Absalom, Absalom! Summary: Faulkner's Story of Thomas Sutpen and His Ruined Dynasty
What it is about
Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner's Southern Gothic novel about the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a plantation owner in Mississippi. The action spans the years before, during and after the American Civil War, and takes place in Faulkner's invented Yoknapatawpha County. The book is not told straight. It arrives as a set of retellings, delivered years after the fact by people who were not all there and who do not agree.
Sutpen is a white man born poor in western Virginia. As a boy he learns that society can measure a human being by what he owns. That lesson sets the whole book in motion. He arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi with some slaves and a French architect he has somehow forced into service, obtains a hundred square miles of land from a local Native American tribe, and begins building a plantation he calls Sutpen's Hundred, complete with an ostentatious mansion. The last item on his list is a wife to bear him children, above all a son and heir. He ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man's daughter, Ellen Coldfield.
Ellen gives him two children, Henry and Judith. At the University of Mississippi, Henry befriends an older student, Charles Bon, and brings him home for Christmas. Charles and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. Thomas Sutpen then recognises that Charles is his own son from an earlier marriage, and moves to stop the match. What follows pulls the family apart.
The main characters
Thomas Sutpen is the centre, though the reader only ever sees him through other people's accounts. He is ambition in its most stripped-down form, a man building a dynasty the way an engineer builds a bridge, with people as materials.
Quentin Compson is the main narrator, a young man whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. He tells the story to his Harvard roommate Shreve, who keeps interrupting with his own guesses and additions. Rosa Coldfield, Ellen's younger sister, narrates first, with long digressions and a biased memory. Quentin's father fills in more. Each version adds detail and alters it.
Henry Sutpen and Judith Sutpen are the children caught between their father's plan and their own lives. Charles Bon is the elder half-brother whose existence undoes everything. Eulalia Bon, Sutpen's first wife, met him in the French West Indies, where he worked as an overseer and put down a slave uprising. Wash Jones is a squatter on the Sutpen land, and his fifteen-year-old granddaughter Milly becomes part of Sutpen's final attempt to produce an heir.
The themes
Family here is not refuge but machinery. Sutpen wants sons because sons are proof of the design, and when a child fails to serve the design he discards the child. The novel is unusually cold-eyed about what patriarchy actually asks of people.
Ambition and class run together. Sutpen's whole life is a reply to a humiliation he suffered as a boy. He does not want to overturn the system that shamed him, he wants to sit at the top of it. That is the corruption at the heart of the book. The order he builds depends on slavery, on racial category, and on treating women as instruments.
Then there is the question of how anyone knows anything. Because the narrators are unreliable and the events come out of order, the reader finishes more certain about the attitudes and prejudices of the tellers than about the facts of Sutpen's life. The South is remembering itself out loud, and getting it wrong in revealing ways.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the book to surprise you. Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother. Henry refuses to believe it, repudiates his birthright and goes with Charles to New Orleans. Ellen retreats to a darkened room and dies two years later. The two young men enlist in their university company and fight for the Confederacy. Henry very nearly makes peace with the marriage, until his father reveals that Charles is part black. At the war's end Henry kills Charles at the gates of the mansion and flees into exile.
Sutpen comes home to find his hundred square miles reduced to one. He proposes to Rosa, then insults her by demanding she bear him a son first, and she leaves. He begins an affair with Milly Jones. She gives birth to a daughter, and Sutpen casts mother and child aside with a comparison to his horse, which has just sired a male. Wash Jones kills Sutpen, Milly and the baby, and then himself when the law comes. Years later Quentin takes Rosa back to the apparently abandoned Sutpen's Hundred, and they find Henry there.
Why it still matters
The book takes a story that could be told as melodrama and makes the telling itself the subject. Faulkner is interested in inheritance in every sense: property, blood, guilt and the stories a region repeats about its own past. The racial logic that destroys the Sutpens is not a private quirk of one man, it is the law of the society he is trying to join. Readers who want a tidy narrative will struggle. Readers willing to assemble the picture from fragments get one of the most ambitious novels in American literature, and a study of ambition that refuses to admire it.
