listens to others tell the story of the Sutpen
Henry and the black slave (later servant) Clytie are her main family; he also receives an old letter from the Sutpen family. He
friends. She seems weak and pliable at first, but surviving with relates the story of Thomas Sutpen to his roommate at
Clytie during the Civil War hardens her. Her ambiguous Harvard College, Shreve, and joins with Shreve in imagining
relationship with Charles Bon leaves her an emotionally events to explain parts of the tale. He is a sensitive young man
withdrawn woman, but one with an iron will to survive. who can hardly stand the burden of telling the story of the
Sutpens and is acutely aware of the fact he can't escape his
Southern roots.
Henry Sutpen
Henry is an indecisive, nonviolent character who easily falls
under the influence of others. His earliest and closest
relationship is with his sister, Judith. Later, Henry forms a
strong attachment to the sophisticated Charles Bon, who
becomes Henry's closest friend. However, the more Henry
learns about Charles Bon, the stranger and more conflicted
their relationship becomes. Henry is above all loyal to his friend
Charles Bon and at first refuses to believe anything negative
about him. Later, Henry shoots and kills Charles Bon to prevent
him from marrying his half sister, Judith.

Miss Rosa Coldfield

Miss Rosa grew up in a loveless household, which left her with
life-long emotional scars. She cares about her sister, Ellen, but
despises Thomas Sutpen. Miss Rosa is consumed by rage at
Sutpen's treatment of her sister (his wife) and later of herself.
She is racist but comes to accept living with a black woman
(Clytie) on the plantation. She also shows a caring loyalty to
the Sutpen children until a gross insult from Thomas Sutpen
forces her to flee the plantation.

Charles Bon
Charles Bon is part black but can "pass" for white. His last
name Bon means "good" in French. He lived in New Orleans
and got his elegance, sophistication, and taste for dissipation
and pleasure from that city. He is self-assured and can mingle
easily in Southern white culture—as long as his racial make-up

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Characters 6

Character Map

Judith Sutpen
Dreamy girl, becomes
strong-willed

Daughter

Quentin Compson Ellen Sutpen

College student, haunted Daughter Unhappily married
by tale southern woman
Tells his
story

Spouses

Thomas Sutpen
Ambitious, cold, single- Son
minded man

Son

Son

Charles Bon Sister-in- Henry Sutpen

Sophisticated young man law Indecisive young man

Miss Rosa Coldfield Sisters

Angry, vengeful woman

Main Character

Other Major Character

Minor Character

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
Full Character List
Character Description
Thomas Sutpen is an ambitious man
Thomas who buys 100 square miles of land,
Sutpen builds a mansion, and starts a family in
1830's Mississippi.
Ellen (Coldfield) Sutpen is the
emotionally starved and almost ghostly
Ellen Sutpen
wife of Thomas Sutpen and the mother
of his white son and daughter.
Judith Sutpen is the strong-​willed but
Judith Sutpen obedient white daughter of Ellen and
Thomas Sutpen.
Henry Sutpen is the rather weak and
straight-​laced white son and heir of
Henry Sutpen
Thomas Sutpen and Ellen. He becomes
a close friend to Charles Bon.
Miss Rosa Coldfield is one of the
novel's primary narrators; she relates
her story to Quentin. She is the fiercely
Miss Rosa
vengeful but prim daughter of Goodhue
Coldfield
Coldfield and the sister of Ellen Sutpen.
She harbors an intense hatred for
Thomas Sutpen.
Charles Bon is the sophisticated and
elegant part-​black son of Thomas
Sutpen and Eulalia, his first wife in the
Charles Bon
West Indies. Bon lived in New Orleans,
and he became a close friend of Henry
and the fiancé of Judith.
Quentin, along with Shreve, narrates
the second half of the novel. A
Quentin Southern young man heavily burdened
Compson by the "cursed" history of the Sutpen
family, he is a student at Harvard
College.
The aunt, who is never named, raised
Rosa from childhood. We learn mainly
The aunt she was cold, strict, and distant to
Rosa, whom she blamed for causing
her mother's death in childbirth.
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Characters 7
Charles
The son of Charles Bon and his
octoroon mistress, Charles Etienne de
Etienne de St.
St. Valery Bon leads a tortured life
Valery Bon
because of his mixed race.
Jim Bond is the son of Charles Etienne
Jim Bond
(Bon) and his dark-​skinned black wife.
Clytie (Clytemnestra Sutpen) is the
Clytie daughter of Thomas Sutpen and a
black slave.
Goodhue Coldfield is a puritanical
Goodhue
Methodist minister and the father of
Coldfield
Miss Rosa and Ellen Sutpen.
Quentin's grandfather, General
General
Compson, is Thomas Sutpen's closest
Compson
friend in Mississippi.
Quentin's father, Mr. Compson, tells
Mr. Compson much of the story as he heard it from
his father, the general.
Milly Jones is the granddaughter of
Milly Jones Wash Jones, mother to an illegitimate
daughter of Thomas Sutpen.
Wash Jones is a lower-​class white
Wash Jones squatter and helper on the Sutpen
plantation.
Shreve (Shrevelin) McCannon is a
Canadian student at Harvard,
Shreve
fascinated by Southern history as told
McCannon
to him by Quentin, his college
roommate.
The unnamed octoroon is a mistress of
Unnamed
Charles Bon in New Orleans and
octoroon
mother of his son Charles Etienne.
Eulalia Bon Sutpen is Thomas Sutpen's
Eulalia Bon first wife, whom he married in the West
Sutpen Indies. She is part black and the mother
of Charles Bon.
The unnamed infant is the illegitimate
Unnamed
daughter born to Milly Bond and
infant
Thomas Sutpen.
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Plot Summary 8

nightmare" of his and his family's life and the "desolation" that
k Plot Summary was his undoing—and the undoing of all who were associated
with him, including Miss Rosa.
The main action of Absalom, Absalom! takes place in the
The rest of the novel tells how and why Thomas Sutpen's
fictional Yoknapatawpha County, near the (also fictional) town
life—and the lives of those around him—unfolded as it did.
of Jefferson in northern Mississippi. The plot revolves around
There are two narrative threads. The history thread tells the
the character and actions of Thomas Sutpen, a poor boy from
story of Sutpen and his family, which begins with Sutpen's
what will become West Virginia who pursues a burning
origins in western Virginia, through the Virginia Tidewater and
ambition to be respectable, to never be shunned or
Haiti, then to Mississippi. He creates the Hundred and starts a
disrespected by those with more money than he has, such as
family, but tragedy leaves the grand plantation and the family in
other plantation (and slave) owners. The genesis of his
ruins.
ambition is described in Chapter 7 as the cold, calculating
Sutpen who devises a "design" to realize his ambition. When
The character thread tells how the story is told to, and retold
Sutpen somehow amasses enough wealth, he buys 100 square
by, Quentin Compson. This covers his visit to Miss Rosa in
miles of land in northern Mississippi ("Sutpen's Hundred"),
September 1909, his conversation later that day with his father,
builds a magnificent mansion, has countless slaves working his
and his long conversation with Shreve in Cambridge in 1910.
land and making him money, and sets about establishing what
One strand of the novel is about Sutpen's life in Mississippi,
he hopes will be a powerful family dynasty. The plot tells how
after he has established his plantation.
Sutpen rose from an impoverished Appalachian boy to the
most powerful and richest man in Yoknapatawpha County and Both strands revolve around Charles Bon, Sutpen's son with
shows the effect of Sutpen's actions on others and on his own his West Indian first wife, and how having a mixed-blood son
legacy. brings about the downfall of the Sutpen family in Mississippi.
Each chapter adds another layer to the reader's understanding
In Chapter 1 Miss Rosa Coldfield speaks to Quentin Compson,
of Sutpen's tragedy.
a young man whose grandfather knew Sutpen well. Miss Rosa
needs to tell Quentin the story of the Sutpens before he leaves
for Harvard College in Massachusetts. Miss Rosa has her own
version of the history of Thomas Sutpen and his family and
fate. Quentin hardly knows Miss Rosa, but she feels compelled
to keep her story alive by passing it on to his generation. She
says she must relate the story to Quentin so people will "know
at last why God let us [the South] lose the War."

Miss Rosa proceeds to talk about how Thomas Sutpen, a

complete stranger, arrived in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833
with a band of slaves and set about realizing his ambition to
own a plantation and start a family dynasty. Miss Rosa says
Sutpen was never a gentleman, and she has harbored an
intense hatred for Sutpen for 43 years. She almost always
refers to him as a "demon." Quentin interprets her stream-of-
consciousness ramblings as "invoking [the] ghost" of Thomas
Sutpen who, at the time of this telling, is dead. Miss Rosa says
Sutpen sought respectability and tried to attain it by marrying
her sister, Ellen Coldfield. Yet issues of race, of irredeemable
past actions, and Sutpen's implacable, calculating, and stony
coldness destroy his family, leading to Ellen's death in the
process. For these and other reasons, Miss Rosa nurtures a
burning, obsessive hatred for the "ogre" who "conceived [the]

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Plot Summary 9

Plot Diagram

Climax

11

10
12
9
Falling Action

Rising Action 8
13
7

6 14
5
15
4
Resolution
3

2
1

Introduction

9. Sutpen tells Henry that Charles Bon is black.

Introduction
10. Charles tells Henry to be his brother or kill him.

1. In the West Indies, Sutpen marries Eulalia.

Climax

Rising Action 11. Henry kills Charles Bon.

2. Sutpen and Eulalia have a son, Charles Bon.

3. Sutpen comes to Mississippi and buys Sutpen's Hundred.

Falling Action
4. Sutpen marries Ellen Coldfield for her respectability.
12. Sutpen insults Rosa, so she won't marry him.
5. Henry and Judith are born to the Sutpens.
13. Sutpen impregnates and insults Milly.
6. Henry meets Charles Bon at the University of Mississippi.
14. Wash Jones kills Sutpen.
7. At Christmas, Charles and Judith fall in love.

8. Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his brother.

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Plot Summary 10

Resolution

15. Sutpen's mansion burns down with Henry inside.

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Plot Summary 11

Timeline of Events

1827

Thomas Sutpen marries Eulalia Bon in the West Indies.

1831

Sutpen and Eulalia have a son, Charles Bon.

1833

Sutpen arrives in Mississippi, buys land (Supten's

Hundred), and builds a mansion.

1838

Sutpen marries Ellen Coldfield.

1839

Supten and Ellen have a son, Henry Sutpen.

1841

Supten and Ellen have a daughter, Judith Sutpen.

1859

Henry Sutpen meets Charles Bon at college.

Christmas 1860

Sutpen tells Henry that Charles Bon is his brother.

1861–1865

Sutpen, Henry, and Charles Bon fight in the Civil War.

During the Civil War

Sutpen tells Henry that Charles Bon is black.

1863

Ellen dies.

1865

Henry kills Charles Bon at the mansion gates.

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Plot Summary 12

1866

Sutpen proposes to Rosa and insults her; she leaves.

1869

Milly bears Sutpen a daughter, whom he rejects

insultingly.

Moments later

Wash Jones kills Sutpen.

1871

12-year-old Charles Etienne Bon comes to live at the

plantation.

1882

Jim Bond is born to Charles Etienne and his wife.

1884

Judith and Charles Etienne die of yellow fever.

September 1909

Miss Rosa and Quentin find Henry in the mansion.

December 1909

Sutpen's mansion is burned down with Henry in it; Jim

Bond lives in the woods of Sutpen's Hundred.

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
c Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1
Summary
In September 1909 Miss Rosa Coldfield summons young
Quentin Compson to her "airless" and "shuttered" home to tell
him what she knows and how she feels about the plantation
owner Thomas Sutpen. Miss Rosa wants Quentin to know her
family's history before he leaves for Harvard College in
Massachusetts. She fears history may be lost forever if she
does not pass it on. Sutpen was the husband of Miss Rosa's
sister, Ellen. Miss Rosa hates Sutpen for his ruthlessness and
mistreatment of her sister (whom he married solely for the
respectability she conferred on him), his family, and eventually
Miss Rosa herself. She refers to Sutpen as a "demon," "devil,"
or "ogre." Miss Rosa is described as a "small figure in black"
who is so physically fragile and tiny her feet are "clear of the
floor" when she sits in a chair. A Methodist minister's daughter,
she is extremely controlled, with an "air of impotent and static
rage."
Quentin thinks about Miss Rosa's father, Goodhue Coldfield.
He refused to fight in the Civil War, and he became a recluse
and died in his attic. Quentin listens for hours as Miss Rosa
tells of how Sutpen "first rode into town out of no discernible
past" in 1833, acquired his 100-square-mile plantation
("Sutpen's Hundred"), and eventually chose to marry Ellen.
In an aside Quentin asks his father, Mr. Compson, why Miss
Rosa chose to speak to him. Mr. Compson then says Miss
Rosa will want Quentin's help later on. Mr. Compson also refers
to his father's (and Quentin's grandfather's) friendship with
Sutpen, as well as an "engagement that did not engage," a
subject that will be further explained later in the novel.
Miss Rosa describes the two Sutpen children, Judith and
Henry. She briefly mentions exile and murder in relation to
Henry and a nonengagement in reference to Judith. She
describes her sister's married life as "doomed" and a
"desolation." That family's life, she says, was one of "formal and
lifeless decorum," implying relationships were all on the
surface, with no emotional attachment behind them. Miss Rosa
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Chapter Summaries 13
talks about Sutpen as a man seeking "respectability" to protect
him from "strangers who might come seeking him." Miss Rosa
implies Sutpen's past contains some vile actions. He must
protect himself from the "outrage" of others who know or find
out about them. She speaks of the "wild" and "savage" black
slaves he brought with him when he arrived in Mississippi and
began building his plantation.
Miss Rosa became intimately involved in the family when Ellen,
on her deathbed, asks Rosa to "Protect her. Protect Judith at
least." In this role in the Sutpen family, Rosa comes to hate
Sutpen even more intensely and to recognize how the family
represents the "curse on the South ... on the land and the time
already cursed." Rosa becomes involved in another aspect of
Sutpen's "design" that feeds her hatred of him. The reader will
learn more about that later in the novel.
The chapter ends with a description of Ellen's shock at having
seen the fights Sutpen organized between his black slaves.
She is aghast her children have witnessed such violence.
Henry is put off by the fighting scenes, but Judith is riveted and
not shocked or alarmed at all. Ellen is particularly shocked
when she learns Sutpen himself sometimes fights one of his
own slaves. The lack of compatibility between Sutpen and
Ellen is underscored by Sutpen's seeming inability to
comprehend Ellen's emotions. He claims, probably falsely, he
had no idea his children had witnessed the fights.
Analysis
Miss Rosa's telling of the Sutpen story is presented primarily
as a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Her thoughts are
disjointed, and she introduces a variety of characters and
events that, at this early stage in the book, are not explained.
Miss Rosa's narrative is also one of the clearest examples of
the subjectivity of lived history. Her view of the history of the
Sutpen family is extremely biased. Her account is also
improbable, as her memories of the time when she was quite
young are likely not wholly reliable. Miss Rosa's narrative is the
most personal and emotionally fraught of all those in the book.
She nurtures an intense hatred for Sutpen, whose actions
bring nothing but destruction to anything and everything he
touches. She sits "bolt upright" in her eternal black dress as if
she must maintain her rigidity to prevent the violence of her
hatred from tearing her apart. She even refers to his "doomed"
children (her niece and nephew) as "half-ogre children." Miss
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Chapter Summaries 14

Rosa states that during her sister's marriage Ellen lived a life of
"tranquil and unwitting desolation ... as if she had never lived at
all." She refers to Sutpen as "a demon ... who came out of
nowhere and without warning ... [and] tore violently a
plantation" from the land. As Quentin listens to Miss Rosa's
account, he sees in his mind Sutpen and his slaves "overrun
suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished
earth and drag [the plantation] ... violently out of the soundless
shield of a virtuous woman, to make his position impregnable,"
and she notes "it was mine and Ellen's father who gave him
that." Rosa correctly identifies respectability as a key part of
Sutpen's "design." After Ellen's marriage, because there was
nothing else her father could provide him, "not even sheer
gratitude ... could force him to forego his own pleasure."
Miss Rosa remembers the past as a dream and the people she

Nothing." knew in the past as ghosts. Sutpen and the war have
destroyed everything. Memories of Sutpen and what he did are
Miss Rosa hates Sutpen for a "crime committed that would "nightmares" for Rosa. For Southerners, Faulkner suggests, the
leave [her] family cursed to be instruments not only for that past is the only thing real.
man's destruction" but for their own. Miss Rosa wonders what
"crime" her grandfather or father may have committed that
their family should have run afoul of Sutpen. Chapter 2
In her narrative Miss Rosa provides an outline of the entire
story. But because her telling is so subjective, it will take the
rest of the novel to make clear what she just hints at. Much of
Summary
what Miss Rosa says in this chapter is not intended to be
Chapter 2 occurs later on the same day as Chapter 1, after
understood fully at this point. Not only are people and incidents
Quentin has returned from Miss Rosa's. The chapter is told
only briefly touched on, they are presented in a highly personal
both by the omniscient narrator and from the point of view of
and subjective way. What happened is known, and most of the
Mr. Compson, Quentin's father. He tells Quentin the story of
events in the novel are presented in this first chapter. The
Thomas Sutpen's early years in Yoknapatawpha County. Mr.
essential question is: Why did these events happen? The
Compson has been told much of this by his father (Quentin's
answer to this question becomes clear as the narrative
grandfather), General Compson.
unfolds.

Sutpen arrived in the county in 1833, when he was about 25

Miss Rosa's narrative also expresses the racial prejudice of the
years old. At this time, no one knows him, where he comes
time and the way the South was cursed by the immorality of
from, or anything else about him. Mr. Compson describes him
slavery. Sutpen's violent history is the history of the
as looking "sick," as though he had been "through some
slaveholding South, whose slaveholders desperately need to
solitary furnace experience which was more than a fever."
achieve "respectability" to conceal and justify their barbarism.
Sutpen is a big, gaunt man with a short reddish beard and
Miss Rosa's tale contributes to Faulkner's larger project of
"alert, ruthless" eyes. Sutpen seems impoverished, but his
telling the story of the American South's rise and fall. She
"secret and furious impatience" to realize his "design" will soon
refers to Sutpen's slaves as "black beasts" and as a "band of
change that. Townspeople ask Sutpen questions about
wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men."
himself, but he discloses nothing. When they learn Sutpen has
Yet Miss Rosa also recognizes slavery is the South's curse that
bought his 100-square-mile plantation from some American
led to the Civil War and to the region's ruination. She considers
Indians "with gold Spanish coin," they are astounded.
Sutpen and his actions the embodiment of the "curse" of the
South that led to war: "Only through the blood of our men ...
Sutpen leaves his newly acquired land and travels somewhere
could He stay this demon." With men like Sutpen, she avers, "Is
via the Mississippi River. Sometime later, he returns with a
it any wonder that Heaven saw fit for us to lose [the war]?"
French architect and 20 "wild negroes." Sutpen has the
architect design his mansion, and eventually Sutpen and his
Miss Rosa had been watching Sutpen for decades, and she'd
slaves begin to build it. During this period Sutpen and his black
figured out how he used people to realize his ambition, his
slaves are almost indistinguishable, all going naked except for
"design." This was particularly relevant to his treatment of her
a coating of dried mud. As Miss Rosa told Quentin, "[they
and her family. She understands "he needed respectability, the
were] distinguishable one from another by his beard and eyes

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Chapter Summaries 15

alone and only the architect resembling a human creature." ceremony is over and Ellen gets into a carriage, some
This observation reinforces the idea, propounded mainly by townsmen throw clods of dirt at the carriage and at Sutpen,
Miss Rosa, that Sutpen was "uncivilized." who stands "motionless" throughout. Ellen begins to cry again,
but the mob disperses. Sutpen "did not forget that night," and
After two years of intense and backbreaking labor, Sutpen's he never again invited the townsmen to his mansion for parties.
mansion is completed. Sutpen lives alone in the windowless,
doorless, unfurnished house for three years. He often invites
the men of the county to visit his mansion, where they play Analysis
cards and drink. He also arranges fights between his male
slaves that are popular entertainment for the visiting men of Chapter 2 is primarily narrated by Mr. Compson, Quentin's
the county. Sometimes, to the shock of the onlookers, Sutpen father. General Compson, Quentin's grandfather, was the
himself fights with one of his slaves—usually winning the fight. closest thing to a friend Sutpen ever had. So Mr. Compson's
During this period, Sutpen seems to blur or be uninterested in telling of Sutpen's story gives the reader a fuller (and
the difference between white and black men. The difference somewhat more positive) view of the man and the events
doesn't seem to matter to him; he seems to vie the racial caste surrounding him. This new perspective on Sutpen may offer a
system as a luxury for the wealthy and well-established. Yet it more balanced view of the man. But as with all subjective
is the difference between the races that will prove to be his history, it is hard to know what is true and what isn't. The story
undoing when, later, he is forced to be acutely aware of race. Mr. Compson tells is secondhand. So just as parts of Miss
Rosa's account might be true or untrue (given the bias created
Sutpen's slaves clear the land and plant cotton. While they
by the intensity of her feelings), parts of Mr. Compson's
work the fields, Sutpen oversees the work from his perch on a
account may also be true or untrue, depending on what he
horse. A rumor goes around Sutpen wants to marry for money.
remembers of the things he heard from his father. Throughout
But the county learns it is not wealth Sutpen wants in a wife, it
the novel, readers must bear in mind that what each narrator
is respectability. Sutpen targets Goodhue Coldfield, a
says may contain kernels of truth as well as fabrications based
puritanical Methodist minister, as the father of a prospective
on rumors or bias. Readers should also note instances in which
bride. Coldfield is not rich, but in his "Puritan uprightness" he is
Compson's narrative references and affirms or denies the
unquestionably respectable. Sutpen determines to marry Ellen
validity of things Miss Rosa says in Chapter 1.
Coldfield.
Mr. Compson's telling is far less emotional and far more
Sutpen originally arrived via the river with his slaves. After he
matter-of-fact than the tale told by Miss Rosa. This does not
decides to marry, Sutpen disappears by traveling on the river.
necessarily mean his version of events contains more truth or
When he returns, he brings with him windows, doors, lavish
is more reliable; he simply has a more unemotional, down-to-
furnishings, rugs, drapery cloth, chandeliers, and all the other
earth character. In Mr. Compson's telling, Sutpen is not the evil
fancy accoutrements needed for life in a fine mansion. He
force Miss Rosa depicted. Instead he is like a "visionary" who is
stays at the town hotel, brings flowers to the Coldfield family
"alert" and "ruthless." Sutpen is drawn as a character who is "a
home, and emerges from there officially engaged to Ellen. But
slave of his secret and furious impatience" and determined to
when he leaves the Coldfield home he is arrested. The
make his mark. He is fixated on his ambitious "design," and his
townsfolk think Sutpen must have broken the law in order to
will to achieve it is powerful and indomitable. To this end,
have acquired such rich furnishings for his house. General
Sutpen is said to have "alertness for measuring and weighing
Compson and Mr. Coldfield intercede and have Sutpen
event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature"
released on bail. Sutpen is never indicted or brought to trial, so
to see his ambition fulfilled. He is cold and calculating in pursuit
no one knows how he got the money to furnish his mansion. A
of his ambition.
few months later, in June 1838, Sutpen marries Ellen Coldfield.
Mr. Compson, like Rosa, recognizes Sutpen sought a wife to
Ellen weeps on the day of her wedding, possibly because
cement his reputation as a respectable gentleman. Also like
nobody in town attends; the church is empty and instead the
Rosa, Mr. Compson admits Sutpen's "design" to realize his
townsfolk assemble outside. Mr. Compson claims Ellen's tears
ambition was cold and calculating even in choosing a wife. In
are not because she is marrying Sutpen. But when the
fact, the women of Jefferson remark "he had now come to

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
town to find a wife exactly as he would have gone to the
Memphis market to buy livestock or slaves." To achieve his aim,
he allies himself with the one man in town with whom he has
nothing in common: an upright minister. In matters of marriage
and childbearing, the novel's women are emblematic of all
women in the antebellum South: they figure only as the means
to one end or another, whether it is respectability or a son and
heir.
Mr. Compson states that the townsfolk thought of Sutpen in
terms of "ruthlessness rather than justice and of fear rather
than respect." But the town overcomes its fear when Sutpen
disappears on the Mississippi River again, returning with lavish
furnishings for his mansion. The river here, as elsewhere in the
book, signals a significant change in events or conditions.
Characters in the book who travel on the river are almost
always changed by some event or new realization. Here, too,
Sutpen's river journey changes not only his fortunes—he now
has the belongings to set up a household fit for a pure
Southern wife—but the way the townsfolk view him. After
Sutpen's mistaken arrest, Mr. Coldfield is able to have Sutpen
freed from jail. Having Mr. Coldfield vouch for his innocence
reinforces Sutpen's respectability, and thus furthers his
"design."
Sutpen may have gained respectability through his new wife
and her family, but he has earned the enmity of most of the
townspeople, as demonstrated by the empty church and the
men throwing dirt clods. Ellen weeps, but Sutpen does not
care. She and the townsfolk are immaterial to his design, so he
is indifferent to what they do or what they think.
Chapter 3
Summary
Chapter 3 is again narrated by Mr. Compson, who is speaking
to his son Quentin later the same afternoon. He mainly relates
the stories of Miss Rosa's life and Ellen's married life. In telling
these stories, Mr. Compson's narrative weaves back and forth
in time. Faulkner introduces new characters and situations
without explaining them. In particular the character Charles
Bon is mentioned, but his role in the story is not elaborated
here. He's described as a friend of Henry's from New Orleans
who has a "worldly elegance and assurance" and whom Miss
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Chapter Summaries 16
Rosa would never meet.
Miss Rosa's mother had died in childbirth, and her family is said
never to have forgiven Miss Rosa for causing her mother's
death. Miss Rosa was raised in her father's house by a spinster
aunt, and thus grew up steeped in bitterness. She hated her
father while living with him in their "grim mausoleum ... of
puritan righteousness."
After the elopement of her spinster aunt, Miss Rosa begins to
see more of the Sutpen family. By 1858 Ellen has "bloomed"
and embraced her role as wife and mother in a great house.
She is frequently seen out shopping with her "dreamy and
volitionless" 17-year-old daughter, Judith. She calls upon the
ladies of the town, including Miss Rosa. Ellen begins to live in "a
world of pure illusion [as wife to] the wealthiest [man and as]
mother of the most fortunate [children]." She acts like a
"duchess," though she is also giggly and silly. Henry Sutpen
and Charles Bon are away at college. Sutpen also leaves for a
short time.
Over time Ellen and Judith visit Miss Rosa less and less
frequently when they come to town. When she speaks of him
at all, Ellen refers to Charles Bon as if he were an "inanimate
object ... or furnishing." Yet the reader is introduced to the
notion Judith will marry Charles Bon (whoever he is—the
reader does not yet know very much about him, though he is
mentioned, as when Mr. Compson states Miss Rosa never met
him). Miss Rosa begins sewing clothes for Judith's trousseau.
While she's working on the trousseau, Ellen stops visiting her.
Mr. Compson says "then something happened," but at that time
nobody knew exactly what it was or who was involved.
Whatever it was, it occurred during a second Christmas visit to
the mansion by Henry and Charles the following year, 1860.
The event was dire and momentous. The upshot of this
"happening" is Henry renounces his father, his birthright, and
the mansion. Henry leaves with Charles Bon, after which Ellen
"retired to the darkened room which she was not to quit until
she died two years later."
During this period, the Civil War is looming. News arrives of
Lincoln's election and the firing on Fort Sumter (in April 1861).
Miss Rosa, and likely most of the female characters,
"scarce[ly] listens" to the news that is "the knell and doom of
her native land." Thomas Sutpen enlists in 1861 with Colonel
Sartoris's regiment to fight for the South. As the war
progresses, Sutpen's slaves abandon Sutpen's Hundred and
follow the Union soldiers away. The Sutpen mansion begins to
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
fall apart.
Mr. Compson then tells Quentin about Mr. Coldfield and how
he closed his store when troops began to appear in the town.
Mr. Coldfield was a conscientious objector who refused to sell
his goods to fighting men. Mr. Compson insists Mr. Coldfield
"was not a coward" but "a man of uncompromising morality."
Mr. Coldfield nails himself into the attic of his home. For a
while, Miss Rosa (his daughter) sends up his food on a rope he
pulls in through a window. But then, the reader is told, "he
died." Mr. Compson speculates on why Mr. Coldfield starved
himself to death. He says perhaps it was the sinful greed he
showed in doing underhanded business with Sutpen. Then
again, his suicide might have had another cause altogether.
After her father starves himself to death in 1864, Miss Rosa is
both "an orphan and a pauper." She remembers Ellen's
deathbed wish in 1863 that Miss Rosa "protect" Judith, so she
moves out to Sutpen's Hundred, but she does not move right
away. She goes after a character named Wash Jones, whose
place in the story is not otherwise explained, rides to her house
one day and calls her name. When she does go to Sutpen's
Hundred, Miss Rosa finds Judith living with Clytie, Sutpen's
daughter with a slave woman. She knows Henry has
disappeared, but she does not know why.
Compson explains that Miss Rosa's disconnectedness and
isolation in the world leads her to contemplate marriage with
the "demon" Sutpen. This marriage is only alluded to, and the
reason why Miss Rosa might possibly agree to marry Sutpen is
not fully explained. It's impelled by a "catastrophe," but readers
must wait to learn what form this event takes.
Analysis
Readers should note this chapter is formatted differently from
the previous one, though Mr. Compson is still the narrator. This
chapter contains no quotation marks, so it's sometimes difficult
to tell who is speaking. The chapter seems to be a continuation
of the story as presented in Chapter 2.
This chapter begins with Mr. Compson's perspective on Miss
Rosa's early life. Though his account is subjective, his story
humanizes the tormented, hate-twisted woman the reader met
in Chapter 1. However, as with the other narrators, Mr.
Compson's version of Miss Rosa's life is not definitive. He
rarely cites the sources he uses for the information he
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Chapter Summaries 17
provides and frequently uses the words perhaps and doubtless
to indicate how speculative this part of his narrative is.
It is Mr. Compson who compares the Sutpen story to a "Greek
tragedy," meaning a tragedy fated to happen. These
references reinforce the mythical qualities of the story
previously introduced by Miss Rosa's talk of ogres and demons
and by Mr. Compson's account of the creation of the mansion.
They also highlight Mr. Compson's particular outlook and
philosophy. For example, to speak about these events as a
Greek tragedy elevates and ennobles the events. Yet the
theatrical allusions also suggest the actors are merely
actors—puppets controlled by some impersonal force of fate
or history of which they, and Sutpen most of all, are ignorant.
The themes of racism and miscegenation are introduced in this
chapter by the first mention of Clytie, Sutpen's child with one
of his female slaves. Sutpen is said to have named all his "wild
niggers" in order "to assimilate them." Clytie's full name is
Clytemnestra, a figure from ancient Greek tragedy who
murdered her husband (Agamemnon) and was then killed by
her son (Orestes). Though the Greek Clytemnestra is
sometimes portrayed as a noble woman, others interpret her
character as vengeful and without remorse. In Absalom,
Absalom!, as readers will discover, Clytie acts nobly, as a kind
of glue that helps the Sutpen women survive the Civil War. In a
sense, though, Clytie symbolically helps to kill Sutpen (her
father). Like Wash Jones's granddaughter and the child Sutpen
will beget upon her, she represents the utter callousness
toward human life and dignity that will bring about his
destruction. Clytie's actions at the end of the novel will give her
more of the "remorseless" quality of her Greek namesake.
This chapter introduces the character Charles Bon. The reader
is told very little in this chapter about who he is and how he
figures in the Sutpen story. He is mysterious, "appear[ing]
phoenix-like, fullsprung from no childhood, born of no woman,
and impervious to time." Bon's mysterious origins are like
Sutpen's: they appear seemingly out of nowhere and without
explanation, forcing readers to do the same sort of
investigation and speculation the characters must do.
The river again represents change. Charles Bon goes home to
New Orleans via the river. Mr. Compson then states Sutpen
was "away on business" just afterward. However, he also
speculates Clytie knew Sutpen, too, had taken the river to
follow Bon to New Orleans. What Sutpen confirms through this
river journey will reshape his family and the events in the rest
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
of the novel.
Finally, ghosts and dreams appear symbolically in this chapter.
Faulkner refers to the dreamy unreality of life on Sutpen's
Hundred several times. Ellen is described as having
"succeeded at last in evacuating not only [her] puritan heritage
but reality itself," having "escaped at last into a world of pure
illusion." Mr. Compson says the daughter, Judith, was a "young
girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and
imperviousness to actuality." The symbol of a dreamlike life
and almost ghostly existence is underlined.
Chapter 4
Summary
Quentin waits for night to fall before returning to Miss Rosa's
house. He pictures the dark, grim place and the woman who
lives in "impregnable solitude." While Quentin is sitting on the
porch, Mr. Compson brings out a letter Charles Bon had long
ago written to Judith. Judith wanted to save the letter, so she
gave it to Quentin's grandmother for safekeeping. Later in the
chapter Quentin will read the letter.
Mr. Compson explains Henry had met the older Charles in
college, where Henry came to love him as a friend. It is implied
Henry may have also had homosexual feelings for Bon. Henry
adored Charles Bon so much he began to emulate his actions,
his dress, and his sophisticated "manner of living." Judith is also
taken with Charles. Although they spend little time together,
when Charles and Judith first met at Christmas in 1859 they
seem to become romantically attached to each other.
Sometime in the months that follow they become engaged.
Mr. Compson tells what he thinks occurred at a critical turning
point in the Sutpen family history. This event takes place in
1860 when Henry and Charles visit Sutpen's Hundred for the
Christmas holiday. Mr. Compson describes Charles as an
"intending bigamist," because Charles carries a picture of an
octoroon woman and child. This seems to indicate Charles is
already married.
Mr. Compson imagines the crucial confrontation during the
1860 Christmas holiday that occurred between Sutpen and
Henry and caused Henry to forsake his father, inheritance, and
home. The consequences of the revelations, Mr. Compson
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Chapter Summaries 18
says, led Henry to "cast his lot with [his] single friend," though
"he must have known ... that what his father had told him was
true" and "that he was doomed and destined to kill [Charles]."
This is the first time Henry is connected by name to the murder
of Charles Bon. The reader learns, too, Sutpen had traveled to
New Orleans (Charles's home) to confirm who and what he
was. Mr. Compson thinks Sutpen was there to confirm
Charles's marriage, though this assumption will later prove to
be incomplete.
Henry refuses to believe what his father has told him even
though on some level he knew "that it was the truth." Henry
does not tell Charles about his break with his father because
he does not want Charles to lie and deny what Henry senses is
true. At the same time, Charles lets Henry know he will act in
accordance with Henry's wishes regarding his marriage to
Judith.
Henry and Charles then travel to New Orleans. Charles
introduces Henry, the puritan country boy, to debauched and
"voluptuous" behavior. During Henry's stay in New Orleans, Mr.
Compson implies, Henry also found out the truth about
Charles's marriage. Henry confirms Charles's marriage to the
octoroon (one-eighth black) woman and is troubled by it. The
mother of his son is part black, Charles states, so she doesn't
count as a wife. His marriage is therefore not official and
should not be seen as an obstacle to his marriage to Judith.
Henry wants to believe all this, but he is terribly conflicted,
telling himself, "I will believe! ... Whether it is true or not, I will
believe!" Yet the more time Henry spends with Charles in New
Orleans, the less Henry realizes he knows about his friend.
As he tries to figure out why Sutpen objected to Charles, Mr.
Compson essentially throws up his hands and says, "They
don't explain and we are not supposed to know." He mentions
the clues that others have to try to understand the Sutpen
tragedy, such as old tales and letters, "yet something is
missing." He describes rereading, poring over the clues, but in
the end, he says, people have "just the words, the symbols ...
against that turgid background of a horrible and blooding
mischancing of human affairs." He does, however, observe
shrewdly that the bond between Henry and Judith was strong,
and perhaps in wanting to believe in the possibility of a
marriage between his close friend and his sister, Henry was
fulfilling his own incestuous desires.
Henry and Charles return to college, but then the Civil War
starts. They enlist together in the same regiment to fight for
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
the Confederacy. Mr. Compson speculates both hoped the war
would solve their problem. If one of them were killed in battle,
their awful predicament would be resolved. Mr. Compson says
Judith had no idea what transpired between Henry and his
father. In the four years they fought in the war, Henry did not
allow Charles to write to Judith. During the war years, Judith
and Clytie (along with Wash Jones) live on the plantation,
growing their own food and trying to survive as best they can.
Then in 1863 Ellen dies. At war's end Judith gets the letter from
Charles, and Miss Rosa moves into the mansion.
Mr. Compson finally gives Quentin the letter from Charles to
Judith. It begins by describing the hardships of war and the
shame of its loss. Referring to their engagement, Charles
writes, "We have waited long enough." Yet he does not say
when he will be able to come to see her, as he does not know.
While bemoaning "the best of the South is dead," Charles
writes, "I now believe that you and I are ... included among
those who are doomed to live." The implication is the problem
of Charles's first marriage, and Henry's conflicted thoughts
about it, continue to live as well. Henry demands Charles
renounce his first wife, but he refuses.
After receiving the letter, Judith and Clytie immediately begin
sewing together whatever scraps of cloth they can find to
make Judith's wedding dress. As he listens, Quentin imagines
Henry and Charles returning to Sutpen's Hundred after the
war. The chapter ends by repeating an event revealed in
Chapter 3: Wash Jones is sitting on his mule outside Miss
Rosa's house. The reader now additionally learns Wash tells
Miss Rosa she must come with him because Henry has killed
Charles Bon.
Analysis
This chapter is as much about Henry and Bon as it is about
how Mr. Compson imagines them. His story is compromised by
his lack of understanding of what Sutpen knew about Charles,
why Sutpen went to New Orleans, and what he actually told
Henry at that fateful encounter in the mansion library. Mr.
Compson believes Sutpen told Henry only about Charles's
octoroon first wife. He frequently uses phrases such as "I can
imagine" and "must have [happened]" because he does not
really know the truth of what occurred. Instead, he imagines
what probably happened, using his own ideas and words. The
passage in which he describes the clues others can use to try
to piece together a story is exactly what Mr. Compson and
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Chapter Summaries 19
Quentin are trying to do in the novel, and just what Faulkner
demands of the reader.
Mr. Compson continues to view the characters as heroic,
larger than life, "not dwarfed ... but distinct," not "diffused and
scattered creatures drawn blindly ... from a grab bag and
assembled." Here again there is a mythic dimension to the
story that distinguishes it from a fallen present day.
Mr. Compson also states it is Ellen who initiates the supposed
engagement of Judith to Charles Bon. Mr. Compson says the
"formal engagement existed nowhere yet save in Ellen's mind."
He views Ellen as concocting the engagement to free herself
from "her unreal and weightless life." There is no evidence to
substantiate Ellen's role as the sole instigator of the
engagement. In fact, elsewhere in the chapter, Mr. Compson
refers to Judith being transformed from a "blank shape, [an]
empty vessel," a "young girl ... vague and dreamy" into a
"mature woman in love ... [who had found] repose." The
narrative is unclear as to which of these scenarios is true: Was
Judith in love with Charles, or did Ellen manufacture the whole
drama? What role did Henry and Bon play?
Mr. Compson uses the figure of Bon as a vehicle for a kind of
social critique of the Southern world. Bon is an elegant,
thoughtful, sardonic cosmpolitan; Henry is a passionate,
unthinking, provincial clown. Mr. Compson supposes Bon
"found Sutpen's action and Henry's reaction [to the news of
Bon's marriage to be] a fetich-ridden moral blundering which
did not deserve to be called thinking." He also describes
Charles contemplating the Sutpen family from behind a barrier
of sophistication "in comparison with which Henry and Sutpen
were troglodytes." The long-imagined scenario of Bon
introducing Henry to the world of New Orleans is a kind of
allegory of innocence and experience. This seems to be a big
preoccupation of Mr. Compson's.
The drama of Judith and Charles is evoked as a kind of dream.
Henry has a "dream of change" in Charles Bon's
circumstances. He hopes he will wake from this "dream" to find
all the problems are resolved or have disappeared. The letter
Judith received from Charles is finally revealed at the end of
the chapter. In it Charles writes "the best of the South is dead"
but he and Judith "are doomed to live." They must live on as
ghosts in a dead world which has had its culture destroyed.
A gate divides the past from the future in this chapter—the
gate at which Charles Bon is murdered. Charles and Henry ride
side by side "to the gate of the mansion ... Inside the gate ... a
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
young girl waited in a wedding dress." But Henry will not let
Charles pass through: "Don't you pass the shadow of the
[gate]post," Henry warns Charles. Charles replies, "I am going
to pass it, Henry." For both of them, passing that gate would
have life-altering consequences. Yet Henry's not allowing
Charles to pass through the gate has its own devastating
effects. At the end of the chapter, Wash Jones rides up to Miss
Rosa's house to tell her Charles Bon has been killed. Clearly,
Henry murdered Charles rather than let him pass through that
gate.
Chapter 5
Summary
This chapter is narrated by Miss Rosa as she describes what
happened after Wash Jones fetched her to Sutpen's Hundred.
She is telling Quentin about the events that occurred after
Charles Bon was murdered, when Miss Rosa is living in the
Sutpen mansion. Ellen has been dead for two years, so the
events in this narrative occur in 1865. Miss Rosa recounts the
story with the burning bitterness and hatred she's always had
for Sutpen, who, she will explain, ruined her family. The
mansion, too, is a ruin.
When Miss Rosa arrives at the mansion, she rushes inside
expecting to see Henry. Instead she first sees Clytie and her
"coffee-colored" Sutpen face standing "rocklike ... antedating
time and house and doom and all." Clytie's "immobile
antagonism" stops Miss Rosa in her tracks, though Miss Rosa
calls out for Judith. Clytie tries to prevent Miss Rosa from
going up the stairs, even grabbing her wrist to stop her.
Outraged "at the black arresting ... hand on my white woman's
flesh," Miss Rosa launches into a racist rant. Filled with
"amazement and outrage at that black arresting and
untimorous hand on my white woman's flesh," she says, "Take
your hands off me, nigger." She thinks of the situation as a
"nightmare" from which she will awaken. She realizes she is too
late to "protect" Judith as she had promised Ellen she would.
Judith calls to Miss Rosa from the second floor, and she races
up the stairs. Judith is standing in front of a closed bedroom
door holding a small picture. Miss Rosa then gets a bit
sidetracked in her story as she begins to reminisce. She tells
Quentin some things about her "barren" youth, when she felt
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Chapter Summaries 20
almost as if she did not exist. She then recalls or imagines the
time Henry brought Charles to the mansion, though she admits
she never saw Charles then—or ever. Yet Miss Rosa speaks
about the time in 1860 when, on New Year's day, Henry and
Charles stop at her home. She does not see Charles then (or
ever), but his existence stirs a kind of "romantic quickening" in
her. It's possible she fell in love with the idea of Charles, the
elegant stranger she's never seen. Back in her recollection
from 1865, Miss Rosa does not go into the closed room Judith
is blocking, but the reader knows Charles's dead body is in
there when men "carr[y] the coffin up the stairs" and into the
room. Throughout, Miss Rosa describes Judith as "cold and
tranquil," noting "she did not even weep" at Bon's makeshift
funeral.
Miss Rosa stays at the mansion with the two other women,
waiting for Thomas Sutpen to return. They know when he
comes back he will try to rebuild his plantation and mansion.
The three women live "like nuns" or three "creatures," surviving
by their own labor. Their hand-to-mouth existence lasts seven
months, until Sutpen rides up on his horse. Miss Rosa then
makes a strange and unbelievable statement—that she
"became engaged to marry him [Sutpen]"—an astonishing turn
of events.
Sutpen asks Judith where Henry is, and she tells him Henry
murdered Charles Bon, then ran away and is not at the
mansion. Judith weeps for Henry, as she had not done for
Charles. Miss Rosa describes Sutpen as a "shell" who is barely
present. Yet he begins almost immediately, as Miss Rosa had
predicted, to try to rebuild his plantation. His will and
determination to rebuild are steely as he focuses solely on
resurrecting his plantation. Miss Rosa notes that, unlike other
men in the county, Sutpen "kept clear of the sheets and hoods"
of the Ku Klux Klan, and he avoided or ignored the
carpetbaggers who began to overrun the South. With Wash
Jones and a few other men, Sutpen evaluates the state of his
empire. They work tirelessly to bring the plantation back to its
former condition.
One afternoon, Sutpen begins looking strangely at the 19-year-
old Miss Rosa. Then, astonishingly, Sutpen asks her to marry
him. Though she has hated him all her life, Miss Rosa longs for
something resembling a life for herself, so she consents. She
realizes she's the only marriageable white woman available to
Sutpen, and she desperately wants to change the barrenness
of her life. He gives her an engagement ring, but then neither
looks at nor speaks to her for two months—as if she's not
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
there. After two months of silence, on the day when Sutpen
realizes just how much (or how little) of his land he will be able
to save and keep, he suggests something to Miss Rosa that
grossly insults her. Miss Rosa leaves the mansion, abandoning
the family.
Back in her own house, Miss Rosa is destitute. She survives by
scavenging or by stealing vegetables from her neighbors'
gardens. She refuses, however, to accept gifts of food from
her neighbors, as she doesn't want charity. Miss Rosa tells
Quentin about her disbelief when she learns Thomas Sutpen is
dead.
By the end of the chapter, Quentin is barely listening to Miss
Rosa. He is imagining what must have happened in the
mansion when Henry ran in to tell Judith and Clytie he'd killed
Charles Bon. Quentin imagines Henry saying to Judith, "Now
you can't marry him ... Because he's dead ... I've killed him."
Finally, when Quentin is again listening to Miss Rosa she tells
him "There's something in that house ... hidden in it." It's a
disquieting, almost terrifying revelation.
Analysis
As with Miss Rosa's previous narration, this chapter is written
in the stream-of-consciousness technique: it is largely
presented in italics and contains no dialogue tags such as
"Miss Rosa said." It is possible the narrator is Quentin as he
thinks about his conversation with Miss Rosa from earlier in the
afternoon.
In this chapter Miss Rosa repeatedly references what others
may have said about her. For example, she'll say "So they will
have told you [Quentin] doubtless already how." As the chapter
unfolds, Miss Rosa fleshes out the character of Sutpen and
reveals part—but not all—of the reason her hatred for him has
grown so poisonous. She seems quite preoccupied with the
stories circulating about her.
Wash drives Miss Rosa up to the gate of the mansion. As in
other parts of the book, passing through the gate refers to
change; it will shatter Miss Rosa's life. She will be changed
forever in her hatred of Sutpen will intensify and become all-
consuming.
Miss Rosa reveals her racism when she enters the mansion
and Clytie tries to stop her from going upstairs. Rosa describes
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Chapter Summaries 21
Clytie as having "rocklike ... antagonism" toward her, which in
some ways echoes Miss Rosa's own hatred of Sutpen. Clytie
is, after all, a Sutpen herself. Miss Rosa is outraged and
offended when Clytie uses her first name—"Don't you go up
there, Rosa"—and dares to tell her, a white woman, what she
can or cannot do. Clytie's touch seems to break the ghostly
spell Miss Rosa and others live under in their solitude. Faulkner
emphasizes this point by saying the touch of flesh cuts through
decorum and causes the "eggshell shibboleths of caste and
color" to fall away. (A shibboleth is an empty phrase shared by
a particular group.) Though the touch outrages her, it also
reminds Miss Rosa she shares a humanity with Clytie—a
reminder too disturbing for her to contemplate.
Later, Miss Rosa wonders why she stayed on at the mansion
after Charles Bon is buried. Perhaps, she thinks, she should
have left to be in town with those "who were at least of my own
kind ... who thought [of race] ... as my forbears thought."
Instead of leaving, though, Miss Rosa stays to wait for Sutpen
to return from the war. During this period at the mansion, Miss
Rosa admits the three women became "as one being,
interchangeable and indiscriminate." The hardship of the war
and its aftermath seem to reconfigure social relationships:
everyone is joined in the struggle for survival. Living with Clytie
seems to allow Miss Rosa to give up at least some of her
inherent racism. Miss Rosa describes her relationship with
Clytie during this time: "She and I were open ... honorable
enemies"—a description which may indicate at least some
improvement in her racist attitude.
When, after the women have been scraping a living together
for seven months, Sutpen returns, his renewed ambition,
brazen but calculating, is shocking yet at the same time heroic.
When Sutpen hears of Henry's murder of Charles Bon, he
seems unmoved, with "the same face ... the same ruthless
eyes" he'd always had. He is too preoccupied with his
undertaking to restore his house and plantation. Miss Rosa
describes his "incorrigibility of undefeat" and even begins to
view Sutpen as "not the ogre ... but a mortal fallible one less to
invoke fear than pity." While his efforts are doomed, he is
nonetheless admirable, like literary antiheroes such as Milton's
Satan and Melville's Captain Ahab.
Throughout this chapter, there is a sense of unreality even as
the references to the Ku Klux Klan root it in the history of the
South. Miss Rosa's time at the mansion is sometimes referred
to as a "dream" because life is unrecognizably changed.
Especially after Sutpen proposes marriage to her, Miss Rosa
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
refers to the dreamlike quality of what has happened. She calls
Sutpen's life a "mad dream" that impels him to the impossible
task of trying to rebuild his plantation. Rosa recognizes his
"design," his "compelling dream" as insane. Yet Miss Rosa
misunderstands Sutpen's motives when she says, "O furious
old man, I hold no substance that will fit your dream." Readers
must wait to learn how Sutpen sees her fitting into his all-
consuming "design."
Chapter 6
Summary
Chapters 6–9 take place in January 1910 at Harvard College in
Massachusetts, in the room shared by Quentin and his
roommate, Shreve. In answer to Shreve's question about why
people choose to live in the South, the two young men discuss
the history of the Sutpen family.
The story is told intermittently by Quentin and by Shreve.
Quentin relates what he remembers hearing about the story
from both Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson, his father. Some of the
narrative in these chapters is taken up by Shreve, a Canadian.
He summarizes and extrapolates his own version of events
based on what he's heard from Quentin, prompting Quentin to
think, "I have heard too much, I have been told too much; I have
had to listen to too much, too long."
Shreve gives Quentin a letter that just arrived for him from his
father. The letter announces the "painless" death of Miss Rosa
Coldfield. Shreve wants to know if Miss Rosa was related to
Quentin, and Quentin explains their relationship—she was an
old lady he knew who "died young of outrage" in 1866. Shreve
presses Quentin to tell the story of Miss Rosa and the Sutpen
family.
Quentin begins his story by remembering going to the Sutpen
mansion with Miss Rosa after her unsettling statement about
things being "hidden" there. Shreve is amazed Quentin would
go with her to find this "hidden" thing or person after decades
of avoiding the mansion. Shreve, seeming to sum up what
Quentin has told him so far, skims over Miss Rosa's history as
a deprived child in a barren, loveless household. He describes
how her father starved himself to death during the Civil War.
Then Shreve reveals what Sutpen said to Miss Rosa that so
insulted her she broke off their engagement: Sutpen had
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Chapter Summaries 22
demanded Miss Rosa have sex with him until she became
pregnant and bore him a son. Only then—when she had given
him a male heir—would he marry her. The proposition justifiably
outraged and insulted Miss Rosa, which is why she abandoned
him and his family for the next 43 years.
The story of the "demon" Sutpen is retold in obvious
amazement by Shreve, who questions parts of it. Quentin
responds, "Yes" to the astounding story Shreve is retelling.
Shreve understands, and Quentin confirms, Henry fled to avoid
being hanged for murdering Charles Bon. He realizes Sutpen,
now near 60 years old, clung to the "illusion that time and
change had not elapsed" as he tried to rebuild his ruined
plantation. Shreve references "the Creditor" and "Faustus" as
higher (devil-like) powers with whom Sutpen sealed a bargain
in order to achieve his ambition. Shreve even realizes with this
"bargain" Sutpen had "set his children to destroying one
another before he had posterity" and tried to remedy that by
suggesting he and Miss Rosa "breed together for test and
sample and if it was a boy they would marry."
Quentin notices Shreve's account makes him sound like Mr.
Compson. "He sounds just like Father ... Just exactly like
Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I
went out there as he did the day after I came back." Quentin is
referring to his discoveries from the trip he took to the old
plantation with Miss Rosa. Quentin thinks of Sutpen's
"hereditary evil" and of the "mad impotent old man who realized
there are limits ... [even] on a demon."
After the war, Sutpen can no longer sustain himself and his
family off the Hundred. He and Wash Jones open a small
country store to try to eke out a living, but it does not do well.
Sutpen becomes intensely frustrated at how little money he
makes from the store, which sells goods mainly to freed
blacks. Sutpen and Wash become drinking partners and rage
about the humiliating defeat of the South. Quentin talks about
the rusty scythe Sutpen lent to Wash and how it becomes the
instrument of Sutpen's death because of yet another insult
Sutpen utters: this time to Wash's granddaughter, Milly.
Quentin remembers Sutpen's death and how the man's body
was taken to the church. The mules pulling the wagon are
whipped so savagely the wagon overturns and Sutpen's coffin
spills onto the road. Eventually, Sutpen is in his grave and
Judith, tearless, says a few words at the gravesite.
This reminds Quentin of the time he and his father visited the
graves of Thomas, Ellen, and Judith Sutpen and viewed their
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
tombstones. Judith had also bought a tombstone for Charles
Bon. The grave of Charles Bon's son by his octoroon wife,
Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon, was also there.
It seems Judith had written to Charles Bon's widow, who
brought her son with her to visit his grave. She is a "magnolia -
faced woman," but her thin and delicate 11-year-old son seems
lonely and despondent. When his mother dies in New Orleans,
Clytie travels there to bring the boy to live at the plantation.
The 12-year-old French-speaking boy cannot communicate
with the others in the mansion, and he becomes withdrawn and
morose. The boy is traumatized, and Judith treats him "with a
cold unbending detached gentleness," without love or much
attention. He is cared for, but without affection. Judith and
Clytie believe he is at least one-sixteenth black because of his
parentage.
Charles Etienne has a miserable childhood in Mississippi, which
affects his self-worth and his racial identity. His mixed blood is
a curse. As a young man, he hangs out with black men, but
they seethe at the sight of him and he sometimes gets in fights.
The (white) justice system seems to identify him as white; after
he is arrested, the justice calls him a "white man." Quentin's
grandfather gets the indictment quashed, so Charles Etienne is
freed from jail. He spends a short time at the plantation but
then disappears for a year.
Charles Etienne returns to the plantation with a woman who
has dark black skin, who some refer to as "apelike," and who is
portrayed as uneducated, even backward. His wife bears
Charles Etienne a son, Jim Bond, who like his mother is
described as slow-witted; he is light-skinned. Charles Etienne
flaunts his dark-skinned wife before blacks and whites alike, as
if wanting to provoke them. Judith offers Charles Etienne
money to move North, but he refuses. He stays to live with his
wife in "the Gethsemane which he had decreed and created for
himself, where he had crucified himself." Meanwhile, Clytie
takes Jim Bond under her wing and teaches him how to farm
and do other tasks on the plantation.
Soon both Charles Etienne and Judith are struck down by
yellow fever, and both die of the disease. Jim Bond remains
and helps Clytie out on the plantation. When the story picks
him up later, Bond is in his 20s and Clytie is a keen-eyed,
sharp-witted, but wizened old lady who lives on the plantation
with him.
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Chapter Summaries 23
Analysis
The narrative layers become very difficult to disentangle in this
chapter, with italics and parentheses marking shifts between
past and present, speech and thought, but not providing much
more clarity than that. For example, in the long italicized
passage beginning "Just exactly like Father," the participle
thinking apparently refers to Quentin, who'd just been
"glancing" and "smelling" and "seeing," but the passage also
describes Sutpen as a "demon" (Miss Rosa's language, picked
up by Shreve), refers to "whatever dragon's outcropping of
Sutpen blood the son might sow" (recalling how in Chapter 3
Mr. Compson spoke of Sutpen's "ironic fecundity of dragon's
teeth"), and includes mention of "Faustus" and "the Creditor"
(terms Shreve introduces in his retelling of the story). So
whose voice (or interior monologue) is this in the italicized
passage? It's not Quentin's, or not exactly, since unlike
Quentin's this voice doesn't know if Henry is alive or dead ("if
the son still lived").
Further complicating the narration is the fact Shreve is an
outsider, not a Southerner, and so cannot really understand
what's going on. At the same time, as an outsider, he has some
distance from the events he has learned about from Quentin
and can offer special insights into them.
The novel continues to represent a picture of the South itself.
Sutpen, once a big landowner, is reduced to a small-time
storekeeper, his social status not much higher than Wash
Jones's. Now, with the introduction of Shreve's character,
Quentin also becomes the stand-in for the early 20th-century
Southern male. Shreve treats him like an authority on a world in
which Quentin was simply born.
The chapter opens with Quentin receiving a letter telling him
Miss Rosa has died, and much of the chapter refers to the
death of various characters. Death is related to the failure of
Sutpen's ambition. Quentin says "when [Sutpen] came back
home ... [he] found his chances of descendants gone." So
Sutpen turns to Miss Rosa as his last chance (or so he thinks)
to produce a (white) heir, but he insults her unforgivably by
asking her to prostitute herself. Even if she agreed to have sex
with him, had the child she bore been a girl, Sutpen would have
abandoned her and the child. Sutpen thus wanted to use her
only to help him continue his "empire" and fulfill his lifelong
ambition. He is even described as a "Caesar" intent only on
maintaining this empire.
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
When Miss Rosa flees Sutpen and his plantation in outrage and
horror, the total ruination of Sutpen's ambition becomes clear.
Other parts of the chapter refer to the tombstones of all the
members of Sutpen's family who have died, including Ellen,
Judith, and Charles Bon. Yet none of them had, or were
accepted as having, produced an heir for Sutpen. In some
ways it was Sutpen himself who prevented them from
producing the heir he so desperately wanted. Shreve states
Sutpen had "set his children to destroying one another before
he had posterity."
General Compson offers to help Charles Etienne relocate to
the North, but Charles Etienne refuses. Perhaps he is
determined to be what he is—or to be accepted as a white
man—in his native South. Yet Charles Etienne does leave the
plantation for a while (though no one knows where he's gone.)
When he returns to the plantation after his time away, Charles
Etienne is married, and his wife is described as "coal black,"
simpleminded, and "ape-like." It is as if Charles Etienne has
aligned himself with a stereotype of blackness. He "flaunts" her
everywhere he goes, as if daring others to say something
disparaging so he can fight them. And so, despite having a
"body and limbs almost as light and delicate as a girl's, [Charles
Etienne gives] the first blow" when racial slurs are flung at him.
He fights with "fury and implacability and physical
imperviousness to pain and punishment ... laughing." He knows
no other way to relate to the world because of how it has
boxed him in.
Chapter 7
Summary
Chapter 7 takes place in the cold room where Quentin and
Shreve are talking together at Harvard College. Shreve is
fascinated by Quentin's story, but Quentin is quiet and
brooding. He is relating what he's presumably heard from his
father, who heard it in turn from his father (General Compson),
who heard it from Sutpen. Although parts of the story may
have been changed somewhat in all its retellings, it's the first
time the basic tale comes from Sutpen himself.
Quentin takes up the story at the time when Sutpen was
building his mansion. The French architect can no longer stand
working for Sutpen, and he tries to escape through the swamp.
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Chapter Summaries 24
With the help of General Compson (Quentin's grandfather),
some men and their dogs, and Sutpen's 20 "wild" slaves,
Sutpen tracks down the architect and brings him back to finish
the job. During the prolonged search for the Frenchman,
Sutpen tells General Compson some things about his past life.
Sutpen was born to a dirt-poor family in the mountains of
western Virginia (West Virginia was not yet a state). When
Sutpen was 10 years old, his father moved the family south and
east to work on a plantation in the Tidewater region of Virginia.
Quentin stresses the "innocence" of young Thomas Sutpen. He
is ignorant of social class and even racial distinctions. He can't
imagine people owning land or having the power to make
others work for them while they live in leisure. He thinks some
people are born lucky or rich and others aren't, and it's just a
matter of chance and nothing by which to judge a rich man as
better or superior to a poor one. He thinks "only a crazy man"
would "want more than he could eat or swap for powder and
whiskey."
On the Tidewater plantation, the family is still impoverished.
Crucially, it is on the Virginia plantation where Sutpen first
notices the plantation owner spends much of his time in a
hammock, while a black slave constantly fans his owner to
keep him cool. Sutpen also notes the black slave is better
dressed and better fed than he and his white family. Yet
Sutpen still has his innocence because he had no envy.
Thomas Sutpen's life changes on the day his father tells him to
bring a message to the plantation owner. Wearing his usual
ragged clothes, Sutpen knocks on the front door of the
plantation house. The door is opened by a black slave wearing
fine clothes. The black man looks askance at Sutpen's ragged
clothes and appearance and then tells him never to come to
the front door again—he must go to the back door only. Sutpen
turns and runs away. He sits in a cave to figure out what has
just happened to him and why—and what he should do about it.
How can he escape a "future ... of cut-down and patched ...
garments" and create one where he will command respect?
After considering several courses of action, Sutpen finds the
answer: "You have got to have what they have."
Sutpen abandons his family and somehow makes his way to
the West Indies, where he becomes the overseer on a sugar
plantation. How he got there is never revealed. He learns
French and island patois and puts down a slave rebellion. He is
"shrewd" and "unscrupulous." Sutpen marries Eulalia, the
daughter of the sugar plantation owner, and has a child with
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
her. But the reader is told he "put his first wife aside," as she
was "unsuitable to his purpose ... to the design which [he] had
in mind." Sutpen's "design" is his ruthless and calculated plan
to become a plantation owner, which he believes is his
"destiny." It will become clear later why Sutpen abandoned his
first wife.
Thirty years later, in 1864, Sutpen resumes telling General
Compson about his early life. Sutpen is established on
Sutpen's Hundred and making money. Sutpen explains he did
not feel guilty about abandoning his first wife because her
parents had "misrepresented" her to him. The enormity of this
"misrepresentation" becomes clear to Sutpen only after his
first wife bears him a son.
Sutpen never says explicitly what the "fact" was that had been
misrepresented by the planter and his daughter and which was
revealed in the child she bore. The planter is identified as
French, and Sutpen told General Compson "the old man's wife
had been a Spaniard." From this General Compson concludes
Sutpen hadn't seen much of the girl he was to marry, which
may imply General Compson suspects something about the
racial makeup of the planter and his family that Sutpen was too
"innocent" to notice. Still, neither the wife nor the child are
explicitly identified as black: Sutpen continues to refer to it
merely as a "fact."
It is Shreve who, with surprising quickness, realizes the son is
Charles Bon. So Shreve, who's the farthest removed from all of
this and for whom all this is evidence of the crazy South,
becomes the one to "confirm" elements of the story, and
Quentin reaffirms them.
Sutpen makes provisions for supporting his wife and child and
thinks he's rid of them forever until the Christmas Day in 1859
when Henry brings Charles Bon with him to Sutpen's Hundred.
The text implies Sutpen told General Compson he recognized
Bon immediately as his son. This seems to indicate Sutpen's
later objections to Charles Bon marrying Judith are not just
because of bigamy, but because of miscegenation and incest.
However, these details are only hinted at and not explicit.
Sutpen goes to New Orleans, where Eulalia and her son live,
and confirms the truth about Charles Bon. When Henry and
Charles return to the mansion the next year, Sutpen realizes
Judith and Charles are forming a relationship. This is why
Sutpen tells Henry that Charles was his brother (he does not
yet tell him Charles is part black). After this revelation Henry
leaves the mansion and cuts all ties with his family.
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Chapter Summaries 25
Then the Civil War begins and the three men enlist to fight for
the South. Sutpen and Henry hope Charles will be killed in
battle, which will solve their problem. Henry is torn by having to
decide what to do about Charles. During the war, Sutpen finds
Henry's regiment, and he asks for and gets permission to
speak to his son. It is again Shreve who draws a conclusion
from this fact: Sutpen "played that trump after all," meaning
Sutpen told Henry that Charles was part black.
Sutpen is now in a dilemma. He has acted honorably toward his
first wife. He still sends her money to support her. His honor
forbids him to divorce her, however. Marrying Miss Rosa
(without first "testing her out") exposes Sutpen to the prospect
of having a female child, not the male heir he so desperately
wants. It also seems Sutpen's "design" is threatened by
Charles Bon and his "betrayal" in possibly marrying Judith. The
progeny from that union would be unacceptable as heirs to
Sutpen's dynasty.
Sutpen decides he must have a white male heir. He begins
giving small gifts to Wash Jones's 15-year-old granddaughter,
Milly. Then he has a sexual relationship with her, despite her
low status, ignorance, and poverty. Wash permits this, as he
adores Sutpen. One year later, Milly gives birth to Sutpen's
child. When Sutpen sees the infant, he insults Milly viciously:
"Well, Milly, too bad you're not a mare ... Then I could give you a
decent stall in the stable." As he leaves their shack, Sutpen
beats Wash with a whip. Outraged, betrayed, and humiliated,
Wash grabs the rusty scythe Sutpen has loaned him and uses
it to kill Sutpen. Later, a search party finds Sutpen's body. They
come to arrest Wash Jones. Before they do he asks them if he
can "see about his granddaughter." Wash goes into his shack,
takes a butcher knife, and kills Milly and her infant.
Shreve is astonished by these events. He can't understand why
Sutpen so gravely insulted Milly and Wash. Shreve
understands when Quentin tells him Milly's child was not the
son Sutpen required, but a girl.
Analysis
This chapter is the first in which Quentin really takes over the
narration in direct discourse. Shreve now just interrupts him
from time to time, as when he says, "Jesus, the South is fine,
isn't it. It's better than the theatre, isn't it." The telling of the tale
is taking an increasing toll on Quentin, as if he will never
escape the story—or his origins, since the story represents the
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
history of the South itself.
This chapter is vital in showing Sutpen's past and how he
becomes the obsessed man readers see. The story is told by
Quentin, who has gotten it thirdhand from his father, whose
own father told it to him. Readers should keep in mind that in
so many retellings (by so many biased, limited, and subjective
narrators) it might have lost some of its veracity. Also the
original story is told to General Compson by Sutpen himself.
Although General Compson was Sutpen's best friend, the
reader might question how truthful the ambitious Sutpen would
be in telling about his life.
At one point in the chapter, Quentin thinks about history as
being "like ripples ... on water after a pebble sinks, the ripples
moving on, spreading" in a pool that is "attached by a narrow
umbilical water-cord to the next pool" where things have been
"seen, felt, remembered, reflect[ed] in a different tone."
Quentin's idea may be interpreted in two ways. He may be
saying what happens in the past continues to happen in a
sense, its meaning or significance not diminishing with time. Or
he may be expressing the way an event seems to have
consequences that expand outward and alter other events
within the same history. This would mean the same history can
be experienced in different ways. "Maybe nothing ever
happens and is finished," he thinks.
The primary theme in this chapter is the way innocence and
ambition cannot coexist. Quentin says "[Supten's] trouble was
innocence," and "he discovered ... what he just had to do
whether he wanted to or not," because "if he did not do it he
knew that he could never live with himself."
In his early life, Sutpen's innocence is expressed through his
contentment and lack of envy. He does not even know "there
was a country all divided [up] and fixed and neat" with "people
living on it all divided ... and neat because of what color their
skin happened to be." Young Thomas Sutpen has no notion
some people had "authority or warrant to look down at others,
any others." His view of life changes when his father takes the
job on a plantation in southern Virginia. A new and crucial
realization hits Sutpen: not only was there a difference
between white and black, but "there was a difference between
white men and white men."
Sutpen maintains his innocence even as he realizes "the
difference in comfort between the presence and absence of
shoes and warm clothing." Yet Sutpen is still not even aware he
is innocent. His life—his innocence—changes on the day his
Copyright © 2019 Course Hero, Inc.
Chapter Summaries 26
father asks him to carry the message to the plantation owner
in his mansion. Sutpen is astounded he, a white boy, is turned
away from the white man's house and treated with contempt
by an enslaved black man who has more and better things than
he does.
Sutpen picks up his story 30 years later, again speaking with
General Compson. By now his design—to get "richer and
richer"—is taking shape. Sutpen explains he has a conscience
but "he had argued calmly and logically [with it] until it was
settled." It's as if "the ingredients of morality were like the
ingredients of a pie or cake" and if measured properly, "nothing
but a pie or cake could come out." Sutpen's innocence resides
in his calculating mind. No matter what he does, if he
rebalances the "ingredients" of any action, the morality of the
act will be guaranteed. Morality for him is malleable and can be
balanced by him into acceptability to further his design.
Sutpen tells General Compson his family and his ambitions are
being destroyed because of some "mistake" he must have
made in his design. Sutpen analyzes events and his behavior
from every angle to find out where the mistake occurred. He
feels if he can find this mistake he "might repair whatever
injustice [he] might be considered to have done"—particularly
to his first wife, Eulalia, and her son, Charles Bon. He insists on
the justice of his abandoning his first wife and son because
they did not fit into his "design." Yet he cannot understand his
past has caught up with him. The first marriage poisons
Sutpen's life, yet he refuses to or cannot see why that
happened since his "design" required a white wife and family.
The "bad luck" Sutpen is having with his current family is, he
believes, "not moral retribution" but rather "just an old mistake
... which a man of courage and shrewdness ... could still
combat" if he could only figure out what it was.
If Charles Bon, Sutpen's black son, is the source of the
mistake, Sutpen must find a way to deal with or remove him.
Sutpen hopes Charles Bon will be killed fighting the Civil War,
but this does not happen. As a result Sutpen sets Henry up to
kill Charles Bon, as this is one way to rectify the mistake. But
Henry loves Charles Bon and is unable to kill him in cold blood.
Sutpen seems not to realize how making Henry a murderer will
affect the family and his dynastic ambitions. For him it is a way
of correcting the earlier mistake, but the tragedy of his
ambition will be played out differently.
Sutpen further denies the immorality of his actions when he
determines to start a third family to produce the white male
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
heir he must have for his ambitions to be realized. He
rationalizes and justifies this plan as coinciding with his
"design" and because his first wife's true identity "had been
foisted upon [him] without [his] knowledge ... which meant the
absolute and irrevocable negation of the design." Sutpen feels
abandoning or altering his design would be "a betrayal of that
little boy who approached that door fifty years ago and was
turned away." Yet his ambition is everything. Those who
obstruct it must be sacrificed. Sutpen tells General Compson if
nothing else worked he'd "play his trump card." Sutpen thinks
this will further his design, but it will prove his undoing.
His obsessive ambition, and the calculating shrewdness he
thinks he uses to further it, make Sutpen tone-deaf. He thinks
Miss Rosa is his last best hope for a white male heir, yet he is
so insensible of others and their feelings he approaches her in
the way that would most offend her. In the same way, he can't
stop himself from insulting Milly after she gives birth to a girl
because she's upended his design and ambition. He is totally
self-absorbed, and so he pays the ultimate price and is
murdered.
The theme of racism is also apparent in this chapter. The
young Thomas Sutpen cannot help but notice the slaves he
sees "had better clothes" than he and his family. He
understands hitting them would not get him what he wants for
they are only like a "child's toy" or a "balloon with a face
painted on it"—objects, not humans. When Thomas Sutpen's
father gleefully describes how he and some other men brutally
attacked one of the plantation's black men, he says the man
was no "actual ... living creature, [no] living flesh to feel pain
and writhe and cry out."
The door is a powerful symbol of change in this chapter. It is
when he is denied entry to the front door of the Virginia
mansion that young Thomas Sutpen discovers his innocence
and devises his "design" to have what the rich slave owners
have. His refusal to betray his young self standing by that door
and being denied entry by a black man largely motivates
Sutpen to pursue his "design." Interestingly, toward the end of
the chapter the reader learns that for most of his life Wash
Jones, who is white and who idolizes Sutpen, is never allowed
to approach the Sutpen mansion from the front door. He is
only allowed to use the back door. So Sutpen has no
compunction about disrespecting those he sees as lower than
himself, though at the same time he has elevated himself from
a childhood that was very like the life Wash Jones and Milly are
forced (by him) to lead.
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Chapter Summaries 27
Chapter 8
Summary
The frame narrative in Chapter 8 again becomes somewhat
unstable. Quentin and Shreve conjure up in their minds, or
identify with, Henry and Charles Bon. They seem to be
transported to 1860 Mississippi and relate the story as if they
are the characters. Chapter 8 is narrated primarily by Shreve,
who summarizes what Quentin has told him. When he speaks,
Shreve speculates about what might have happened,
particularly in relation to Charles Bon. At times an omniscient
narrator takes over.
Shreve begins by speculating about what Charles Bon knew.
He says Charles didn't know about Sutpen's first conversation
with Henry (in 1860) and so was unaware Henry was his
brother. As a young man in New Orleans, Charles immersed
himself in the sensual pleasures of that city. He no longer
cared who or what he was. Charles could pursue this idle life
because he (may have) received money from a lawyer who
controlled and meted out the money Sutpen had left to support
his first wife and her son.
The lawyer and the scenarios involving him are a construct of
Shreve's imagination. Shreve imagines the lawyer was a crook
who devised ways to steal some of the money intended for
Sutpen's first family. Shreve suspects the lawyer had found a
way to blackmail Sutpen. Perhaps with the connivance of
Charles's mother, who uses her son as an instrument of
vengeance against Sutpen, the lawyer learned where Henry
was going to college. He subsequently enrolled Charles Bon,
then 28 years old and with his own wife and son, in the same
school. It was all part of the plot to destroy Sutpen.
The lawyer, in Shreve's imagined story, sent a letter to Henry at
this small college, introducing him to Charles. Shreve and
Quentin imagine Charles might recognize his own features in
Henry's face. Henry was in thrall to the sophisticated Charles
Bon and began to copy his style and behavior. At one point
Henry even says he wished Charles were his brother. Shreve
implies Charles knew about Judith from Henry. When he
looked at Henry he saw "my skull, my brow, sockets, shape and
angle of jaw and chin." The resemblance leads Charles to think
maybe he and Henry have the same father. When Charles
accepts Henry's invitation home for Christmas, he thinks he'll
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
see for himself "[he] whom I had ... learned to live without."
Charles just wants Sutpen to recognize him as his son; he need
not even acknowledge him openly. But when they are face to
face, "nothing happen[s]." Sutpen gives no sign of recognition.
Shreve and Quentin discuss whether it was possible Charles
loved Judith after having been with her so briefly on his visits to
the mansion. Was he wooing her for revenge? Was it fate or
doom? Charles never really proposes. He waits for Henry's
agreement before deciding to marry Judith.
Shreve imagines Charles and Henry's trip to new Orleans,
thinking Henry did not realize the implications when Charles
introduced him to his octoroon wife and child. More
significantly, they imagine the lawyer meets with Charles and
all but tells him Sutpen is his father. He says Charles has the
chance to wreak vengeance on Sutpen for the dishonor
suffered by his repudiated mother and himself. Yet this
scenario is questionable, as Charles Bon does not know who
his father is or why he repudiated his mother.
Shreve and Quentin then imagine Henry and Charles serving
together in the Confederate army. Henry keeps insisting he
needs more time to consider what Charles's marriage with
Judith means and how he should react to it. Should he consent
or refuse to let it happen?
Shreve states it must have been Henry who was wounded in
battle, not Charles. Shreve speculates Charles saved Henry's
life, but Henry begged him to let him die. Death would free
Henry from having to make the impossible decision about
Charles and Judith. "Let me die ... I won't have to know it then,"
Henry is imagined saying. But as the South falls, Henry begins
to accept Charles's marrying Judith. He "thanks God" the
matter has been settled. He encourages Charles to write that
letter to Judith.
Shreve then retells the story of the night Quentin and Miss
Rosa went to the plantation to find what was "hidden" there.
Suddenly, the omniscient narrator states, both young men are
quiet as if they are with Charles and Henry in the Confederate
army. They almost experience Henry being summoned to see
his father in the colonel's tent. The students imagine a
conversation between Sutpen and Henry in which Sutpen tells
Henry that Charles Bon's mother was "part negro." That's why
he can't let Charles marry Judith. Henry knows what he must
do, but it depends on what Charles decides to do.
In an intensely charged exchange, Henry and Charles try to
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Chapter Summaries 28
find a resolution to this impossible problem. Charles seems to
understand Henry will—must—kill him: "Then do it now,"
Charles says. The climax of the novel emerges from this
revelatory but agonizing exchange in a dialogue between
Henry and Charles. In Shreve's version of this exchange, the
racism within the taboo against miscegenation is made clear.
Shreve speculates Charles knew all along it would come to
this. He has Charles say to Henry, "So it's the miscegenation,
not the incest, which you can't bear." But Henry doesn't
answer. Henry can make the choice to ignore the prospect of
miscegenation in his family, but he either does not or cannot.
He tells Charles they are brothers, yet Charles will not let
Henry get off that easily. He brutally expresses the South's
view of what this "brotherhood" would mean ("a nigger sleeping
with your sister").
Shreve describes how Henry must have shot and killed Charles
as they rode up to the mansion: Henry refuses to let Charles
through the gates that lead to the house, rides ahead, turns
back toward Charles, and shoots and kills him. He imagines
how a tearless Judith found the picture of the octoroon and
the boy in Charles's pocket. Judith realizes Charles had
removed her picture from the metal case and replaced it with
that of his wife and son. Shreve tells Quentin that Charles did
this so Judith would not grieve for him after Henry did what
Charles knew he was going to do. "Yes," Quentin says.
Analysis
This chapter is largely about imagined events. Shreve is
excited by this strange story of the South and enthusiastically
immerses himself in its history. He summarizes some of what
Quentin has told him, but then Shreve, the primary narrator
here, launches into his own imagined version of what
happened. Shreve is eager to tell about what might have been
Charles's experience of events. Shreve does reference events
that were told to him by Quentin earlier. But there is no way
Shreve can actually know if anything in his speculative
narrative is true. Some of what he says may have happened,
but there's the possibility little or none of what Shreve says
occurred.
Still, Quentin joins in embellishing and imagining explanations
for the tale. Their enthusiasm illuminates the romantic
elements of the Sutpen family tragedy as it underscores the
subjectivity of history. Their speculation suggests that in the
end, history is made by whoever tells the story best.
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Chapter Summaries 29

Shreve speculates on another type of "design" that might have Sutpen family is a possibility preferable to miscegenation.
been at play in the story. Without any evidence, he suggests There could hardly be a greater condemnation of the racist
there was a lawyer in cahoots with Eulalia Bon, Charles's Southern value system.
mother, who plotted revenge against Sutpen for abandoning
her and her son. The lawyer's cold calculation of how he will
fleece Sutpen closely resembles the ruthless calculation Chapter 9
Sutpen put into his "design." Shreve suggests the lawyer was
somehow keeping an eye on the Sutpen family in Mississippi,
and the plan he hatches for Charles to attend Henry's college
Summary
so he can get close to Henry and insinuate himself into the
family is designed for the purpose of Charles marrying Judith
Quentin lies trembling in his ice-cold room at Harvard, perhaps
and bringing about the downfall of the Sutpens. The other part
more from emotional exhaustion than the cold. Shreve, the
of this plan is, perhaps, to blackmail Sutpen, get his money, and
Canadian, says he wants to understand the South better
destroy him that way.
because "it's something my people haven't got ... We don't live
among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves." Quentin
Charles is said not to "care that she [his mother] had been
replies, "You can't understand. You would have to be born
shaping and tempering him to be the instrument for whatever it
there." He begins to speak about the night in September 1909
was" she had planned. Yet it is plausible Charles's attendance
when he and Miss Rosa drove out to the mansion to see what
at that small college was part of a plot. After all, Charles was
was "hidden" there. Miss Rosa wails, "I don't know what to do."
already married and had a son. He was 28 years old—far older
Quentin thinks, "Go back to town and go to bed." But they
than most students first entering college. Why would he
continue on.
suddenly choose to go to college? And why that college at
exactly the same time Henry matriculated? Shreve even asks,
When Quentin asks her what's hidden in the mansion, Miss
"Why? Why this college, this particular one above all others?"
Rosa says that's what she's come to find out. Quentin leads
her through the dark toward the mansion. The front door is
The symbol of the gate as a portent of great change appears
locked, nailed shut. Instead of breaking it down, Quentin finds a
here. At Christmas Henry and Charles ride through "the gates
rotted window he can open. He steps into the pitch-dark room
and up the drive to the house" where Sutpen and Judith await
and feels his way toward the door to open it for Miss Rosa.
them. Shreve imagines Charles knows his relationship to the
Suddenly, he hears a match striking behind him. It's Clytie, now
family, thinking, "All right. I want to go to bed with who might be
an old woman. Quentin opens the door and Miss Rosa enters.
my sister." In this version of the story, Charles contemplates
and accepts committing incest with his half sister. At the end
Miss Rosa walks directly to the stairs, but Clytie tells Quentin,
of the chapter, the gate is the doorway to Charles's murder.
"Don't let her go up there." Clytie grabs Miss Rosa's arm, but
Miss Rosa pushes her away. Clytie again tries to restrain Miss
Shreve imagines that when Henry finally allows Charles to
Rosa, who then hits her and knocks her to the floor. Quentin
write to Judith, he realizes what will happen. But he's grateful
helps Clytie up and climbs the stairs to get Miss Rosa and take
it's settled (or so he thinks). According to Shreve, Henry would
her away. He hears something below and turns to see a
be relieved if Charles Bon married Judith. Then he would be
"hulking ... light-colored ... negro man ... [a] slack-jawed idiot." It
accepting and condoning incest and "they would all be
is Jim Bond, Charles Etienne's son. Quentin finds Miss Rosa on
together in hell." But at least, in Shreve's version, they would be
the upper landing, looking "bloodless." Quentin realizes that
together. This echoes Mr. Compson's suggestion in Chapter 4
now "[he] must see too."
that Henry had homosexual feelings for Charles—a relationship
that is possibly doubled in Quentin and Shreve themselves. The
Quentin enters a shuttered "bare, stale room." Lying on the bed
Canadian Shreve looks at Quentin and his strange, undeniably
is a man with a "wasted yellow face ... [whose] wasted hands
Southern story with much the same fascination Henry held for
[were] crossed on the breast [like] a corpse." It is Henry
the exotic, older Charles.
Sutpen, who has been hiding in the mansion for four years. He
says he came home "to die."
The final tragedy of this chapter is, for Henry, incest within the

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
Quentin is shaken. He takes Miss Rosa home, then returns to
his own house. He feels he must bathe and scrub himself clean
after this experience.
Three months pass before Miss Rosa returns with an
ambulance to bring Henry to town so he can get medical care.
Shreve wonders about Miss Rosa's motivation. Did she really
want to save Henry, or was she preserving her hatred of
Sutpen? Or, he thinks, perhaps she wanted Henry to be tried
and hanged for the murder of Charles Bon.
Clytie sees the ambulance coming and thinks they are coming
to arrest Henry to try him for murder. Clytie had planned for
this moment by filling a closet with "tinder and trash" and
kerosene. As the ambulance nears the mansion, the closet is
set on fire. Smoke billows out of the mansion, and the once-
magnificent building begins to burn. Miss Rosa and the
ambulance crew rush into the house, but when they open the
door the air they let in fuels the flames. The house is consumed
in a conflagration. As the mansion burns, they see Clytie calmly
looking down at them. She and Henry die in the fire as a
screaming Jim Bond flees. Miss Rosa returns to town in the
ambulance, and sometime later, she dies.
No one can catch Jim Bond, who lurks furtively around the
ruins of the plantation. Yet sometimes Quentin and others in
the area hear him howling. Shreve reviews the downfall of the
Sutpen family, but he's disquieted by the remaining Sutpen, Jim
Bond. The other deaths "clear[ed] the whole ledger," but
Bond's survival upsets the equation. He is still heard and, very
rarely, seen around the ruined plantation. Finally, Shreve asks
Quentin, "Why do you hate the South?" And Quentin replies
vehemently, "I don't hate it." To himself he thinks: "I don't hate it.
... I don't. I don't!"
Analysis
The third-person narrator tells the story in this chapter, which
brings the tragic history of the Sutpen family to a fiery close.
Some questions linger with no explanation. Readers never
learn where Henry has been or what he has done in the
decades since he disappeared to avoid arrest for murder. And
when Miss Rosa returns to the mansion three months later
with an ambulance, it is unclear exactly what her intention is. Is
she there to save Henry's life? Or, as Clytie believes, is she
coming to have Henry arrested and hanged for murder? The
narrative seems to indicate Miss Rosa returns in order to save
Copyright © 2019 Course Hero, Inc.
Quotes 30
Henry's life, but exposing him to society via medical assistance
would also reveal his past. In this novel that is as much about
the act of passing on a history as it is about the legacy of
slavery in the South, some answers are elusive.
When Miss Rosa and the ambulance men rush into the house,
the door is again a symbol of violent change. When they push
open the mansion door the outside air "explode[s] like powder
among the flames as the whole lower hall vanished." The
conflagration ensures the utter destruction of the mansion and
of Sutpen's ambitions. Clytie and Henry burn to ashes, and only
the mentally challenged descendant, Jim Bond, remains to
howl at the desolation.
Shreve makes a crude joke about how many blacks it takes to
destroy one member of the Sutpen family. His joke, though in
bad taste, reflects the culture that led to the downfall of the
Sutpen dynasty. Slavery and racism ultimately destroy
Sutpen's family and his ambitions, just as they destroyed the
South.
Shreve's final comment is highly ambiguous. He tells Quentin
his idea that "in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the
western hemisphere" and in a thousand years all people "will ...
have sprung from the loins of African kings." Does Shreve
mean in time all people will be of the same mixed blood and
racial hatred will no longer exist in the world? Readers must
decide for themselves.
Quentin's last lines establish him firmly as Faulkner's stand-in
for the early 20th-century Southerner. He expresses great
anguish as he tries to convince Shreve and himself he doesn't
hate the South. In Chapter 6 Shreve asked Quentin why people
choose to live in the South. Quentin's answer has been the
history of the Sutpens, a violent and tragic story that took
place near his hometown and involved one of his ancestors.
After hearing the full tale, it is not surprising Shreve would ask
Quentin why he hates his birthplace. Yet Quentin has also
defended the South to Shreve, saying it can only be
understood by those who are born there. His anguish
expresses his understanding that he both loves and hates a
place that is a part of himself.
g Quotes
"When you have hated somebody
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Quotes 31

for forty-three years you will know "[Bon seemed] impervious of time
them awful well." ... a man with an ease of manner
and a swaggering gallant air."
— Miss Rosa Coldfield, Chapter 1

— Mr. Compson, Chapter 3

Miss Rosa has observed Sutpen for years, during which time
she's nurtured a ferocious hatred for him. She hates Sutpen
Charles Bon is shown to be an elegant and sophisticated man
because of his ruthlessness and his coldness, especially to his
of the world, one who has drunk deep of pleasure and is
wife, her sister, Ellen. Sutpen also grossly insults Miss Rosa, as
confident in his worldly experience and in himself.
described later in the book. However, her hatred actually
biases her understanding of Sutpen; she thinks she "knows
[him] awful well" but presents a different picture of him than
does Mr. Compson. "Something happened ... a quarrel
between ... the son and the father."
"He [came] to town to find a wife ... — Mr. Compson, Chapter 3
as he would have [gone] to market
to buy livestock or slaves." The thing that "happened" is Sutpen told Henry that Charles
Bon is his brother. The conversation took place behind closed
doors, so it is known only by gossip. The father and son
— Mr. Compson, Chapter 2
quarreled, and the son repudiated his father, his family, and his
inheritance.
Compson recognizes Sutpen always acts out of self-interest.
Sutpen is described here as treating people in an almost
inhuman way, using them for his own benefit without "There are occurrences which
considering their feelings or well-being. He is executing his
design, a symbol of the antebellum South's culture. stop us dead ... through which
events transpire as ... in a
"[Which] was the most unreal ... soundless vacuum."
the adult who had escaped reality — Miss Rosa Coldfield, Chapter 5
... or the young girl who slept
waking." The murder of Charles Bon nails the lid in the coffin of the
Sutpen family. It is transformative; the family can never be the
same again. Life is afterward lived in limbo, or in a "vacuum,"
— Mr. Compson, Chapter 3
awaiting destruction.

Her marriage to Sutpen causes Ellen to escape reality, to live in

a world of illusion. Her daughter, Judith, adapts to her family's "I have heard too much, I have
dysfunction by barely living at all; by living in a suspended state
where she is scarcely a formed human being. been told too much; I have had to
listen to too much, too long."

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Quotes 32

— Quentin Compson, Chapter 6

settled."

Quentin represents the modern (that is, early 20th-century) — Quentin Compson, Chapter 7
Southerner. He has grown up with stories that are his cultural
inheritance, and they are taking a toll on him. All the
When Sutpen does something wrong or immoral that begins to
voices—Rosa's, his father's, Shreve's—are beginning to bounce
trouble his conscience, he reverts to his cold, calculating mind
and echo around his head to the point where his own voice can
to recast his actions by creating a rationale for them that
hardly be heard.
makes them, in his own mind, right and moral. This is an
example of how he controls everything and bends it to further
his "design."
"Better that he were dead, better
that he had never lived."
"It wasn't going to be the old man
— Shreve McCannon, Chapter 6
who would have to pay the check."

This quote refers to Charles Etienne, Charles Bon's son. He is — Shreve McCannon, Chapter 8
so torn by his mixed blood—and by the way people treat him
because of it—that he lives in a perpetual state of identity
In Shreve's account, Charles Bon understands Sutpen has
crisis. Making a judgment about a society that would treat
done terrible things to further his ambition. Charles realizes
Charles Etienne this way, Shreve imagines he must wish he
that whatever Sutpen did, it would not be Sutpen who pays the
were dead or had never been born.
price, but others in his family who would suffer and pay for his
immoral deeds. Sutpen does "pay the check," however, as his
life's work falls apart and he dies at the hands of Wash Jones.
"He learned the difference ...
between white men and black
men, but ... [also] between white "We don't live among defeated

men and white men." grandfathers and freed slaves ...

always reminding us to never
— Quentin Compson, Chapter 7
forget."

After young Sutpen's experience of being turned away from a — Shreve McCannon, Chapter 9
plantation's front door, he begins to distinguish not only the
different status of black men in relation to whites, but the
Shreve is contrasting the culture and mindset of those not
reasons that different white men—rich men and poor
brought up in the southern United States (he's Canadian) with
men—also have different status and are treated either well or
those who must live their lives with the burdensome memory of
with contempt.
their history of defeat and slavery.

"His conscience had bothered him

"The house [reeked] in slow and
... at first, but he ... argued ...
protracted violence with a smell of
logically with [it] until it was
desolation and decay."

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
— Quentin Compson, Chapter 9
After more than 40 years, this is the condition of the Sutpen
mansion Miss Rosa and Quentin encounter on the night they
come to find what is "hidden" there. The condition of the
mansion reflects the violence and the devastation the Sutpen
family members have experienced.
"I am older at twenty than a lot of
people who have died."
— Quentin Compson, Chapter 9
Quentin is nearly crushed by all he has learned and
experienced while living in Mississippi. He feels immensely old
because he is the recipient of a violent, dreadful history. His
point is Southerners carry a history with them that people from
other places cannot not experience.
"I don't hate it he thought ... I don't.
I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate
it!"
— Quentin Compson, Chapter 9
Quentin is responding to Shreve's question, "Why do you hate
the South?" Quentin struggles with his feelings about his
birthplace, a mixture of love and hatred.
l Symbols
Doors and Gates
Doors and gates represent important changes for the
characters, and sometimes the events, in the story. These
changes are dependent on the characters' choices to pass or
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Symbols 33
not pass through these openings. Gates and doors appear
frequently throughout the story at key moments.
One aspect of the symbol of doors and gates is confrontation.
For example, are the characters who are faced with the choice
of whether or not to go through a door or gate ready and
willing to deal with what is behind the door or beyond the gate?
Are they willing to confront the situation, or the change, that
going through the door will force them to confront?
A character passing through a door or gate signifies an
important change or life-changing event will take place. For
example, the Sutpen family's downfall is sealed when Henry
walks through the "library door" to hear is father's revelation
about Charles being his brother. Once Henry passes through
that door, the family is changed irrevocably. The bigamy that
bars Charles from marrying Judith is described as a "a gate
ponderously locked ... of solid beams." But in New Orleans,
Charles and Henry knock on "an adjacent doorway" and they
enter through the "solid gates" that "close behind them." When
Henry and Charles pass through these doors and gates, they
are entering a forbidden realm. In New Orleans Charles
escorts Henry "through one of those inscrutable ... lifeless
doorways" and "into a place which to his puritan's provincial
mind all of morality was upside down." Here, the doorway
opens to a new life for Henry of debauched pleasure and
dissolution.
Sometimes, however, a character does not or cannot pass
through a door or gate. This often represents stasis, an
inability to act, or the end of a chapter in that person's life.
Perhaps most notably, such a situation directs the entire
course of the novel when the young Thomas Sutpen is turned
away from the front door of the plantation. He is motivated by
his humiliation to create and single-mindedly pursue his
"design." The inability to pass through a gate also factors in the
final encounter between Henry and Charles; in this case, it
literally ends Charles's life and sends Henry into a life of
seclusion.
Phantoms and Dreams
Phantoms and dreams are fitting symbols for characters and
events that haunt the novel's narrators and come from a
history as violent and sweeping as a Gothic tale. In the parts of
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide
the text that are remembered and related in a stream-of-
consciousness technique, figures from the past are often
referred to as phantoms or ghosts. Events are described as if
they occurred in dreams or nightmares. These references
underline the difficulty of clearly recalling past events. The
characters who populate the Sutpen family history have been
transformed in the minds of these narrators into fantastic or
surreal figures in tragic and unbelievable situations.
Events, too, are remembered and described as being so
strange and unbelievable they are like "dreams" or
"nightmares." Judith, the product of a dysfunctional family, is
the "girl who slept waking." Sutpen's actions are so ruthless
and lead to such tragedy they are like nightmares. The
supposed good times in the past were so misconstrued by
those living through them they acquire an unreal, dreamlike
quality.
The Design
Sutpen's plan for gaining the wealth and respectability he
craves is often referred to in the text as his "design." The
specifics of that design ground him firmly in the antebellum
South. He accomplishes his design by building his house and a
slave-based plantation; thus, it functions as a symbol for the
creation of the culture of the antebellum South and its legacy.
Sutpen's design requires him to make cold, calculating
decisions that are often inhumane and lead to great human
tragedy, beginning with the abandonment of his first wife and
their son, Charles Bon. In turn his design is ruined by the
reappearance of Charles and the multiple threats he presents
through his engagement to Judith: bigamy, incest, and
miscegenation. It mirrors a culture that went to war to defend
the inhumane system of slavery and is still haunted decades
later by a legacy of racism. The "design" elevates the story of
Sutpen beyond a single pathological case to a whole
pathological society and culture.
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Themes 34
m Themes
Racism, Miscegenation, and
Incest
Absalom, Absalom! begins in 1909 and relates events from the
antebellum South through the post-Civil War era. Racism as a
legacy of the enslavement of black Africans is a core element
of life in the South during this period. For the novel's white
characters, racist views affect not only the black people they
encounter, but also their own fates.
Narratives by former slaves, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, have documented the fact many
enslaved women were sexually assaulted by their white
owners. Generations of black-white sexual contact gave rise to
a significant population of light-skinned blacks, some of whom
married other light-skinned blacks or even whites.
Miscegenation refers to the intermarriage of black and white
men and women: in the context of the novel, miscegenation
was an ineradicable blot on a white person's reputation. No
offspring from such a match could be acknowledged as a true
heir. This was Sutpen's motivation for abandoning Eulalia and
Charles Bon, and for Henry's murder of Charles Bon. Henry is
willing to accept Charles's marriage to Judith, the man's own
half sister; but the thought of a mixed-race man marrying
Judith is intolerable.
In the story of Sutpen, the novel presents a type of allegory of
the South and its "curse" of slavery and racism. Sutpen seems
unconcerned with race until he has a humiliating experience at
the Virginia plantation. He realizes not only race, but class,
determines how a person is treated in the South. Although
Sutpen is an overseer on a West Indian sugar plantation where
some of the worst abuses of slaves occurred, and though he
buys 20 male slaves to build his mansion and work his
Mississippi plantation, he personally does not seem to have
any deep, inbred racism. He works alongside his slaves and
engages in competitive fights with them. He feels responsible
for and supports his first part-black wife and child. He seems
to treat Clytie well. For Sutpen it is the cultural racism of the
South that has the greatest impact on him. He is bound to his
"design" by the terms of respectability imposed on him by
Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Suggested Reading 35

racist Southern culture. serving, and demonic. As is made clear in Chapter 7, Sutpen's
innocence reflects his ignorance of the social stratifications of
race and class and private property and a worldview defined
by luck. Sutpen seems to think his innocence is a problem that
History and Subjectivity outlasts his childhood and is underpinned by Southern culture.

Sutpen's innocence in some ways remains intact while he acts

out his ambition—his determination to rise above his
The story told in Absalom, Absalom! is anchored in the history
impoverished childhood and in his pursuit of respectability.
of the South: a house is built, a plantation is started, cotton is
After a particularly humiliating experience, a young Sutpen
grown, the Civil War is fought and lost, and Reconstruction
realizes he must gain wealth in order to earn respectability
follows. But this history is revealed not as a set of objective
(and never again be humiliated). He decides on, and single-
facts, but through the viewpoints of those who received the
mindedly executes, what some might characterize as a
information, often secondhand.
coldhearted and evil plan to ensure he is never humiliated
Miss Rosa is the only narrator in the novel who has had any again. Yet some narrators in the novel assert Sutpen retains
firsthand experience or participation in the events she his innocence even while pursuing the "design" that will help
describes, and even she narrates events she couldn't actually him realize his ambition.
remember (events that occurred when she was three or four
This innocence seems to arise from the belief, expressed by
years old, or events for which she was not present). Mr.
Sutpen himself, that his ambition is good and right because it is
Compson, Quentin, and Shreve are all retelling the story from
sanctioned by Southern culture. That his reasonable,
received tales. They comment on how they are working from
"calculated" design to realize this ambition is heartless and
scraps and fragments and conjuring up characters and stories
ultimately ruinous to other people and himself is beside the
that may or may not be true. Because of this, readers must ask:
point. In fact Sutpen can't understand why problems keep
how can they tell us much about the things they purport to be
arising that block him from carrying out his "design." Like the
narrating? How much can these stories tell us, not about their
biblical characters Adam and Eve, who eat from the Tree of
subjects, Sutpen and the rest, but about the characters telling
Knowledge and are cast out of paradise, to understand fully
them?
would require the loss of innocence. And in a story where
Thus, the same incident may be described one way by one Sutpen's rise and fall parallels that of the South, loss of
character and in a completely different way by another innocence in his case would require an acknowledgment of the
character. With this technique, William Faulkner presents evils of slavery, something Sutpen cannot fathom.
different aspects of people and events. He also demonstrates
how malleable history and the past can be. In some cases the
reader cannot know which version of an event is "real" or
"true," but sometimes it doesn't really matter. The layers of e Suggested Reading
narrative enrich and reveal the depth of the events and people
described. History is what is lived—or is sometimes imagined to Hobson, Fred C., editor. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!:
be—and the many people who live through it will necessarily A Casebook. Oxford UP, 2003.
construct a multifaceted version of that history.
Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. Dee, 1991.

Ryan, Heberden W. "Behind Closed Doors: The Unknowable

Innocence versus Ambition and the Unknowing in Absalom, Absalom!" Mississippi

Quarterly, no. 45, 1992, pp. 295–312.

Sullivan, John Jeremiah. "How William Faulkner Tackled

Thomas Sutpen is frequently referred to in the novel as Race—and Freed the South from Itself." The New York Times
"innocent," even though his actions are often vile, ruthless, self- Magazine, 28 June 2012.

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Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide Suggested Reading 36

Urgo, Joseph R. Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! UP of

Mississippi, 2010.

Weinstein, Philip. Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of

William Faulkner. Oxford UP, 2012.

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