Introduction

            William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! is such a comprehensive and dense work that there are as many sides and angles to it as there are to the human consciousness—or perhaps, more appropriately, as many as there are in several consciousnesses. More so than most authors, Faulkner had the uncanny ability to delve into his characters' internal proceses in his search for truth, often utilizing a stream of consciousness style to slide into his characters' minds: revealing slippery thoughts so raw and authentic that they seemed to obfuscate the voice of the author. In particular, scores of essays, papers, and books have been written about the different voices of Absalom, Absalom!.

            Faulkner considered Absalom, Absalom! to be a form of Greek Tragedy, saying that he saw Sutpen as a tragic hero, one cast in "the old Greek concept of tragedy."¹ The novel quickly asserts itself within this framework when the narrator says, "The stranger's name went back and forth among the places of business and of idleness and among the residences in steady strophe and antistrophe: Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen."² The use of the terms "strophe" and "antistrophe" signify alternating stanzas or sections of a poem or chorus, specifically that of Greek works.³ By using these particular words, Faulkner promptly lets readers know the framework in which he is working. Faulkner also stated that, "It's incidentally the story of Quentin Compson's hatred of the bad qualities in the country he loves. But the central character is Sutpen."⁴ This reinforces the idea that Sutpen, in the sense of the tragedy, is the tragic character. Sutpen says repeatedly to General Compson on their short vacation from the war that he had only made one mistake and that if he could only fix it, his design could still be saved.⁵ This is a point that in their telling and retelling of the story Shreve and Quentin come back to again and again. Yet despite the fact that Mr. Compson, General Compson, and the two contemporary narrators all seem not to think that Sutpen's mistake could be traced to one error, that this was too simple of an answer; the repetition of this concept, the mantra-like focus by Faulkner seems to be as much of an ironical self-denying clue as is Quentin's "I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!."⁶

            Like much of the narration of Sutpen's story, everything seems to have a truth to it: not an absolute or insoluble truth, but a partial truth that contains an inherent relevance. The mere mentioning of Sutpen's one mistake over and over seems to point the reader to Sutpen's mistake or mistakes. As a master of observing human behavior, Faulkner realized that rarely do people have one tragic flaw that leads to their downfall—or even one pure reason to do anything—but, rather, that all events are caused by the concatenation of disparate reasons and actions. Such is the case with Sutpen. His crime seems to be one that is necessary for, but not the thing that seems most obvious: slavery. No, Sutpen's tale is more complex than that.

            In many ways, Sutpen is an atypical Southerner; he has no historical tie to the land, he has no family, no past, and his behavior differs from the common Southern plantation owner. Yet there is a point to this. If he had not begun as poor "white trash," needing to overcome his humble beginnings, and nonetheless grown into a rich plantation owner, readers would not see what it takes to become that person; what that plantation owner really is, seen from the outside, realized, understood, and embraced. Through Sutpen, Faulkner paints a picture of what that plantation owner is, how he treats those below him, and the essential "truths" that are an integral part of that legacy. And insofar as that is true, Faulkner uses Sutpen to expose the flaws of a South he loved, regarding it with the same ambivalence as Quentin.

Sutpen's Legacy

            Irving Howe observed in William Faulkner: A Critical Study that Sutpen "harms no one out of malice and sadism, and he is not without sense."⁷ This is an apt conclusion; Sutpen certainly was a man with some sense of morals. The interesting question is how he defines those morals. When Sutpen left his first wife, he did all that he felt he could or should do to justly compensate her for that departure, despite what he perceived as her and her father's dishonesty towards him. Even though dismayed that Sutpen would think her satisfied with that, General Compson's legal mind agreed that he probably could have had a very valid and lawful claim to a good deal more.⁸ Sutpen's honor also dictated that he not disparage that first wife, not even telling his only friend exactly what reason it was for which he repudiated her.⁹ In analyzing Sutpen's actions, Howe also agreed with the latter interpretations of Mr. Compson, that it was not for the Negro blood itself that Sutpen left her, but because of the endangerment to the design that this presented.¹⁰ Cleanth Brooks' essay, "History and the Sense of the Tragic: Absalom, Absalom!" has the same message, detaching Sutpen's actions from racism: "Sutpen's unwillingness to acknowledge Charles Bon as his son does not spring from any particular racial feeling."¹¹ While it is because of race and blood that Sutpen turns away Charles Bon—for that which he refuses to acknowledge him at all—it is not the race itself, but because the very presence of the race in Sutpen's genealogy poses a threat to his design. Indeed, this personal disinterest in race is evident in Sutpen's disinclination to join the nascent Ku Klux Klan after he returns from the war. Faulkner writes that Sutpen, "Kept clear of the sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses with which men who were once his acquaintances even if not his friends discharged the canker suppuration of defeat,"¹² telling them that, "If every man in the South would do as he himself was doing, would see to the restoration of his own land, the general land and South would save itself."¹³ No matter what flaws Sutpen possessed, one can respect that inherent drive for self-sufficiency above scapegoatism, no matter the latter vice's form.

            Yet if it was not a lack or morals or racism, then what was Sutpen's crime? How do his sensibilities reflect on the South as a whole? It is not simply an issue of slavery. Nor is it the lack of acceptance of the black race, as Ilse Dusoir Lind would say of the Civil War and Absalom, Absalom!, that it was, "A fratricidal conflict caused by denial of the Negro."¹⁴ Faulkner explains what the crime was early on, for readers to digest slowly as they work through the novel, just as he does with much of the story itself. Within the opening five pages, you know of the father who starved to death in his own attic as a "conscientious objector" to the Civil War, the daughter who secretly fed him until his end, and that Sutpen's son served for four years in the Civil War with the man who was engaged to his sister, and then shot him before the two could marry, fleeing and vanishing.¹⁵ Just as early in the novel, indeed, on the same page, Faulkner has his omniscient narrator say of Quentin that:

He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.¹⁶

The sickness is slavery, but that is not so much as what ailed the South, as the fever which caused it. It was the legacy of racism that became so ingrained into Southern posterity that it became a "truth" of that culture's existence, something that those born there had little chance to think about or make any conscious decision about.

            Watching Rosa Coldfield's interactions with Clytie, one can see this motif mirrored in Rosa's thoughts also. While certainly her relations with her almost-step-daughter are more complex than to attribute to a single cause, one of those causes must be racism. The omniscient narrator's explanation doubles Rosa's thoughts—she cannot grasp it or name it, yet she is conscious of it:

Even as a child, I would not even play with the same objects which she and Judith played with, as though that warped and spartan solitude which I called my childhood, which had taught me (and little else) to listen before I could comprehend and to understand before I even heard, had also taught me not only to instinctively fear her and what she was, but to shun the very objects which she had touched.¹⁷

What Rosa is talking about is a racism that was inscribed onto her before she could speak or even comprehend what was being inscribed upon her; she was a racist before she knew what racism was. That practice became a part of her; it is also what results in her telling Clytie to get her hands off of her, calling her a "nigger,"¹⁸ and ultimately punching her in the face "like a man would have."¹⁹

            This practice of racism, this discourse of "truth," was bred into all aspects of Southern life: inherited from parents, relatives, education, politics, science and religion—all of which told new young Southerners that blacks were inferior, posing this as an obvious and unalterable truth that they would take for granted as maturing individuals. As Wash says, exemplifying this point: "Niggers, that the Bible said had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin."²⁰ Yet if this was the crime, if it was this inscribed "truth" that blacks were a lesser species, a false "truth" inherited as part of a Southern discourse of being, then what made Sutpen different, what made him the criminal, the tragic villain who nonetheless had some sense of integrity and morals? The answer goes back all the way to his childhood and the insult offered by Pettibone's servant.

            It is no accident that Faulkner has Quentin name Sutpen's birthplace as West Virginia. "Not in West Virginia," Shreve reminds him, pointing out that Sutpen was born at a time when all that land was simply Virginia. Although Quentin's historical error is corrected, it places Sutpen's birth in what would become a Union state, particularly, one of rugged self-determinism, where slaves had little or no place, and only poor, hardworking (mostly white) men and women made their livings.²¹ Yet, when Sutpen's family comes down toward the coast, into the heart of Virginia, they meet slaves, and possibly blacks, for the first time. As Sutpen told General Compson (as related by Quentin), "It had never once occurred to him that any man should take any such blind accident as that as authority or warrant to look down at others, any others. So he had hardly heard of such a world until he fell into it."²² Thus, thee world of the plantation owner was new to Sutpen. There, he learned:

The difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room.²³

Young Sutpen was not yet aware of this, however, he was still "innocent." As Faulkner explained, he “had begun to discern that without being aware of it yet.”²⁴ At that time, Sutpen was "no more conscious of his appearance in them [his clothes] or of the possibility that anyone else would be than he was of his skin."²⁵

            All this learning about blacks and slaves and whites culminated in young Sutpen carrying his father's message to Pettibone and being turned back by his black house servant. This event catalyzes all that Sutpen had been observing, turning the experience in on itself, as he formulates the answers in a sudden, hurried, and instantly retrospective manner:

Before the monkey nigger who came to the door had finished saying what he did, he [Sutpen] seemed to kind of dissolve and a part of him turn and rush back through the two years they had lived there like when you pass through a room fast and look at all the objects in it and you turn and go back through the room again and look at all the objects from the other side and you find out you had never seen them before, rushing back through those two years and seeing a dozen things that had happened and he hadn't even seen them before.²⁶

With this realization, a young Sutpen begins to become conscious of blacks and their standing:

A certain flat level silent way his older sisters and the other white women of their kind had of looking at niggers, not with fear or dread but with a kind of speculative antagonism not because of any known fact or reason but inherited by both white and black, the sense, effluvium of it passing between the white women in the doors of the sagging cabins and the niggers in the road and which was not quite explainable by the fact that the niggers had better clothes.²⁷

It is at this point that Sutpen begins to understand the antebellum South. Note how Sutpen remarks that this antagonism was something "inherited," without any conscious reason, an "effluvium," pervading the South like the very air they breathed. Something which Sutpen says (via General Compson and Quentin) was "never once mentioned by name . . . sickness without ever naming the epidemic,"²⁸ a reference which corresponds to the omniscient narrator's language earlier in the novel. The fact that it was this narrator that mentioned it previously, and not one of the characters of Absalom, Absalom!, seems to give credence to Quentin referencing the same analogy at this point. At the very least, it marks a distinct pattern that can be analyzed, though, one that is not as black and white as it seems.

            Sutpen did not just come to realize the difference between blacks and whites, but between whites and whites: the difference that was not one of hard work or merit, but "luck." What surprises him is that people take advantage of this "luck." If this new plantation mentality teaches him that the people who he had initially thought of as people were not, but were slaves, things, objects; then his world is truly shattered to learn that he and his are below those things. Those slaves dressed better than his kind, and many merely had to serve their masters drinks and take his shoes off—a much easier life than that of a poor farmer or worker. A slave nearly runs over his sister when she does not want to move out of the way for him. Moreover, they seem impervious to violence, just a "balloon with a face painted on it . . . laughing:" capable of turning him away from the front door—telling him never to use the front door—and ordering him to go around to the back.²⁹ In reflecting on those two years, in understanding everything finally, Sutpen sees himself and his family as the plantation owner Pettibone sees them:

As cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity, populate, double treble and compound, fill space and earth with a race whose future would be a succession of cut-down and patched and made-over garments bought on exorbitant credit because they were white people, from stores where niggers were given the garments free, with for sole heritage that expression on a balloon face bursting with laughter which had looked out at some unremembered and nameless progenitor who had knocked at a door when he was a little boy and had been told by a nigger to go around to the back.³⁰

            The only release the poor whites are allowed is to vent their frustrations on the blacks—which changes nothing—or they can be happy to be nothing: taking refuge in family, whiskey, and sex. Yet Sutpen cannot abide by this; he cannot accept people taking advantage of the accident of birth. Quentin and his own progenitors still claim he was innocent, but that innocence becomes transmogrified from actual innocence (i.e. ignorance) into the unique status of being an outsider on the whole discourse of social strata, having somehow penetrated that Southern discourse and evading the inscribed "truths" that overwhelm even the rest of his transplanted family, and of dissatisfaction with the end results of such "truths."

            Sutpen realizes that something must be done. He cannot strike out at Pettibone; that is not what he is really striking out at, but rather at the entire discourse of the South, what Lind calls "The inexorability of 'fate.'"³¹ Or as John T. Irwin says, it is: "Not revenge against a system in which the rich and powerful can affront the poor and powerless but against the luck of birth that made him one of the poor."³² Sutpen tries to invert this play of Fate by becoming one of those powerful men, through "courage" and "shrewdness," rather than Luck. He realizes that "To combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do what he did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with."³³ Thus, Sutpen set off to make his own fortune.

            In some senses, Sutpen follows the narrative of the classic Greek tragedy in the style of Oedipus Rex, in that he tries to avoid his own given fate, to no avail—in particular as a detective investigating a crime to which he is unknowingly the perpetrator—but there is more than that circumstance that leads to Sutpen's downfall. Sutpen is given three chances to avoid his doom, to fully depart from the paradigm that scorned him, but in all three instances, he fails to do so, instead subscribing to the very discourse which insulted him in the first place. Sutpen loses his chance to acknowledge those of color, or the poor whites, and fails utterly by inscribing his own son with the same values that he claimed to suffer insult by and swore to combat.

Southern Discourse

            Faulkner describes Sutpen's design for "Sutpen's Hundred as if it had been a King's grant in unbroken perpetuity from his great grandfather—a home, position: a wife and family . . . along with the rest of respectability."³⁴ Character-wise, it is Rosa who explains this at the beginning of the novel. An integral part of thist design is to raise a pure white lineage, which is why Sutpen repudiates his first wife. Sutpen believed her sated with the compensation he had given her; yet, Charles Bon, his son from that marriage, returns, surfacing as a college friend of Sutpen's son, Henry. Almost at the end of the war, Bon says to Henry, explaining his desire for acknowledgement (through Shreve): "I thought at first it was because he didn't know [that Bon was Sutpen's son]. Then I knew that he did know, and still I waited. But he didn't tell me. He just told you, sent me a message like you send a command by a nigger servant to a beggar or a tramp to clear out."³⁵ The parallel between Sutpen and Bon's experiences is striking. The question, then, is how to interpret it. Sutpen's refusal to acknowledge Bon inflicts the same hurt upon his own son as was inflicted on him, not for color per se, but for the pain of Luck or Fate, that which made Bon black just as it made Sutpen poor. But, by this time, Sutpen has become so complacent as the plantation owner and Confederate officer, that he has partly inscribed himself with the same paradigm of thought that he had once escaped and sought to revenge. Had Sutpen accepted Bon, he could have conquered that Luck or Fate, he would have brought someone up, who through no fault of his own had been "cursed" with blackness, who had been born into a world where fragmentary-Negroness made him the equivalent of a slave to those that knew his true heritage—even though he could "pass" for a white man. Sadly, Bon’s only acknowledgement comes implicitly in the form of his death, as Sutpen maneuvers Henry to stop him from marrying Judith because of his lineage.³⁶ Because Sutpen’s battle was with Fate, or a general Southern discourse, and not with any one person or persons, Sutpen would not have had to reveal the fact of Bon's partial blackness to anyone: he would not have had to tell the other inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County. As he realized in General Compson's office, he could have:

Let matters take the course which I know they will take and see my design complete itself quite normally and naturally and successfully to the public eye, yet to my own in such fashion as to be a mockery and a betrayal of that little boy who approached that door fifty years ago and was turned away, for whose vindication the whole plan was conceived and carried forward.³⁷

By this point, however, Sutpen has already destroyed himself; the discourse that he had once escaped, has become re-inscribed upon him during his life as a Southern plantation owner and Confederate officer. What was once not a fight about himself or any one person, but against Luck, Fate, and the Southern discourse in general, becomes a self-centered war of revenge for Sutpen, falling short of any deeper cultural meaning.

            Sutpen's very language reveals a self-centeredness, in which he perceives all elements against him personally, forgetting that it against Fate which he contends. "They deliberately withheld from me,"³⁸ he says in his conversation with General Compson. "Faced with condoning a fact which had been foisted upon me,"³⁹ "[w]hile the other party or parties to it concealed from me . . . [they] would destroy the entire plan and design which I had been working toward."⁴⁰ Thus, over time, Sutpen loses his focus; he forgets what it is that he is fighting. Sutpen would only have had to be content with himself (and Bon), knowing that he had beaten that discourse, that Fate: that he had brought someone else up beyond the Fate inscribed upon them. Instead, Sutpen defeats himself. He falls victim to the same fears of racial impurity and social bigotry that defiled the inscribed mindset of the entire antebellum and post-War South.

            In the same way, Sutpen fails with Milly Jones: what the narrators considered his third (and final) chance at posterity. As Quentin says, Sutpen "[w]as now past sixty and that possibly he could get but one more son, had at best but one more son in his loins, as the old cannon might know when it has just one more shot in its corporeality."⁴¹ Sutpen seduces Milly, brings her gifts, and plans to marry her: if she can but produce a son. Yet the very brutality of his methodology is as degrading to her as his own sisters' sudden pregnancies: just one man of many, taking advantage of a girl who desperately wanted what she might have perceived, that as a poor white girl, she would not have received from anyhere else—and perhaps in this case, from where she might have seen her own dreams of becoming a mother and wife realized: living in a beautiful mansion, served by hired help, free in riches and comfort. But when Milly’s child turns out to be a daughter, Sutpen gives up, repudiating her also, and finally goading Wash into killing him.⁴² Thus for the third and final time, Sutpen loses the opportunity to raise one up who had been slighted by Fate; he casts Milly and her grandfather down just as he had been all those years ago, leaving them in the same despair, leaving Wash to think of Sutpen and himself:

Better if his kind and mine too had never drawn the breath of life on this earth. Better that all who remain of us be blasted from the face of it than that another Wash Jones should see his whole life shredded from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown into the fire.⁴³

This internal monologue mirrors Sutpen's realization that he and his were objects to the rich master. The only difference in the two experiences is their reactions to such insult. Perhaps, in part, the reactions were different because of their respective ages. Sutpen, at fourteen years of age, had ample opportunity and time to build his fortunes as a kind of revenge, but Wash had little such recourse; his only option was the one that Sutpen had discarded: violence.

            But even in killing Sutpen, feeling that he must, that it is his only answer to Sutpen's insult, Wash realizes the futility of this actions:

That if he ran he would be fleeing merely one set of bragging and evil shadows for another, since they (men) were all of a kind throughout all of the earth which he knew, and he old, too old to run far even if he were to run who could never escape them, no matter how much or how far he ran.⁴⁴

This world, this South, was full of men inscribed with the fact that no one who so openly and blatantly violates their "natural" order can escape unpunished. No poor white, who before the War was seen as less even than a slave, could insult a white landowner, let alone kill one. Knowing this, Wash too goads his killers into the act which must be his end.

By comparision, Wash's death shows how close Sutpen came to succeeding. Illuminated in the violence of Sutpen's and Wash's deaths is the subtlety of Sutpen's design. Sutpen built his destiny out of nothing to defeat any sense of Luck, and concerning himself, he succeeded. Yet in becoming too comfortable with plantation life and becoming frustrated with his failed attempts at securing posterity, he did not realize that he was fulfilling the same role that he had wished to defeat. As Robert Dale Parker has noted, "Once he has it too, instead of allowing him to combat them it will make him do the same offensive thing."⁴⁵ And so Sutpen soundly becomes what he had set out to destroy. Perhaps the only thing worse than that is the fact that he inscribes his son with the very same ideology that he once escaped and then fell victim to through his own complacence.

            Henry Sutpen—the son of Thomas Sutpen, he: "Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation"⁴⁶—is given the full benefits and attention of a young, wealthy landowner. He is heir to a hundred acres of the richest farmland in the county, and most importantly, is given the same heritage and legacy that all Southern children are: that of Fate, that a person's place in life is determined by their luck of birth and that that birth makes one better or worse than another. Of all people, Thomas Sutpen should have brought his son up outside the stanbdard Southern discourse, but he does not. Sutpen can even see it happening, but he does nothing to stop it. When young Henry sees his father fight his slaves, Henry becomes ill, vomiting and screaming. This behaviour demonstrates a distaste for his father's aberrational behavior, for a nonconformity with the normative Southern discourse of gentility and race. Yet Sutpen does not do anything other than smile behind his black beard.⁴⁷

            Henry is the one who apes all Bon does, in manner and dress, going so far as to say to Bon, "If I had a brother, I would want him to be older than me . . . Yes. And I would want him to be just like you."⁴⁸ Henry sees in Bon not a man of color, but a wealthy peer from urban New Orleans, a sophisticated counter to his own country manner. Henry loves Bon so much that he is willing to let him marry his sister, a permission certainly not granted lightly, let alone foisted upon another, knowing that he (Henry) would: "Hate the man that I would have to look at every day and whose every move and action and speech would say to me, I have seen and touched parts of your sister's body that you will never see and touch: and now I know that I shall hate him and that's why I want that man to be you."⁴⁹ Bon is the man that Henry wants to marry his sister, the man he will recommend to his father, the man that he will even ultimately repudiate his fortunes for: the man to whom he said, "From now on mine and my sister's house will be your house and mine and my sister's lives your life."⁵⁰

            Henry's love for Bon is obvious and undeniable: it is why he gives Bon the "probation" of four years when he finds out his true relationship to his half-brother, even though he says he knew it would do no good. Henry was hoping against all hope that Bon would change his mind and decide not to marry Judith or perhaps that he would get used to the idea of the incest. Indeed, it ends up being the latter, as Henry tells Bon to write the letter to his sister: justifying it with the European royalty of history who might have done the same thing.⁵¹ It should also be noted that this passage is one of the few that Faulkner's narrator takes out of the hands of the storytellers, delivering it with his omniscient authority. Henry, regarding incest, is able to say about the finality of his allowing Bon to marry Judith, that, "that something was the irrevocable repudiation of the old heredity and training and the acceptance of eternal damnation."⁵² Henry is willing to deny the legacy inscribed upon him by his entire surroundings, willing to allow the incestuous marriage of Bon and his sister, to deny the paradigm that his father once did—without his father's help—something he will do even under the threat of "eternal damnation."

            Everything changes, however, when Sutpen plays his "trump," revealing not only that Bon is Henry's half-brother, but part black; and again, this fact is delivered with certainty by the omniscient narrator.⁵³ For Henry, this changes everything. As Robert Dale Parker points out: "The very existence of Clytie . . . leaves it plain that Sutpen has no objections to miscegenation so long as he retains the position of power . . . the objection that propels the novel's plot is not to miscegenation itself but more specifically to miscegenation between equals.”⁵⁴ It is this that Henry cannot abide. The man who would accept damnation for the passive acceptance of incest, would rather kill his half-brother than see a part Negro marry his sister.

            Henry, arguing more with himself than Bon, tells Bon that "You are my brother," to which Bon only responds, "No I'm not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry."⁵⁵ Bon, like Sutpen and Wash, instigates his own death, acquiescing at last to the monolithic Southern discourse which would not let him penetrate its sensibilities; the tool of that discourse in striking him down is Henry, acting in the stead of Sutpen the father. Bon could not escape this discourse. Henry could not escape this discourse. Thus, through Henry one can see the monumental failure that Sutpen created out of nothing, as he was trying to break free from that Southern discourse. Rather than defeat it, he ended up instead perpetuating it not once, not twice, but three times: compounding each failure on top of the others.

            With the room darkening around Shreve and Quentin, like the curtain drawing on the stage of a Greek tragedy, Sutpen's tale unfolds and finishes as much as it can, questioning even the beliefs and practices of the modern Southern narrator (Quentin). Yet, the story cannot end with Sutpen, or else there would be no need to include Quentin in the story at all. For Faulkner to have wanted or needed a modern narrative voice, there must have been a distinct purpose. That purpose is to tie the same Southern discourse to Quentin, to force him to realize that it is still being inscribed upon him and those being raised in his time.

            Quentin is as appropriate of a narrator as he is specifically because he is not wholly subsumed by this discourse; rather, he is split by it. Certainly, he is aware of it in Rosa. As previously mentioned, Rosa demonstrates characteristics of racial intolerance, inscribed upon her, for reasons unknown even to her. Rosa seems to see the fiction through which such "truth" has been presented, but is afraid to embrace that discovery. Faulkner writes of her that she:

Even at nineteen must have known that living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash. Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either: not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upwards sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth, relicts the seething and anonymous miasmal mass which in all the years of time has taught itself no boon of death but only how to recreate, renew; and dies, is gone, vanished: nothing.⁵⁶

Quentin hears this, but cannot comprehend that this is a repeated theme in Faulkner's depiction of both him and the South in general. Further, Rosa speaks of the same "sickness" that the narrator does at the beginning of the novel and later as well. Rosa also alludes to the same "foundation . . . factual scheme," which imprisons with its truth. Although she may not know it by name, she feels an all-encompassing discourse, which "renew[s]" itself, and which "vanished," by which Faulkner really means hides, or becoming invisible, eluding notice as an obvious "truth," no more.

            Although Quentin is split by this discourse, he is also subject to it. In the later chapters of the novel, he casually uses the word "nigger," where Mr. Compson rarely did, and even Rosa uses it only in exclamation. While this may seem a surface complaint, it represents a certain mindset, a capability or vulnerability to this Southern discourse. Quentin certainly observes this discourse's effect on Rosa, who both strikes Clytie, "like a man would have,"⁵⁷ without even condescending to call her a "nigger" or to tell her to "get her hands off of her," yet who gets angry at Jim Bond for not helping her up, saying "You nigger . . . Help me up! You aint any Sutpen."⁵⁸ Quentin sees all of this, while at the same time being the one to help Clytie up, who sees the duality in Rosa not recognizing Jim Bond as a Sutpen, as the "heir," but just as a "nigger."

This whole experience, combined with finding out the truth of both Sutpen's repudiation of his first wife and child and the racism behind Henry's murder of Bon (for it is at that visit, revealed only in the last chapter, although hinted at earlier, that this happens), chases Quentin to his bed, leaving him sweating and panting, his muscles aching—just as they do in the recitation of the story and its culmination and the final questions which he knows must be asked.⁵⁹ Confounding it all is the fact that as Robert Dale Parker points out, "Rosa is every bit as close as Quentin to Faulkner's novel-writing, language-fashioning self. In a sense, Rosa is Quentin grown up, with the same Southern sense of doom and would-be intellectual's memories of agonized adolescence that Quentin seems never able to escape, yet matured and assertive as Quentin will never be."⁶⁰ Perhaps Quentin is tormented by this possible future and is desperate to escape it, unwilling to perpetuate the blind hatred of either Henry or Rosa.

Yet, despite whatever issues Quentin may have had with Rosa, it is Henry’s actions that he cannot let pass. Quentin is tormented by Henry's murder of Bon, stuck there on Rosa's telling of the story—imagining the dialogue that must have passed between Henry and Judith then. The narrator says that, "He (Quentin) couldn't pass that. He was not even listening to her."⁶¹ Of this situation, John T. Irwin sees a doubling issue as well, saying, "Quentin identifies with both Henry, the brother as protector, and Bon, the brother as seducer . . . Quentin projects onto the characters of Bon and Henry opposing elements in his own personality."⁶² Yet to see Quentin as identifying with Bon as the incestuous seducer, one must refer back to The Sound And The Fury. While that may be a very real aspect of Quentin's psychology, it is beyond the scope of this essay, and not necessarily the only aspect of doubling here that bothers Quentin. While certainly, Quentin sees and identifies with Henry as the valorous Southern chevalier, he is also amazed at Henry's willingness to kill a man that he would have suffered eternal damnation for, just because he was part black and trying to assert himself as an equal. The same part of him that identifies with the concepts of being able to kill in the name of familial honor, is also the part of him that is susceptible to having been inscribed with the same aforementioned discourse of "truth." And in that one brother, that one character (Henry), Quentin finds all that is heroic and deplorable in man: particularly a Southern man of honor and gentility. It is that conflict which Quentin cannot reconcile.

Beyond his personal issues, though, Quentin seems apprehensive about the fate of all who are inscribed by this discourse: as exemplified by Sutpen, Rosa, and Henry. After his first return from Rosa's house, after beginning again the story of Sutpen (one which he was familiar with from early childhood), Quentin asks his father:

Why tell me about it? What is it to me that the land or the earth or whatever it was got tired of him at last and turned and destroyed him? What if it did destroy her family too? It's going to turn and destroy us all someday, whether our name happens to be Sutpen or Coldfield or not.⁶³

Quentin's sense of fatalism seems melodramatic in its nihilism, but is not too far off. Like most of the phrases uttered by most of the characters (excepting the omniscient narrator) the stories and opinions do not ring of ultimate truth, but rather have an inherent semblance of truth, if inexact. This discourse that Faulkner has put in the mouths of his narrators will destroy humankind in the sense that it will doom them all to the same biases and prejudices which will hold them back from being able to: "[m]erely endure: he [humankind] will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”⁶⁴ Such were Faulkner's words at his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature; notice the parallels between this and Rosa's speech, where she speaks of "the prisoner soul." It is this imprisoning, this discourse, which prevents that compassion, sacrifice, and endurance -- or rather that which precludes it, at least in so far as toward those that are given a different social placement, due to economics or race, as determined by Luck or Fate.

Yet even in this penultimate argument, what Shreve and so many others in Cambridge have asked Quentin has been neglected: "Whats it like there [the South]. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."⁶⁵ Quentin finally answers: "I dont know."⁶⁶ Shreve also asks:

"Why do you hate the South?"

"I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don’t. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!.⁶⁷

However, it is obvious from Quentin's answer that while not an ultimate truth, there is a semblance of truth in Shreve's assertion; Quentin answers too quickly, too nervously.

Quentin hates and loves the South in the same way that he is ambivalent about Henry's actions, in the same way that he identifies with and loathes them and, thus, loves and hates himself: confused by the discourse that has been left for him and all the South. Although he recognizes its effects, Quentin himself is impotent, too weak to throw off the shackles of this discourse or to pierce the "arras-veil," as Rosa calls it. That is also why Quentin is so intrigued by Sutpen. Sutpen knew the truth, saw through that truth, and escaped it: yet in allowing himself to be reinscribed by it, failed to defeat the Luck and Fate which he swore to combat, not once, not twice, but three times. Quentin is destroyed by the fact that a man of such strength and courage, with ample opportunities, failed to take advantage of that strength, failed to overcome that collection of inherited "truths": instead falling victim to the same Southern discourse that he swore revenge against.

Conclusion

            Through Sutpen's rise and fall from and to nothingness, and Quentin's modern Southern representation of it, tempered by Shreve's outsider view, filtered down through the years by Mr. and General Compson, Rosa Coldfield, and Sutpen himself, Faulkner creates a vivid, introspective exploration into the underlying assumptions of Southern and Confederate existence and the discourse of one of the myriad of "truths" that ruled it: detailing its effect on those at various levels of that society. Faulkner burrows into the brains of each of his characters and narrators to expose this, and in doing so, not only constructs a striking historical work, but bridges that history into his near-present. Absalom, Absalom! poses in classical terms the tragedy of an entire culture, one destroyed by another, and in at least one regard, examines its weaknesses and its legacy, symbolized by the travails, courage, and failures of one man: Thomas Sutpen. It also shows how long after men like him died off, the discourse which pervaded their lives continues on, unperturbed.

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