Absalom, Absalom

Absalom, Absalom! is a distinctive literary work that is characterized by its intricate exploration of the Southern past and a narrative structure that challenges conventional storytelling. The first chapter sets the stage by offering a panoramic summary of the plot, laying the foundation for a multifaceted examination of events from various perspectives. Faulkner follows a somewhat deceptive strategy in the first chapter: By laying out the events of the story to come, the narrative ostensibly offers a clear roadmap on which the rest of the text will rest. The conceit of this panoramic view of the novel, however, is that the apparent simplicity of the events initially set out is complicated through the use of multiple narratives, reinterpretations, guesswork, and incomplete historical knowledge. Faulkner’s immediate reveal of the story to come becomes increasingly ironic as the narrative subsequently confuses and questions this initial groundwork.

To complicate the events set out by Rosa in the novel’s first chapter, Faulkner employs a non-linear narrative that intricately weaves together different viewpoints, emphasizing the complexity of human relationships with the past. During the first chapter, Miss Rosa’s perspective reveals the anger and resentment she still harbors toward Sutpen, and how she believes that his arrival to town catalyzed a downward spiral for her and her family. She characterizes this as a “fatality and curse on the South and on our family” (14) and frequently describes Sutpen as the evil force that enacted that generational curse. Miss Rosa’s resentment and almost mythic understanding of Thomas Sutpen also articulates a theme of legacy and violent, downward spirals both for the individual families involved and for the South more broadly, contributing to the themes of the Tragic and Violent Legacies of Slavery and the Decline of the American South Post-Civil War. Chapter 1 also establishes the novel’s discursive, stream-of-consciousness style, which often results in very long, convoluted sentences that eschew grammatical convention, employing multiple parenthetical remarks, shifting the narrator or perspective without notice, and leaving phrases or descriptions unclear or incomplete. This complex, discursive narrative style and structure is itself a paged metaphor for the confusing, subjective web of Multigenerational Storytelling and Memory; from this convoluted web will, eventually, emerge a clearer understanding of the Sutpen family history.

Chapters 2 and 3 see Mr. Compson emerging as a key narrator of the Sutpen family history. Although he offers Quentin much more detailed synopses of certain events that Miss Rosa only touched upon in the prior chapter—including the wedding between Ellen and Sutpen, Ellen’s death, and Rosa and Sutpen’s brief engagement—it also becomes increasingly clear that he may be an unreliable narrator. Although Mr. Compson is not intentionally misinterpreting the story, he imbues certain events with subjective interpretations that call into question how accurate his representation may be. His speculations, for instance, often echo the rumor-driven choral assumptions of the surrounding town and county, as when he alludes to a vaguely incestuous relationship between some of the Sutpen children: “[…] Because the town knew that between Henry and Judith there had been a relationship closer than the traditional loyalty of brother and sister even […]” (62). Although these interpretations and rumors are not proven incorrect, they serve as a deliberate misunderstanding of the actual key potential incest within the family, which only emerges later in the clarification of Charles Bon as Judith’s half brother and potential fiancé.

Mr. Compson also offers speculative interpretations of Sutpen’s early years in the County and of the rises and falls of other characters, including Mr. Coldfield and Ellen. Mr. Compson is a mouthpiece for an idea that guides much of the narrative: fate and destiny as guiding forces within the family lineage. The interpretation of the Sutpens’ downfalls as predetermined shapes the narrative, emphasizing themes of fate, power, and the struggle against an inevitable doom. When Mr. Compson describes Ellen’s fate, for instance, he intertwines it with the doomed destiny of Thomas Sutpen himself in the language of inevitability:

Yes, he had corrupted Ellen to more than renegadery, though, like her, unaware that his flowering was a forced blooming too and that while he was still playing the scene to the audience, behind him fate, destiny, retribution, irony— the stage manager, call him what you will—was already striking the set… (57).

This exploration serves as a microcosm for larger questions that define the history of the South, presenting a compelling portrait of a region grappling with the residual, doomed effects of an economy built on violence and enslavement.