Absalom Absalom

♦ LITERARY QUALITIES ♦

Absalom, Absalom! is a difficult book for some readers because Faulkner uses a technique called circumlocution to convey his story. Rather than tell his story from beginning to end in chronological order, he relates each event piecemeal and at different points in time. When a plot structure is circular rather than linear, readers often have a difficult time piecing together the entire story, and in this novel Faulkner makes this piecing together more difficult by using four separate narrators. In order for each narrator to tell their side of the tale, each must return to the same parts of the story the other narrators have already related.

The use of multiple viewpoints adds complexity to a story that is full of complexities itself. Because each narrator injects their personal opinions and prejudices into their story, none of them can be considered reliable, and readers must therefore distinguish fact from opinion. Readers must also understand that none of the narrators has all of the information pertinent to the story available to them, and that much of the information they do have is simply hearsay. Though readers gradually become aware of facts and events, they must take the emotions of each narrator into account as well as attempt to understand their motivation for telling the tale as they do. Faulkner's use of multiple narrators certainly adds depth to his characters, but it disrupts the chronology of the Sutpen story. While Faulkner's lengthy sentences serve to fur-

ther complicate the story, it has been suggested that these lengthy sentences also help establish the time continuum as well as convey the complex nature of re-creating true accounts of times past.

The concept of time assumes primary importance in the novel, for Faulkner believed it was essential to create a vivid picture of the past. Because the Sutpen story so absorbed the people of Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner wanted to establish the story as legend, and in order to do so he had to give his story a strong historical perspective. One way Faulkner accomplishes this is by telling the entire tale in the first chapter. This placed the story in the past right away and gave it credibility as an established myth. None of the narrators knows all of the facts of the Sutpen story because the events happened long ago and because each of them is affected by events in different ways. Only Faulkner, as author, knows the facts, so he uses omniscient narration in the first chapter to reveal them. He outlines the events as they happened, then allows the four narrators to embellish the events and thus establish a mythic tone. It is only after the story is told and the basic facts of the story are revealed that Faulkner allows his four narrators to repeat the tale and inject their own interpretations into the telling. This repetition and interpretation of the story helps characterize it as legend. Readers understand that, in Yoknapatawpha County, the Sutpen story has been accepted as true, ingrained in the minds of the people, and re-interpreted over time in many ways.

Faulkner's frequent use of literary references also helps to establish a mythic tone. The title Absalom, Absalom! refers to the biblical story of David and Absalom, related in the Book of Samuel, which, like Faulkner's story, deals with the themes of incest and murder and relates the moralistic message that "a house divided against

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itself cannot stand." Biblical references permeate the novel, as do age-old themes such as guilt and injustice, which are critical to the literary interpretation of the novel as a legend from the South. But the fact that Faulkner uses the story as a complex metaphor is just as significant to its literary interpretation; for the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen is analogous to the rise and fall of the South.

The history of the Sutpen family is analogous to the history of the South in that Thomas Sutpen pretends to uphold the values of the South, yet he epitomizes its moral degeneration. Sutpen dedicates himself to his "design" and creates a dynasty based on his obsession with creating a perfect, ordered world. This clearly parallels the dedication of the Confederacy to create a perfect, ordered South. Both Sutpen and the Confederacy strove to establish their own sense of greatness, yet both sacrificed human concerns in the process. Sutpen's design, by nature, dooms its creator to failure. Working to preserve his own honor and his own freedom, Sutpen, like the Confederacy, winds up epitomizing the dishonorable slaveholder and symbolizing the injustices carried out in the Antebellum South.

In the volumes of criticism that have been written about Absalom, Absalom!, the Sutpen story emerges not only as a metaphor for the Southern experience but as a metaphor for the process of writing fiction. Faulkner pieces together fragments of gossip and creates a viable tale. The fact that Faulkner uses bits and pieces of information, most of them hearsay, makes readers question the possibility of interpreting history and producing a viable account of the past. Indeed, the job of any author or storyteller involves the tasks of interpreting information and ordering facts. Faulkner seems to challenge his narrators, and his readers, to do this as well. Then, too, by challenging them to create something be-

lievable out of things they do not know to be true, Faulkner not only challenges them to assign meaning to a sequence of events but to question the reliability of history in the first place.

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