Absalom Absalom

♦ SETTING ♦

Absalom, Absalom! is set in the fictional city of Jefferson, Mississippi, and in Yoknapatawpha County, the setting of fourteen other novels by Faulkner as well as for many of his short stories. Faulkner knew the setting well because he fashioned Jefferson after the Mississippi town of Oxford where he grew up. He thus provides detailed descriptions of the plantation houses, the run-down shacks of the tenant farmers, the rivers, the railroads, and the dirt roads. By the time Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom!, his vision of this mythic world he created

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Absalom, Absalom!

was complete. He includes a map of the county as well as a chronology of historical events and a genealogy of the characters, all of which bring the county to life as a real place in the American South and an appropriate setting for Faulkner's analysis of Southern culture and ideals.

Faulkner's realism is convincing because he details the county's past as well as its present to give his story historical perspective. Readers know the roads the characters traveled and the houses in which they lived, but they also know the history of those roads and those houses. Faulkner details the setting so well that readers become immersed in Yoknapatawpha County; they can almost feel the muggy weather and see the run-down plantation houses. The map of the county gives locations to the events that occur in all the books in his Yoknapatawpha series. True to Faulkner's vision of making his story a living legend, Yoknapatawpha County epitomizes the mythical South.

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