Absalom or Avshalom (??????????? “Father/Leader of/is peace”, Standard Hebrew Av?alom, Tiberian Hebrew ?A???l?m), in the Bible, is the third son of David, king of Israel. He was deemed the handsomest man in the kingdom.
His sister Tamar had been raped by David’s eldest son, Amnon, who was in love with her. Absalom, after waiting two years, revenged by sending his servants to murder Amnon at a feast to which he had invited all the king’s sons (2 Samuel 13):
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Context
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in September 1897; he died in Mississippi in 1962. Faulkner achieved a reputation as one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century largely based on his series of novels about a fictional region of Mississippi called Yoknapatawpha County, centered on the fictional town of Jefferson. The greatest of these novels–among them The Sound and the Fury,Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!–rank among the finest novels of world literature.
Faulkner was especially interested in moral themes relating to the ruins of the Deep South in the post-Civil War era. His prose style–which combines long, uninterrupted sentences with long strings of adjectives, frequent changes in narration, many recursive asides, and a frequent reliance on a sort of objective stream-of- consciousness technique, whereby the inner experience of a character in a scene is contrasted with the scene’s outward appearance–ranks among his greatest achievements. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.
Absalom, Absalom! is perhaps Faulkner’s most focused attempt to expose the moral crises which led to the destruction of the South. The story of a man hell-bent on establishing a dynasty and a story of love and hatred between races and families, it is also an exploration of how people relate to the past. Faulker tells a single story from a number of perspectives, capturing the conflict, racism, violence, and sacrifice in each character’s life, and also demonstrating how the human mind reconstructs the past in the present imagination.
Summary
In 1833, a wild, imposing man named Thomas Sutpen comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, with a group of slaves and a French architect in tow. He buys a hundred square miles of land from an Indian tribe, raises a manor house, plants cotton, and marries the daughter of a local merchant, and within a few years is entrenched among the local aristocracy. Sutpen has a son and a daughter, Henry and Judith, who grow up in a life of uncultivated ease in the northern Mississippi countryside. Henry goes to college at the University of Mississippi in 1859, and meets a sophisticated fellow student named Charles Bon, whom he befriends and brings home for Christmas. Charles meets Judith, and over time, an engagement between them is assumed. But Sutpen realizes that Bon is actually his own son–Henry and Judith’s half-brother–from a previous marriage which he abandoned when he discovered that his wife had negro blood. He tells Henry that the engagement cannot be, and that Bon is Henry’s own brother; Henry reacts with outrage, refusing to believe that Bon knew all along and willingly became engaged to his own sister. Henry repudiates his birthright, and he and Bon flee to New Orleans. When war breaks out, they enlist, and spend four hard years fighting for the Confederacy as the South crumbles around them. At the end of the war, Sutpen (a colonel) finds his son and reveals to him that not only is Bon his and Judith’s half-brother, he is also, in part, a black man.
That knowledge makes Henry revolt against Bon in a way that even the idea of incest did not, and on the day Bon arrives to marry Judith, Henry murders him in front of the gates of the Sutpen plantation. Sutpen returns to a broken house, and becomes a broken–though still forceful–man; he slides slowly into alcoholism, begins an affair with a fifteen-year-old white girl named Milly, and continues in that vein until, following the birth of his and Milly’s daughter, he is murdered by Milly’s grandfather Wash Jones in 1869.
Decades later, in 1909, Quentin Compson is a twenty-year-old man, the grandson of Sutpen’s first friend in the country (General Compson), who is preparing to leave Jefferson to attend Harvard. He is summoned by Miss Rosa Coldfield, the sister of Sutpen’s wife Ellen (and briefly Sutpen’s fiancee herself), to hear the story of how Sutpen destroyed her family and his own. Over the following weeks and months, Quentin is drawn deeper and deeper into the Sutpen story, discussing it with his father, thinking about it, and later telling it in detail to his Harvard roommate Shreve. The story is burned into his brain the night he goes with Miss Rosa to the Sutpen plantation, where they find Henry Sutpen– now an old man–waiting to die. Months later, Rosa attempts to return for Henry with an ambulance, but Clytie, Thomas Sutpen’s daughter with a slave woman and now a withered old woman herself, sets fire to the manor house, killing herself and Henry, and bringing the Sutpen dynasty to a fiery end.
Characters
Thomas Sutpen - Owner and founder of the plantation Sutpen’s Hundred, in Yoknapatawpha County, near Jefferson, Mississippi. Married to Ellen Coldfield; father of Henry, Judith, and Clytemnestra Sutpen, also of Charles Bon. An indomitable, willful, powerful man, who achieves his ends through shrewdness and daring, but who lacks compassion. Murdered by Wash Jones in 1869.
Charles Bon - Son of Thomas Sutpen and Eulalia Bon, the part- black daughter of the owner of the Haitian plantation on which the young Thomas Sutpen was overseer. After Sutpen renounced his wife and son upon learning of Eulalia’s negro blood, Bon and his mother moved to New Orleans, where Bon lived until deciding to attend the University of Mississippi in 1859. A laconic, sophisticated, and ironical young man.
Ellen Coldfield Sutpen - Thomas Sutpen’s second wife, mother of Henry and Judith Sutpen. A flighty and excitable woman.
Rosa Coldfield - Ellen Coldfield’s much-younger sister, younger aunt of Henry and Judith Sutpen. Briefly engaged to Thomas Sutpen following Ellen’s death, but left him after he insulted her. Spent the rest of her life as a bitter spinster, obsessed with her anger and hatred of Thomas Sutpen.
Mr. Coldfield - A middle-class Methodist merchant and father of Ellen and Rosa.
Henry Sutpen - Thomas Sutpen’s son with Ellen. Grew up on Sutpen’s Hundred, then attended the University of Mississippi beginning in 1859. There he befriended Charles Bon, whom he later murdered. A well- meaning and romantic young man, with his father’s strength of purpose but lacking his father’s shrewdness.
Judith Sutpen - Thomas Sutpen’s daughter with Ellen. Grew up on Sutpen’s Hundred, where she was engaged to Charles Bon in 1860. Strong, indomitable, and, like her father, swift to action.
Clytemnestra Sutpen (”Clytie”) - Daughter of Thomas Sutpen and a slave woman. Grew up on Sutpen’s Hundred as subservient to Judith and Henry; remained at the plantation until burning the manor house down in 1910, an event which caused her death.
Wash Jones - A low-class squatter living in the abandoned fishing camp at Sutpen’s Hundred. Performed odd jobs for and drinks whiskey with Thomas Sutpen. Milly’s grandfather; murdered Sutpen with a rusted scythe in 1869.
Milly Jones - Wash Jones’ young granddaughter, who at fifteen gave birth to Thomas Sutpen’s child. Murdered, along with Sutpen and the baby, by her grandfather shortly after the birth.
Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon - Son of Charles Bon and his octoroon mistress- wife. Taken by Clytie to Sutpen’s Hundred in 1871. Married a negro woman in 1879. A tormented, violent man.
Jim Bond - Son of Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon and his negro wife. Raised by Clytie on Sutpen’s Hundred, from which he disappears following the fire in 1910. A slack-jawed, oafish man.
Quentin Compson - A young man from Jefferson, Mississippi, who is preparing to attend (and later does attend) Harvard in the first part of the 20th century.
General Compson - Quentin’s grandfather and Thomas Sutpen’s first friend in Yoknapatawpha County. A Brigadier General for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and a distinguished citizen of Jefferson, Mississippi.
Mr. Compson - Quentin’s father and General Compson’s son, a man who believes in the power of fate to destroy human lives. Relays to Quentin many of the stories he heard from his father about Thomas Sutpen.
Shreve - Quentin’s roommate at Harvard, a young man from Edmonton in Alberta, Canada.
Chapter 1
Summary
In September 1909, in Yoknapatawpha County, near Jefferson, Mississippi, Quentin Compson is sent a handwritten note from an old woman named Miss Rosa Coldfield, summoning him to meet her that afternoon, so that he can hear the story of her youth and of the destruction of her family. Quentin, a young man from a prominent Jefferson family–his grandfather was a general in the Civil War–is perplexed as to why she would want to talk to him, and asks his father about it. Mr. Compson explains that Quentin’s grandfather had been involved in the story, because he was a friend of a man named Thomas Sutpen, whom Rosa Coldfield considers the demon responsible both for her family’s ruination and her own.
Quentin goes to see Rosa Coldfield; they sit in the musty room she calls the “office,” with the shutters shut so tightly that only thin slits of light shine into the room, and he listens to her story. She explains to him that she has heard he is preparing to attend Harvard–perhaps he will have literary ambitions, and perhaps he would like to write down the story one day. Quentin realizes that she wants the story to be told, so that its hearers will understand how God could have let the South lose the war–because the South was in the hands of men like Thomas Sutpen, who had valor and strength but neither pity nor compassion.
Miss Rosa’s narrative is told with an intense, smoldering bitterness: she has spent the last four decades burning up in her obsession with the events she now recounts. In 1833, she says, Thomas Sutpen descended upon Jefferson with nothing more than a horse and two pistols and no known past (with a group of savage slaves and a French architect in tow, Sutpen at their forefront like a demon–this is how Quentin pictures the event). Through violent force of will Sutpen had managed to raise up a house the size of a courthouse on an estate he carved out himself and named Sutpen’s Hundred. Sutpen was little better than a savage himself, holding fights between his slaves–fights in which he often participated–and horse races, luring men to his plantation for events undescribable to young girls. Thirsting for respectability, Sutpen married Ellen Coldfield, the older sister of Miss Rosa, who was yet to be born), and the daughter of a local Methodist merchant. Sutpen had two children by Ellen, Henry in 1839 and Judith a year later, but being a father did not temper his wild, violent behavior. One night Ellen discovered her husband participating in a fight with a negro before a bloodthirsty crowd, with the children watching–Henry crying and upset, Judith (who had snuck there to watch with a little negro girl) in rapt attention. Judith seemed to possess her father’s temperament: when his reckless carriage races before the church were stopped by the minister’s complaints, the six-year-old girl began to cry insensibly.
Later details in the story become somewhat vague in Miss Rosa’s narration: Thomas Sutpen and his son Henry each fought in the war, she says, and she describes Ellen on her deathbed. Just before she died, Ellen asked Rosa, then a young girl, to look out for Judith–even though Judith was older than Rosa. Rosa replied that the only thing the children needed protection from was themselves. But other than these glimpses, details are scarce– except for one central event which Rosa refers to several times: on Judith’s wedding day, just before the wedding was to take place, her brother Henry killed her fiance in front of the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred.
Commentary
Absalom, Absalom! is an unusual book in that its first chapter summarizes nearly the plot of the rest of the book. The events Miss Rosa recounts in the life of Thomas Sutpen and his family are the same events that subsequent chapters will examine in depth and from many different perspectives and angles. Part of Faulkner’s project in this novel is to show the way in which people relate to, think about, and interpret the past; to achieve that end, he eschews a straightforward chronological narration in favor of a sequence of events–Sutpen building the house and marrying Ellen, the war, Henry Sutpen killing Charles Bon just before Charles would have married Judith–that will be repeated and deepened throughout the novel. The events will be held up to the light by many different characters, each of whom will give the characters in the Sutpen saga different motivations, and will read a different meaning into the story as a whole.
Most of the first chapter is narrated by Miss Rosa, whose relationship to her past is one of frantic and traumatic bitterness, in which everything has intensified and grown out of proportion: Sutpen is a demon, an ogre, a monster; his slaves were savage animals; and so forth. In addition to exploring the nuances of man’s relationship to the past, Faulkner sets out in Absalom, Absalom! to present a metaphor for the history of the South. It is important to note that even at this early stage, Quentin (who will supply the consciousness that unifies the whole book, just as Sutpen is the figure that dominates it) connects the story of Sutpen to that of the South itself, speculating that the South lost the war because shrewd, strong men like Sutpen lacked compassion or pity, and so earned the enmity of God. Later, Quentin’s roommate at Harvard will ask him to explain the South, and Quentin will tell the Sutpen story in answer. As the novel progresses, Quentin’s and the other characters’ interpretations of the Sutpen story become increasingly a struggle with the larger questions (family, race, honor, violence, morality, power, innocence) that define the history of the South.
Chapter 1 is also the reader’s first encounter with Faulkner’s long-lined, recursive narrative style in which events and sequences are interspersed and jumbled, clauses piled on clauses and adjectives on adjectives. Narrators change sometimes without much warning, and characters are introduced as though the reader were already familiar with them. This style, particularly in the early chapters of the novel, can be dauntingly difficult. It is important to remember that Faulkner does not mean for his reader to understand everything at once, so some confusion is to be expected. His technique is to gradually clarify the story as the novel progresses, causing it to emerge piece by piece until finally, the reader begins to understand.
Chapter 2
Summary
Mr. Compson tells Quentin, as they sit on the front porch waiting for Quentin to depart for Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa, the details of Thomas Sutpen’s early years in Jefferson:
On a Sunday morning in June 1833, Sutpen, a young man of twenty-five, had the look of someone who had been through a violent illness which he survived at enormous mental cost–as though he had been burned up by a tropical fever. He rode into Jefferson with nothing but two pistols and a horse and took a room in Holston House. Practically the whole town was staring at him. He kept the room, but every morning locked his door and rode away before daylight; and so he remained a mystery. There was little chance for the men of the town to learn more about him; he never drank with them at the bar (Quentin’s grandfather later learned it was because he lacked the money to do so), and evaded questioning. But it was obvious that he was consumed by some secret urgency. No one knew how or why, but he purchased from the Indians one hundred square miles of prime virgin land, and paid in Spanish coin–his last money. He then disappeared for two months, and when he returned he brought with him a crew of mud-covered slaves and a French architect.
The legend of Sutpen’s wild negroes emerged slowly over the next few months, brought by men riding in the wilderness who could observe Sutpen sending them to drive the swamp like dogs while he hunted. Though Sutpen and his slaves comminicated in a dialect of French, the town came to believe they spoke a dark tongue from some mysterious country. Over the next two years, advised by the architect, Sutpen and the slaves slowly raised a mansion from the soil, working naked and covered in mud–even Sutpen, who was saving his clothes for his final assault on respectability once he was installed in his house. Finally it was finished, though it still lacked windows, paint, and furniture. For the next three years, Sutpen settled into a perplexing stasis–only General Compson, who loaned him the seed cotton with which he began his plantation, claimed to know his motives; the rest of the town was baffled. He began inviting groups of men to his empty house to hunt and drink and play cards, and to stage fights with his slaves. But the women of the town gradually began to suspect that Sutpen would seek a wife.
One Sunday morning at the end of the three years, dressed again in the clothes he had worn when he first arrived in Jefferson, he returned to the town and went to church. To the utter bafflement of the town people, he seemed to have set his sights on marrying the daughter of Mr. Coldfield, a middle-class Methodist merchant with little to offer him. The hunting and drinking parties ceased, and Sutpen began devoting all his time and energy to Ellen Coldfield’s father.
Then one day, Quentin’s father says, Sutpen disappeared again. When he returned, he brought wagonloads of furniture and crystal for his mansion; and he returned to the vague enmity of the town, which had at last begun to realize that he was becoming inextricably involved with them. Moreover, the town suspected that he had acquired his wealth through criminal and possibly violent means. Finally a party of men from the town, led by the sheriff, rode out to confront him.
Sutpen met them halfway. He rode into the town, the men of the town slightly behind him, and took a room at the Holston House. He came out wearing a new hat, and the assembled crowd (numbering fifty, according to the General) watched in tense silence as he walked across the square to Mr. Coldfield’s house with a bundle of flowers under one arm. A good while later, he emerged with no flowers, and by that time–though the crowd did not know it–he was engaged to be married. The vigilance party arrested him. He was arraigned before a justice, but by that time General Compson and Mr. Coldfield had arrived, and had him released on bond. Two months later, in June 1838, he married Ellen Coldfield.
Ellen wept on her wedding day, and was taken by carriage to Sutpen’s Hundred. Mr. Coldfield had wanted a small wedding, but Sutpen had desired–and received, through the intervention of Ellen’s aunt (though he had refused to openly support her efforts)–a large wedding. A hundred invitations were sent out. Only ten people came. But a large crowd assembled outside the church, and as the newlyweds emerged from their wedding, the groom was pelted with dirt and vegetable refuse. But the scandal quickly blew over.
Commentary
Mr. Compson’s speculative description of the eary years of Thomas Sutpen in Jefferson serves two purposes: first, it begins to humanize the character of Thomas Sutpen, so that he becomes less the monomaniacal demon of Miss Rosa’s testimony and more a driven and charismatic human being willing to do anything to achieve his ends; second, it introduces us to a new means of interpreting the past–that of Mr. Compson. More detached than Miss Rosa, whose relationship to her past is governed by the pain and betrayal she experienced, Mr. Compson only heard about the story from his father, the General; he did not live through it himself. He has clearly had the leisure to ponder and speculate upon the meaning of the events surrounding Sutpen’s Hundred, and seems fascinated by them more for the lesson they offer than for anything intrinsic to his own experience. As Mr. Compson continues to narrate over the next two chapters, it becomes increasingly clear that he believes in a force like fate which guides and controls human behavior; he does not believe individuals are in control of their own destinies. In the Sutpen story, he sees an example of a great and powerful man brought down by a hostile fate that had doomed him from the very beginning. Mr. Compson reads signs of doom into many of the early events of Sutpen’s life (as do many characters–Rosa seems to think that the course of history was set for the children as soon as they were born). Furthermore, he thinks that the characters in the story knew they were doomed, but continued to struggle against fate regardless.
The picture of Thomas Sutpen that Mr. Compson presents is one of a mysterious, driven, potent man determined to see his will carried through. He arrives with nothing and raises a palace. He is accused of having robbed steamboats to finance his exorbitant scheme, and ends by marrying the daughter of a respectable local citizen. Where in Miss Rosa’s account, Sutpen seemed a supernatural force of evil, in Mr. Compson’s account his human characteristics begin to appear. Specifically, Sutpen’s courage and strict refusal to spend more than he can afford seem admirable, while his apparent flight from his past is disconcerting. It is important to remember that Mr. Compson got his impressions of Thomas Sutpen from his father, General Compson, Sutpen’s friend; Mr. Compson’s picture is not always accurate, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
Summary
Quentin asks his father why Miss Rosa would want to tell the story of her betrayal at the hands of Thomas Sutpen. Mr. Compson answers by describing Rosa’s life: her mother died while giving birth to her, after Ellen had already been married for seven years; Rosa was raised by the spinster aunt who had insisted on Ellen having a large wedding, and grew up hating her father for her mother’s death. When Mr. Coldfield died by suicide (ostenstibly because he did not wish to go to war, but possibly also motivated by feelings of guilt connected to the aborted criminal venture he had nearly undertaken with Sutpen), and after Ellen died, Rosa moved to Sutpen’s Hundred to try to save Judith from the Sutpen fate–by marrying Thomas Sutpen herself. Mr. Compson says that Sutpen returned from the war to find the twenty-year-old Rosa living at Sutpen’s Hundred with Judith and Clytie–Sutpen’s daughter by one of his slaves- -and that he named all the children born on the plantation himself.
Mr. Compson describes Rosa’s childhood and her infrequent, traumatic visits to the Sutpen plantation, where she was forced by her aunt to play with her niece and nephew, each of whom was several years older than she was. After her aunt ran off with a man, Rosa went to Sutpen’s Hundred just once a year, and observed her sister’s gradual withdrawal from herself and from her father as she began to seem proud of her marriage to Sutpen. Ellen gradually became a giggling country lady, taking Judith on elaborate shopping trips and generally playing her role to perfection. Eventually, Mr. Coldfield stopped going to the plantation altogether, and Rosa went for years without seeing Sutpen at all. Finally, Mr. Compson tells Quentin, some time after Henry Sutpen killed Charles Bon (the day Bon was to marry Judith), Rosa found it in herself to move to the plantation–after her father’s suicide. She had spent some of the time leading up to that writing heroic poetry about the Confederate soldiers who would have hung her father for avoiding military service if they had found him.
But before Rosa moved to the plantation, while she was still keeping house for her father and after her aunt left, there was a time when she would see Ellen and Judith several times a week–when Henry was at the state university, and had begun to be friends with Charles Bon, bringing him home for the holidays before Bon went to New Orleans on a steamboat. After Bon left, Sutpen disappeared on a business errand. No one but General Compson and Clytie knew that he had followed Bon to New Orleans. During this time, Sutpen had amassed so much money (he was the richest single planter in the county) that he had gained social acceptance, and Rosa heard stories of the balls and parties at Sutpen’s Hundred during the holiday season when Charles Bon visited–Charles Bon, Quentin’s father elaborates, was a strange and sophisticated man from a foreign city who was several years older than his new friend Henry Sutpen. At this time, though it was not spoken of, it began to be assumed that Bon would marry Judith Sutpen. Also at this time, Ellen began to disappear from Rosa’s life.
Then word got to Rosa that something had happened–no one was quite sure what–and Henry and Bon disappeared. Eventually the word came from the slaves–not from Sutpen or Judith, who kept a stony silence–that Henry and his father had had a falling-out, and that Henry had renounced his birthright and left Sutpen’s Hundred with Bon. But Rosa continued to sew clothes for Judith’s wedding, and she was still doing so when Mississippi seceded from the Union and Sutpen rode off to war. After the war broke out, Mr. Coldfield climbed into his attic and nailed the door shut, eventually starving himself to death.
Afterward, and after Ellen’s death, Rosa was alone and penniless. She did not move into Sutpen’s Hundred (which was slowly being ruined by the hardships of the war) at once, though, even though Judith may have urged her to do so. Rosa may have felt, Mr. Compson says, that Judith did not yet need her protection, and that Judith was sustained by her love for Charles Bon. But at the same time, Rosa had no idea whether Bon was alive or dead, or where Henry was, until one day when she looked out the window and saw the squatter Wash Jones, sitting on an unsaddled mule in the street outside, calling her name.
Commentary
To answer Quentin’s question, Mr. Compson stops telling the story of Sutpen’s early years and tells a later story from Rosa’s perspective. This section cuts back and forth through time more haphazardly than most other chapters in the book, and further complicates itself by introducing character such as Charles Bon and Wash Jones as though the reader is already familiar with them. Faulkner never really introduces these characters properly; as the novel progresses, it simply becomes clear who and what they are.
Telling the story from Rosa’s perspective allows Mr. Compson to solidify his idea that the Sutpen story was simply a puppet show staged by fate; and it allows Faulkner to expand and clarify the story of Judith’s engagement and Henry’s slaying of Judith’s fiance, while simultaneously leaving most of the important details obscure and maintaining the aura of mystery that hangs over the Sutpen story. (We are not yet told, for instance, why Henry would have renounced his father or why he would have wanted to shoot his sister’s groom.)
During this section Clytie begins to emerge as a character who, while behind the scenes and powerless–virtually a slave–nevertheless shrewdly manages to ascertain the truth of what is happening. Among the Sutpens, for instance, only Clytie knows that Thomas Sutpen followed Bon to New Orleans instead of going on a business trip, as his wife and his other children assume. Why he would have followed Bon to New Orleans is still a mystery to the reader; in this way, Faulkner brilliantly recreates the sense of ignorance and confusion experienced by Rosa and everyone else in Jefferson who got their only information about Sutpen’s Hundred through the gossip of the slaves. In the next chapter, Mr. Compson will present his theory, which he infers from what he knows Sutpen found in New Orleans. But, as we find out later, his knowledge will be incomplete, and his theory will be wrong.
Chapter 4
Summary
It is still too dark for Quentin to depart on his mysterious errand, so he sits on the front porch imagining Miss Rosa sitting in the dark in her black bonnet and shawl. Mr. Compson comes out of the house with a letter–a letter from Charles Bon to Judith Sutpen that Judith entrusted to Quentin’s grandmother many decades ago. Mr. Compson tells Quentin about the relationship between Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen, how they met at the university, where Charles was a debonair, ironic, and indolent man, looked up to by the local students, and how Henry fixated on him and imitated his appearance and behavior. When Charles went home for Christmas with Henry in 1859, speculation began–originating largely with Ellen–that Charles and Judith were to be engaged. Then Charles left for New Orleans, followed closely by Thomas Sutpen, and the next Christmas, Henry Sutpen was renouncing his birthright and fleeing Sutpen’s Hundred with his friend.
Mr. Compson tries to imagine the confrontation between Henry and his father that led to the break, and describes a scene, behind closed doors, in the library at Sutpen’s Hundred, during which Thomas announced to Henry that he refused to allow Charles to marry Judith, because he had discovered in 1859 that Bon was secretly keeping a octoroon (a woman with a “drop” of negro blood; technically, a woman who was one-eighth black) mistress in New Orleans, to whom he was probably already married. Henry refused to believe it, sided with his friend over his father, and abandoned Sutpen’s Hundred. He went to New Orleans with Charles, who slowly indoctrinated him into the pleasures and corruptions of life in the sultry French-influenced city before revealing to him that he was, in fact, married to a French-negro courtesan, whom he also owned, and whom he had obtained in a strange underground circle of women raised specifically to be won by wealthy men. Bon discounted the marriage as a sham and reminded Henry that the woman, as a “nigger,” was without rights–she did not “count” as his wife. But Henry was nevertheless shattered and enraged: he wanted to believe his friend, but felt pulled apart by inner conflict.
Then the war broke out. Henry and Charles Bon enlisted in a company, where Bon was quickly promoted to lieutenant. Henry remained a private, and refused to allow Bon to write to Judith while he tried to decide what to do. Mr. Compson hints to Quentin that Henry’s fascination with Bon had sexual overtones, which may have spurred him to see Bon married to his sister; and also hints that Henry’s deep connection with his sister had overtones of incestuous desire, which may have spurred him to see her married to his friend. In any event, after four years of fighting, life at Sutpen’s Hundred, like life all over the South, was reduced to a scrabble for food and sustenance: Sutpen, a colonel, was off fighting; Judith kept a garden to feed herself and Clytie; Wash Jones squatted in the rotten fishing camp by the river and occasionally brought food to them.
After four years of fighting, Bon finally wrote Judith a letter–the enigmatic document that Quentin now holds. The letter, which Quentin reads, is a statement of Bon’s intention to find Judith and marry her (”We have waited long enough,” he wrote)–though he also wrote that he could not say when he would come, because he did not know himself. Mr. Compson describes how Judith and Clytie made a wedding gown out of scraps and rags after Judith received the letter; and Quentin imagines the scene before the gates at Sutpen’s Hundred, Henry warning Bon not to come past the shadow of the post, Bon warning Henry that he was going to pass it. The next thing Mr. Compson describes is Wash Jones sitting on his mule outside Rosa Coldfield’s house, shouting to Miss Rosa that Henry Sutpen has killed Charles Bon.
Commentary
This section is important because it clarifies and deepens our understanding of the relationship between Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen, and further clarifies our sense of Mr. Compson as a speculative, analytical thinker to whom everything is a sign of the predestined doom of men great and small. But this is also the most difficult section in the novel in some ways, because Mr. Compson’s description of events is based on incomplete information, and is therefore misleading. As we will learn in subsequent chapters, Thomas Sutpen did not ride to New Orleans simply to investigate Bon, and did not merely discover that he was keeping an octoroon mistress or wife whom he also seemed to “own.” Sutpen rode to New Orleans because he recognized Charles Bon as his own son, his child with the part-negro daughter of the Haitian plantation owner and Sutpen’s first wife; if Bon married Judith, Sutpen’s daughter would be marrying not only a man with negro blood, but her own half-brother.
Mr. Compson is also wrong when he imagines Henry’s confrontation with his father to be centered on the problem of Bon’s mistress; the break actually occurred, as Quentin and Shreve later realize, when Sutpen told Henry that Bon was his brother. During their subsequent trip to New Orleans, then, Bon was unlikely to have worried much about showing Henry his mistress/wife; Henry probably would have taken her as lightly as Bon did. But Mr. Compson does not know at this point that Bon was Sutpen’s son, or that Bon’s mother had negro blood, and his analysis is limited by his lack of knowledge. He tries to construct a whole picture but cannot.
Faulkner does not mislead his readers simply to complicate his plot, or even to preserve the mystery surrounding the story. Part of his project is to show how the past is reconstructed by those who come after it, how the examination of the past is in some sense a creative act on the part of the examiner, who must provide motives, thoughts, and feelings for the people whose lives he examines. Mr. Compson reconstructs the past no more imaginatively than do Quentin and Shreve later, but his factual framework is based on less information. Furthermore, the reconstruction of the past in the individual’s mind is dependent on the personality of the individual, and on the relationship of the individual to the past. So Rosa, who lived through what was to her a nightmare, can stew in her own bitterness for decades, constantly recreating Sutpen in her imagination as a demon from hell and an ogre; Mr. Compson, more distant from the events of Sutpen’s life, can view the story as proof of the role of fate in human life; and Quentin, quite distant from the Sutpen story but still strangely preoccupied with it, can construct the most factually accurate version of the story, and then connect the story abstractly to the overall history of the fall of the South. But he also ranges further into speculation than either his father or Miss Rosa.
Chapter 5
Summary
Miss Rosa now bitterly tells Quentin the story of what happened after Wash Jones, astride a saddleless mule, yelled to her through her window that Henry had shot Charles Bon. Then nineteen, Rosa slid into a kind of frenzied hurry, ordered Wash Jones to hitch the mule to her carriage, and sat in wild frustration as he drove slowly back down the twelve miles of road leading to Sutpen’s Hundred. When they arrived, Rosa ran inside, crying out for Henry, and finding Clytie instead, standing, Rosa says, like some dark extension of the ogre Thomas Sutpen’s monstrous will.
Rosa began to run upstairs to find Henry and Judith. Clytie told her to stop; Rosa ignored her, and Clytie grabbed her by the wrist. All of Rosa’s frustration and revulsion, and all the weight of her slighted past, seemed to hinge on the moment. “Take your hand off me, nigger,” she said. Clytie did not move; suddenly Judith’s voice called “Clytie,” and the hand was gone. Judith was standing in front of the closed door at the top of the stairs, holding a photograph of herself that she had given to Bon.
Judith calmly told Clytie that Rosa would be staying for dinner, and proceeded down the stairs to consult with Wash Jones about the funeral arrangements. Judith then made dinner while Wash and another man built a coffin with planks torn from the carriage house. Then the whole group carried the coffin out to bury it, and Rosa moved into Sutpen’s Hundred to wait for Thomas Sutpen to come home. All three of them–Clytie, Rosa, and Judith–could do nothing but wait for Sutpen: they knew that when he returned from the war he would begin to rebuild his plantation with the indomitable will with which he built it in the first place. They waited for the day of that new beginning patiently, even amicably, Rosa tells Quentin.
One day the war ended; soon after that Sutpen arrived at the front door of his run-down mansion. When he asked Judith about Henry, she told him that Henry had shot Charles Bon, and she then began to weep. Sutpen greeted Clytie, then looked quizzically at Rosa, not recognizing his nineteen-year-old, orphan sister-in-law, whom he had so seldom seen during her childhood. As they had known he would, Sutpen immediately began rebuilding the plantation. Although there seemed to be something curiously empty about him now, he still seemed invincible, and corralled Wash Jones and other men into helping him reclaim what could be reclaimed. One day Rosa noticed him looking at her; soon after that she found herself engaged to him. He promised he would not be a worse husband to her than he had been to her sister. Soon after, on the day when Sutpen finally determined how much of the plantation was salvageable from the ruination of the war (when he realized the plantation could not be saved), he insulted her savagely (she does not specify what he said, though she implies that it carried a sexual overtone). The insult cut Rosa to the bone, and two months later, she fled Sutpen’s Hundred to return to her small house in town, openly stealing her food from her neighbors’ gardens but refusing to accept direct offers of charity. She tells Quentin of the disbelief she felt later when she learned that Thomas Sutpen had died.
But Quentin is not listening anymore; he is picturing Henry storming into Judith’s room after killing Charles Bon, announcing to his sister that she would not be able to marry Bon because he, Henry, had killed him. Lost in this thought, Quentin has to ask Rosa to repeat herself when she tells him that something–someone–is now living hidden at Sutpen’s Hundred. Quentin thinks she means Clytie, who continues to live on the ruined plantation; but Rosa says that is not who she means. Someone else is living hidden at Sutpen’s Hundred, someone who has been hiding there for the last four years.
Commentary
The most chilling moment in all of Absalom, Absalom! occurs at the end of this chapter, when Rosa tells Quentin that she knows “something” is hiding at Sutpen’s Hundred. By now, the Sutpen story has assumed almost mythological proportions in its telling and retelling, and the manor at Sutpen’s Hundred has come to be a symbol of the fortunes of the Sutpen dynasty. As Rosa and Quentin ride slowly toward the plantation, creating in the reader the sense that one is approaching a site almost too fraught with history to be real, Rosa suddenly reveals this new plot twist. The implication is that the story is not over after all–that its ending awaits Quentin and Rosa in the darkened house in the wilderness, miles from town.
The rest of this chapter is taken up by Rosa’s narration of her betrayal at the hands of Thomas Sutpen–the events which so embittered her, and which motivate her to speak to Quentin now. Since the last time we heard Miss Rosa speak, we have heard three chapters of Mr. Compson’s narration, have read Charles Bon’s letter, and have developed a more factual impression of the powerful man named Thomas Sutpen than we had at the beginning of the novel. Where in Chapter 1 we could do no more than accept Rosa’s portrayal of Sutpen as a smoldering demon surrounded by his wild-eyed naked slaves, we are now in a position to see through that view; we can understand why Rosa might feel as she does, but also recognize that the truth about Thomas Sutpen is much more complex than she acknowledges– that he was not in fact a demon sent to ruin the Coldfield family, but a highly complex and flawed man acting in the only way he knew.
This section deals with events that have not had much explication before, and it is crucially important, both for its presentation of the betrayal from Rosa’s perspective and for its development of Thomas Sutpen’s character. In this chapter the man begins his decline: he is no longer the force of nature he once was, but a man left empty by war, who cannot save his plantation. Sutpen is still a charismatic and impressive figure, but Faulkner has laid the groundwork for his eventual slide into alcoholism and despair.
Chapter 6
Summary
Now in his room at Harvard, Quentin is handed a letter from his father by his roommate, a young Canadian named Shreve; in the letter, Quentin reads that Miss Rosa is dead, having lingered for two weeks in a coma before finally succumbing. Quentin has to explain to Shreve that Miss Rosa was not a relative, and then Shreve–who, like everyone else at Harvard, constantly wants Quentin to explain the South– wants to know the story of Miss Rosa, Thomas Sutpen, Henry, Judith, and Charles Bon. Quentin tells him, and then has to listen to Shreve’s bemused retelling of the tale, which reminds Quentin of the way his father would have told the story on that night before Quentin rode out to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa–had his father known everything that Quentin learned that night.
Quentin listens to Shreve asking him about Thomas Sutpen’s later years, after the day when he realized the plantation could not be rebuilt, and desperately opened a store which sold supplies and candy to freed slaves. Sutpen spent his days drinking with Wash Jones, his anger often escalating into a drunken fury, and eventually began spending his nights with Jones’ granddaughter Milly. Then, in 1869, Milly gave birth to Sutpen’s child; the child died, Milly died, and Wash Jones killed Sutpen with a rusted scythe in front of the shack in which the child had been born.
Quentin remembers seeing the graves of Sutpen and Ellen in a family plot where Judith had also had a stone erected for Charles Bon, and where Judith herself was buried by the time of Quentin’s childhood. Another grave was for Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon, Charles Bon’s son with his French-negro mistress/wife in New Orleans. One day that woman had brought her son to see his father’s grave, and not long after that Clytie went to New Orleans and returned with the boy, whom she and Judith raised at Sutpen’s Hundred. But Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon grew up into a reckless, tormented man, who looked like a white man but could not escape the knowledge that he was not. He was finally arrested for instigating a fight in a gambling house and dance parlor for freed slaves. General Compson got him out of jail and sent him away from the town; but he returned a few months later with a negro wife, whom he defiantly thrust in the face of everyone he saw. She gave birth to a son, Jim Bond, a big, hulking saddle-colored idiot boy; two years later Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon and Judith died of yellow fever, and Jim Bond, only a few years older than Quentin, was raised by Clytie, with whom he continued to live, farming in the shell of Sutpen’s Hundred.
Shreve again summarizes in apparent astonishment the story of Quentin’s excursion to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa that September: how, not having been to the plantation for forty- three years, Miss Rosa nevertheless knew that someone or something was hiding there, and not only found someone to believe her story but, in Quentin, found an escort; how, when she and Quentin arrived at the plantation they found only Clytie and Jim Bond, as Quentin had thought they would; and how Miss Rosa had still believed something was hidden in that house, and so pressed on, and found– something else.
Commentary
This section fills in some information about the final years of Thomas Sutpen: his slide into alcoholism, his affair with fifteen year-old Milly, his death at the hands of Wash Jones. It then traces, through Quentin’s childhood recollections of the funeral plot, the later history of Judith and Clytie; the raising of Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon (Sutpen’s unacknowledged grandson) at the plantation, his later collapse into fury and ruin, and the plight of the idiot mixed-blooded child Jim Bond.
These sections begin to cast a sharper light on the question of race (which must have occurred to Quentin once he began to adjust to life in New England), as Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon self-destructs based on the knowledge of his negro blood, though he looks like a white man. When the women find the shard of mirror and imagine him gazing at himself as a child, wondering what his racial makeup meant, it becomes clear that Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon has been born with a monstrous perversion: he is a racist forced to hate himself. The reverse has been carried out by his father, a man with negro blood who nevertheless fought as an officer in the Confederate Army, defending the system of racism and slavery which ultimately led to his death.
Structurally, Chapter 6 divides the first part of the novel (when Quentin is in Mississippi listening to others tell the Sutpen story) and the second (when Quentin is at Harvard telling the Sutpen story himself). It is the first major section of the novel Quentin has narrated, and it is interesting to note how his personal recollections intermingle with the story he tells. For his part, Shreve begins with an idle, abstract interest in the nature of the South, and ends up, over the next few chapters, becoming as passionately drawn into the Sutpen story as Quentin was.
Chapter 7
Summary
A cold New England evening falls outside their cold Harvard room as Quentin tells Shreve about the time when Sutpen and his naked slaves were still raising the mansion of Sutpen’s Hundred from the earth, when the architect tried to escape through the swamp and Sutpen and General Compson tracked him down with the slaves and a pack of dogs. During the foray Sutpen told General Compson something of his early life–and thirty years later, after his wife died during the war, he went to see General Compson and told him some more about his early life; General Compson passed the stories down to Quentin’s father, who told them to Quentin, who now augments them for Shreve with the added knowledge he gained that night in September when he rode to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa.
He tells Shreve how Thomas Sutpen had been born in a crowded log cabin in the hillbilly backwater country that is now (it is 1909) West Virginia, to a drunken father who, when Sutpen was a child, moved the family down into southern Virginia to work on a plantation. It was there, Sutpen told Quentin’s grandfather, that he learned the difference between white men and black men, and the difference between white men who owned things and white men who didn’t; and it was there that he conceived his design to found his dynasty. He ran away from home at fourteen, and by the age of twenty was in the West Indies, where he managed to learn French and patois and became the overseer of a sugar plantation. After singlehandedly subduing a slave revolt on the plantation, he was engaged to the landowner’s daughter, and he married her and had a son. That son, as Quentin learned the night he rode out to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa (and which neither Quentin’s father nor Miss Rosa had known before), was Charles Bon.
But Sutpen learned something about his wife which made it impossible for him to remain with her: she had negro blood, and so did their child. Sutpen renounced her and the boy, made arrangements for them with the plantation owner, and left for America, taking only twenty slaves with him–the twenty with which he founded Sutpen’s Hundred. When Charles Bon showed up on his doorstep with Henry in 1859, Sutpen could foresee the future that awaited him: as he told Quentin’s grandfather in his office, he could either choose to do nothing, in which case the world would know nothing, and his dynasty would be founded to the satisfaction of everyone besides himself; or he could stop the marriage, in which case he feared he would bring ruin to the dynasty. The night he had his break with Henry, he tried to stop the marriage: not by telling his son about Bon’s black wife in New Orleans, as Mr. Compson had thought, but by telling him that Charles was his brother, and therefore Judith’s brother as well. But Henry refused to believe him, though deep down he knew it was true. And so at the end of the war, after Bon sent Judith the letter announcing his intention to marry her soon, Sutpen sought out his son and played, as he called it, his final trump card: he told Henry about Bon’s mixed-race background. Henry, who loved his sister so closely and intensely that he may have felt incestuous sexual feelings for her himself, felt that he had to stop the marriage by any means possible, and so he killed Bon, his brother, just as Sutpen must have known he would.
And so when Sutpen came home from the war (as Quentin tells Shreve, and as Quentin’s father told Quentin), he came home to a truncated family tree: the acknowledged son vanished, the secret son murdered, the daughter widowed before she could become a bride. And when he tried and failed, despite his daring and shrewdness and force of will, to save his plantation, and when he lost his chance to marry Rosa and continue his line with her, he took to drinking and to sleeping with Milly, the low-class squatter Wash Jones’ fifteen year-old granddaughter, ostensibly in secret but practically in the open. Jones knew about it, but preserved a wary complacency, believing that this man–”the Kernel,” as he called him–whom he had served and idolized for fifteen years, would not betray him, and would treat his granddaughter well. Even when Milly became pregnant Jones remained quiet, only telling Sutpen once that he knew he would do right by Milly. When Milly’s baby was born, Jones thought he would see his great-grandchild taken into the mansion. But when Sutpen rode out to see his child, on the same day when one of his mares had foaled, he only looked at his child impassively. telling Milly it was too bad she was not a mare, because then he could at least give her a stable; he then walked out. Outside the shack, having overheard this dialogue, Jones accosted him. Sutpen lashed the old squatter twice with his riding whip, and that was when Jones took up the rusted scythe and cut him down.
Later, on the night when the search party found the body lying where it had fallen, they rode to arrest Jones. He told them to wait a moment; then he took his sharpened butcher knife and slit his granddaughter’s throat, slit the throat of her child, and started attacking the riders with the scythe before they finally brought him down.
As Quentin tells the story, Shreve is aghast. He wants to know why, if all Sutpen ever wanted was a son, and now he had a son, he insulted the son’s mother and walked away, provoking Jones into murdering both Sutpen and the son–and thereby ending any possibility for the continuance of his line. But Quentin tells him he has that part of the story wrong: Milly’s baby was a girl.
Commentary
Chapter 7 is one of the most important sections of Absalom, Absalom!, at last showing Thomas Sutpen in his own words (albeit fourth-hand: General Compson repeats Sutpen’s words to his son, who tells Quentin, who tells Shreve). The insight into Sutpen’s early history brings his character into sharper focus. We learn where he got his attitudes toward strength and power and fear, where he conceived the idea that there are differences between men, how he formulated his attitudes about slaves and slavery, and what impelled him to begin his quest to establish a dynasty.
The image of Sutpen as a boy, being turned away from the front door of a plantation and afterward determining fiercely that no offspring of his would ever be turned away from any door, becomes one of the symbolic moments of his life. Quentin recognizes that at the heart of Sutpen’s ego-driven and vicious campaign to establish a dynasty remained something like innocence. Probably, in Sutpen’s deepest nature, he always wanted to believe that actions undertaken in good faith without deceit or condescension should produce the results he wanted; and so he was able to visit General Compson after the Charles Bon revelation to ask what he had done wrong, believing that if he could rectify what must have been a simple mistake, he could salvage his family and save the situation.
The revelations about Sutpen’s early life also casts an interesting light on his relationship with Wash Jones. By the time he began drinking whiskey with Jones, Sutpen was a rich and successful aristocrat, and Jones was merely a white-trash squatter in his fishing camp. But the tone of Jones’s speech and the flavor of his character resembled nothing so much as the hillbillies among whom Sutpen had been raised; it was natural, then, that Sutpen would feel as comfortable around Jones as around his fellow aristocrats. When Sutpen fathered a child with Milly, it almost seems he had reverted to the behaviors and appetites by which he was surrounded in childhood. And when Jones kills Sutpen, it begins to seem that the great man, the demon, is destroyed by the inescapable nature of his origin.
Chapter 8
Summary
Completely swept away by the story, Shreve and Quentin speculate about how the same events must have progressed from Bon’s perpective. With Shreve talking, but both of them thinking along the same lines, they imagine Bon’s childhood in New Orleans: with an embittered mother obsessed with the wrong perpetrated upon her by her once-husband Thomas Sutpen; the lawyer who handled their affairs, parcelling money out to Bon as he grew older and carefully negotiating his position between the indolent son and the distracted, astringent mother; the pleasures and pastimes to which Bon eventually became addicted and by which he was eventually corrupted, including the octoroon courtesan whom he not-quite married; and his decision to leave for school at the age of twenty-eight. They think about his first meeting with Henry, his first trip to Sutpen’s Hundred, Ellen’s attempts to engage him to Judith, the creeping realization that Thomas Sutpen was his father and that he himself was the doom his mother had sent to ruin Sutpen. They imagine Henry’s confrontation with his father in the library in 1860, his refusal to believe that Bon was his brother even as he knew it was true; they imagine Bon and Henry’s lives in New Orleans following the break, and their lives during the war–when, tormented, Henry demanded to know what Bon (whom he now acknowledged as his brother) planned to do about Judith, and Bon’s blank refusal to make up his mind.
Increasingly speculative, they imagine Bon saving Henry from wounds in battle and Henry asking Bon to let him die; they imagine Sutpen telling Henry the only thing he could to see the marriage stopped: the secret of Bon’s mixed racial background. In their imagined version, when Henry confronted Bon, now determined that his half-brother could not marry his sister, Bon asked, “So it is the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear.”
Toward the end of this fantasy, Shreve begins to retell to Quentin what happened the night Quentin and Miss Rosa rode out to Sutpen’s Hundred to find whatever Miss Rosa believed was hidden there. He describes Clytie trying to stop Rosa from going up the stairs, the old woman Rosa striking old Clytie for trying to stop her, storming her way up the stairs as Quentin helped Clytie to her feet. After this, they think about how Judith discovered Bon’s wife and child in New Orleans: the picture Bon carried of his other family in the metal case she found in his pocket after Henry shot him. They wonder why Bon would have removed the picture of Judith he had once carried in the case and replaced it with the picture Judith found. Then Shreve thinks he understands: he believes that Bon knew Henry was going to kill him, and could find no other way to tell Judith that he had betrayed her, that he did not deserve her grief. Quentin agrees that Shreve is right, and Shreve suggests that they stop talking and go to bed.
Commentary
In this section, the creative acts individuals undertake to reconstruct the past become emphatic and obvious. Swept along by the momentum of Quentin’s story, Shreve begins to narrate, and the two of them invent–largely out of their own imaginations–a plausible childhood for Charles Bon. They explain everything to their own satisfaction, and they may well be right–but it should be remembered that Mr. Compson explained everything to his own satisfaction as well, and was clearly not right. After all, Quentin and Shreve depart from the known facts and into the realm of pure conjecture. The compelling figure of the lawyer, compounding the interest of the hurt inflicted by Thomas Sutpen upon Charles Bon’s mother, is entirely conjectural; there may never have been such a person. But the vivid scenes they imagine, such as the battle where Henry asks Bon to let him die (another fanciful conjecture: before, they had always been told that Bon, not Henry, was wounded in the battle, a detail they change to suit their own story), are almost irresistible.
Committed to the focus of their imaginations, they may augur some truths in the midst of a general error–just as Mr. Compson, wrong about so much, hit upon a psychologically persuasive explanation for Henry’s feelings for both Charles and Judith when he read a glimmer of homosexual attraction into the first and a hint of incestuous desire into the second. In Quentin and Shreve’s case, the imagined motive for Bon’s switching the photograph of Judith with the photograph of the octoroon mistress and child–that Bon wanted to communicate to Judith his wrongdoing, so she would know he was not worth mourning–is extremely persuasive.
The crushing tragic ironies of the story begin to fall fast and furious in this chapter, as Shreve, motivated by a desire to understand the South generally, takes over the narration. There is Bon’s role as a part-negro man fighting as an officer in the Confederate Army. There is the role of Sutpen’s embittered first wife, who destroys her son’s life in order to destroy her former husband. Most painfully, there is the attitude of Henry Sutpen–poor, romantic Henry Sutpen, who always wanted to do the right thing and was more sensitive than his younger sister to violence–about his father’s final revelation: he would have been willing to consider letting Judith marry Charles when he only knew Charles was her brother, but he killed Charles once he learned about his negro blood. He could have reconciled himself to incest before allowing his sister to marry a man he now thinks of as a negro. As Charles Bon tells Henry in Quentin and Shreve’s imagined version of the confrontation: “I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister.”
Chapter 9
Summary
Quentin lies shivering in his bed, intermittently talking to Shreve and thinking about the night in September 1909 when he went to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa. As they made their way to the porch, Rosa trembling with anticipation and fear, Quentin realized it was midnight; when they reached the house he snuck inside through a window and was about to open the door for Rosa when a match struck behind him: Clytie. Miss Rosa entered and headed for the stairs. Clytie asked Quentin to stop her, but Quentin did not move. Clytie told Rosa to stop, then grabbed her wrist; Rosa brushed her hand away. Clytie made to grab for her again, and Rosa struck Clytie with a closed fist, knocking her to the floor. Rosa went upstairs. The hulking, slack- jawed Jim Bond appeared as Quentin helped Clytie up, and helped her to sit on the stairs. Rosa returned, her eyes wide and unseeing. Clytie told Jim Bond to escort Rosa back to her carriage. Quentin made as if to follow, then realized that he, too, needed to see what Rosa had seen; he walked past Clytie up the stairs.
In a bedroom he found Henry Sutpen. Quentin asked him his name, and asked why he had come home, to which the old man replied: “To die.” Shaken, Quentin returned downstairs and drove Rosa home, then drove himself home. He ran from the stable indoors, ran into his room, felt a powerful urge to bathe, and scrubbed himself with his shirt while thinking about what he had seen.
Three months later, Rosa returned to the house with an ambulance for Henry. Shreve asks why it took her three months, but answers his own question: once Rosa returned to the house, it was over; she would have to let go of the hatred she had lived with for so long. But at last she decided to return, to save Henry if she could; and the ambulance made its way slowly up the long driveway to the dilapidated manor of Sutpen’s Hundred. Watching from the window, Clytie saw the ambulance coming, and thought they were coming to arrest Henry for the decades-old murder of Charles Bon. She had prepared for just this occasion; and so she set fire to the closet she had stuffed with rags and stocked with kerosene; and the house began to burn. Rosa ran into the conflagration and had to be restrained from rushing up the burning stairs; Jim Bond began to make an inhuman wailing but ran away from anyone who tried to come near him. Clytie and Henry died in the fire; Jim Bond remained on the grounds of the estate, but all but disappeared.
Shreve says he thinks the presence of Jim Bond ruins the tally; it makes the record book unbalanced. He speculates that the Jim Bonds of the world will one day overrun everything, so that in the future everyone will have negro blood. In the cold New England night, as they prepare to go to sleep, Shreve asks Quentin one final question: “Why do you hate the South?” Immediately, defensively, Quentin replies “I don’t hate it,” then thinks to himself over and over: “I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”
Commentary
And so the story ends: Rosa finds Henry hidden in the house, waiting to die; she tries to save him, and Clytie, thinking she means to have him arrested, burns down the house, killing herself and Henry, literally and symbolically bringing to final ruin the dynasty of Thomas Sutpen–sending the house he lifted out of the earth back to it in ashes. The only shoot of the Sutpen tree left living (unless Henry has had children in the forty- four years since he disappeared) is the idiot mixed-race Jim Bond. As Shreve crudely notes (saying, “It takes two niggers to get rid of one Sutpen”), the ending to the story brings a kind of wretched symmetry that roughly mirrors that of the demise of the South
1790) spanned most of the eighteenth century
a period in which the American colonies grew from small, isolated communities to a united nation of thirteen states. Franklin contributed greatly to the political founding of the nation and did much to help shape the American character. He thus became known by many as 
the first American.
In his autobiography, which stops almost twenty years before he helped to draft the Declaration of Independence and over thirty years before his death, he describes the formation of his own character as an example to others in the newly emerging nation.