Absalom Absalom

♦ THEMES AND CHARACTERS ♦

The story of Thomas Sutpen so captivated the people of Yoknapatawpha County that it took on the character of a living legend. The story is full of love and hate, terror and tragedy. It reveals human strengths and frailties so believable that Sutpen's life becomes a legacy. To the people of Yoknapatawpha County, the legacy began in 1833, when Sutpen arrived in Jefferson, Mississippi, as a mysterious stranger with no intent to reveal his past. No one in the town knows anything about this man for a long time, and when he disappears from Jefferson and then returns with a group of slaves and sets his sights on building a plantation, the townspeople begin to see their own lives change irrevocably in numerous ways.

Sutpen is an enigma in Jefferson, Mississippi, because he reveals nothing of his past

life nor anything about how he acquired his wealth. For this reason the people of Jefferson view him with skepticism and even contempt for quite some time, which appears to reveal Faulkner's belief that Southerners are set in their ways and have difficulty accepting what goes against convention. But once Sutpen establishes his mansion, he marries Ellen Coldfield, the daughter of a respected citizen of Jefferson, and this gains him respect in the county. Sutpen and his wife raise two children, Henry and Judith, and before long gossip about this family and about Sutpen's Hundred, their ostentatious one-hundred-square-mile plantation, seems to dominate the town.

Sutpen's Hundred continues to be a topic of county gossip for years, and Faulkner uses it as a microcosm of Southern society. Southern society placed a high value on land ownership. In the nineteenth century, plantation owners ruled the South, and ownership of both land and people gave them license to do so. Thomas Sutpen built his plantation and worked toward creating his design for a perfect world. Then he attempted to make everything and everyone fit that design. The nature of ownership, as defined by Sutpen's dynasty, leaves no room for human emotion. Sutpen amasses a great deal of wealth, but in the process he comes to disregard the very values that led him to create his plantation in the first place.

The truth behind Sutpen's motivations remains buried in the past, and Faulkner uncovers it over the course of the novel. One of the primary themes in the novel is man's relationship to the past, a theme that emerges early as the mystery of Sutpen's life captivates the people of Yoknapatawpha County and sets the novel's tone. As the narrators of the story reveal more and more of Sutpen's story and delve further into history for explanations, the reader learns that Sutpen left Haiti and his wife Eulalia and child Charles Bon to come to

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Mississippi and start a new life. Sutpen abandoned his son when he learned that the boy's mother was part African. But this son, Charles Bon, eventually came to Mississippi to haunt his father and force him to acknowledge his past life and family. But Thomas Sutpen refuses and turns his son away at the door. Charles courted Judith, his half sister, and intended to force an acknowledgment of his birthright by making Thomas prevent the incest that would occur once his children married.

The facts of this story are disclosed in the first chapter of the book, and from there Faulkner proceeds to embellish the story with not so many factual details. The first five chapters of the novel take place one day in September 1909, just before Quentin Compson, one of Faulkner's four narrators, leaves for Harvard. The next four chapters take place later on, when Quentin and his roommate, Shreve McCannon, are in their dorm room at Harvard attempting to decipher the Sutpen story. It is not until the eighth chapter, when the novel reaches a climax, and the reader discovers the reason Thomas Sutpen is driven to establish his grand design: Sutpen was devastated from an experience he had as a child in Haiti when he was turned away by the Negro servant of a wealthy plantation owner. It was then Sutpen vowed to change his life, become an owner himself, and start a dynasty of his own.

This incident leads to an understanding of Faulkner's rejected child theme which he juxtaposes with the theme of retribution and the theme of the interconnectedness between past and present. Sutpen was bom poor, and he was indeed devastated by being sent to the back door of the planter's house by a "monkey nigger." This incident makes him vow to amass great wealth and create his own dynasty, and to devote his life to his own design, though at the expense of everyone else. But if he seeks

retribution for the injustice done to him by the servant of the black plantation owner, then he fails to see how his rejection of his son years later dooms his life to failure. Sutpen cannot make sense of his past because he is blinded by ambition and determined to become a member of the Southern aristocracy.

Parallel to Sutpen's drive for retribution, Charles Bon comes to Mississippi with a similar drive. It is Bon who is now rejected, when Sutpen dismisses his own son. Bon comes to Mississippi with the intention of marrying Judith, his half-sister, so he befriends Henry, his half-brother, and then begins to court Judith, pretending not to know of the relationship between them. Thomas Sutpen sees that the impending marriage will ruin his dynasty, yet he is a coward and can do nothing to rectify the situation without himself disrupting his perfect world. He refuses to recognize Bon, but tells his son Henry about his secret and lets Henry determine what course of action to follow. Henry kills Charles Bon to prevent incest and the miscegenation (the belief that whites should not marry or have children with members of another race).

The fact that Faulkner weaves the theme of man's relationship to the past with the theme of injustice reveals an essential truth about Southern culture. Past injustices continue to haunt Thomas Sutpen just as past injustices continue to haunt Southerners today; the crimes committed against the slaves can never be erased from Southern history. Guilt emerges as a primary theme in Faulkner's story and as a prominent emotion among the residents of Jefferson, Mississippi. Most of the characters in the novel suffer from guilt of some sort, partly as a result of their own evil doings and partly from the guilt they "inherited" from their ancestors who first became slaveholders.

Faulkner supports his theme of guilt by emphasizing the cruel treatment Southern

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plantation owners inflicted on their slaves. Slavery cannot help but be a big theme in a Southern novel because slavery does, in fact, characterize the nature of Southern ownership. Ownership, in the antebellum South, meant owning people as well as land. It meant exploiting people as well as the earth. Faulkner devotes much attention to the evils that result from the dehumani-zation of black people, and he creates in Thomas Sutpen a character who cannot recognize humanity because of his blind dedication to an abstract design. Sutpen is a cruel slaveholder who condones racism and thus dooms his design to failure. Readers are left to decipher the complex reasons why Sutpen's design fails, as well as to answer other questions that arise during the course of the novel.

Questions arise during the retelling of Sutpen's story because each of the four narrators, like everyone in Yoknapatawpha County, has their own take on what happened and why. Nothing is concrete because personal prejudices influence the townspeople's thoughts and feelings. Sutpen's mystery captivates the county, and gossip surrounds Judith and Henry as they grow up. By the time Charles Bon enters the picture and his life with Judith falls apart, each of the narrators has a different understanding of why Judith and Bon never married. They offer answers to this key question and to other questions that emerge, such as why Sutpen forbade the marriage, and why Henry killed Bon after appearing to stand up for him.

What readers must do as they read Absalom, Absalom!, and what the narrators must do as the novel progresses, is to order events and make sense of random pieces of information. The stories the narrators tell are to be considered but not taken as fact. This does not mean that the basic story these people tell is untrue, but simply that they each reveal a different side of the tale.

The narrators of Faulkner's novel are Rosa Coldfield, the younger sister of Sutpen's wife Ellen; Jason Compson, an older, respected man in Ihe county; Quentin Compson, Rosa Coldfield's young friend; and Shreve McCannon, a Northerner and Quentin's roommate at Harvard. Each of them has different reasons for arriving at the conclusions they do because Thomas Sutpen affected each of their lives in different ways. The structure of the narratives makes the book a psychological novel as well as a historical one, and it sheds light on the motivations of people as well as on the nature of Southern gossip. Because the accounts given by all of the narrators are biased and unreliable, Faulkner demonstrates that people's personal stories largely mold the course of history, and thus the reader must question whether it is ever possible to get a truly accurate account of history in the first place.

One of the questions that emerges in the novel is why Rosa Coldfield agrees to marry Sutpen and then later refuses. As the reader learns more about the circumstances surrounding her decision, there is the realization that Rosa's narration is unreliable because her view is tainted by Sutpen's proposal that they have a child before they marry. For Thomas Sutpen, Rosa Coldfield is simply a means to obtaining his goal, providing an heir to carry on the dynasty. It is with Miss Rosa's narration that readers begin to see an analogy between Sutpen's rise and fall with that of the South. Miss Rosa believes that with men like Sutpen in control, the South is bound to fail. She considers Sutpen lacking in honor and compassion. He exploits people like he exploits the land and thus has to suffer the consequences of the collapse of his dynasty.

The theme of exploitation molds Faulkner's characterization of Sutpen and defines his condemnation of Southern morals. Essentially, Sutpen puts the abstract notion of a

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perfect design before the concrete needs of the people around him. He chooses the life of a planter and thus becomes a natural exploiter, adopting the philosophy of production for profit and personal benefit. Thomas Sutpen exploits Rosa just as he exploited Milly Jones. He got Milly pregnant but abandoned her when she could not produce an heir for him. But he fails to see the consequences of his actions. Thomas Sutpen is unfeeling and unthinking and blind to the feelings of others. He has no imagination and remains so focused on his design that he cannot recognize how his actions will affect those around him. When Sutpen proposes to Rosa that they produce an heir before they marry, he does not foresee that this will cause her to reject him. When he rejects Milly Jones, Sutpen does not foresee that Walsh Jones will kill him in anger because of this. Charles Sutpen also fails to see the inevitability of the collapse of his dynasty and how his own failure to come to terms with the past can bring nothing but doom. With the killing of Charles, Henry disappears and the dynasty collapses. There will be no more heirs.

Absalom, Absalom! gives insight into the exploitation that defines the aristocratic South and which makes stories like Sutpen's living legends. The book is very much an analysis of Southern myths and their roots; for example, the myth of Southern hospitality, the myth of Southerners as aristocracy, and the myth of white supremacy. The roots of these myths are imbedded in history, and thus Faulkner makes the construction of these myths a primary theme. He uses all four of his narrators in the construction process, but the process becomes most noticeable as Quentin and Shreve tell their stories.

In the process of reconstructing the truths of the Sutpen story, Quentin and Shreve go through a laborious process. Not only does this process parallel the recreation of his-

tory and the birth of legend, it parallels the construction of a work of fiction. Quentin is a romantic figure, for Faulkner continually refers to his romantic nature. He knows some facts, but he romanticizes them, so as he and Shreve attempt to assimilate the facts, they use their imagination to draw conclusions. The process by which these boys arrive at their conclusion is crucial to understanding Faulkner's message. He wishes to convey the process of recreating history as an imaginative act, one colored by personal bias. Though the truths are there, locked in the past, these truths are not easily discovered and any meaning derived from them is subject to personal interpretation. The fact that all of the narrators' accounts are biased conveys the notion of historical materialism. For the historical materialist, reality is not learned but created. Sutpen and the other characters in the book create their own realities and thus see only a narrow view of the world.

Absalom, Absalom! is a book of such complexity that re-reading may be necessary in order to fully grasp Faulkner's themes. But Faulkner succeeds in creating a vibrant cast of characters whose lives have been ruined by their historical materialism and their heritage of slavery and racism. Thomas Sutpen is a legacy as the South itself is a legacy; and even in Rosa's view of Sutpen as a demon, he assumes heroic proportions. But there is nothing honorable about Sutpen's legacy, or, Faulkner seems to say, that of the South. Sutpen's honor is embodied in his design, and his design is doomed to failure. When, in chapter six, the reader learns of Sutpen's motive for moving to Mississippi and of his vows to rise above poverty, the reader also discovers that he intended to right the injustice done to him by the planters of Haiti by becoming an "upstanding" member of the Southern aristocracy. He planned to value humanity above personal prejudice. But Sutpen falls prey to the abject materialism of the aristocratic culture and

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can only fail in his pursuit of it. General Compson sees Sutpen's innocence as his weakness. Sutpen cannot assimilate his past experiences into his present life; therefore, he cannot understand how history has betrayed him. In this sense, he embodies the ideals of the Confederacy, attempting to move forward without looking back.

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