William Faulkner

Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi. He was
raised in and heavily influenced by the state of Mississippi, as well as by the history and
culture of the South as a whole. When he was four years old, his entire family moved to the
nearby town of Oxford, where he lived on and off for the rest of his life. Oxford is the model
for the town of "Jefferson" in his fiction, and Lafayette County, Mississippi which contains the
town of Oxford, the model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner's great-
grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in northern Mississippi who
served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, founded a railroad, and gave his name to the
town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County. He also wrote several novels and other works,
establishing a literary tradition in the family. Colonel Falkner served as the model for Colonel
John Sartoris in his great-grandson's writing.
In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner remarked, "Let the writer
take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to
get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach
yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that
nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he
admires the old writer, he wants to beat him". Another esteemed Southern writer, Flannery
O'Connor, stated that, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great
difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule
and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."
Faulkner's most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay
Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Unvanquished
(1938). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories: His first short story collection,
These 13 (1932), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized)
stories, including "A Rose for Emily," "Red Leaves", "That Evening Sun," and "Dry
September." Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County
based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, of which his hometown of
Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat.
Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel,
characterized by Andr Malraux as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story."
Its themes of evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day.
Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play that Faulkner
published, except for his The Marionettes, which he essentially self-published -- in a few
hand-written copies -- as a young man. Faulkner also wrote two volumes of poetry which
were published in small printings, The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and
a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight's Gambit.
 Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into
poverty in Western Virginia who comes to Mississippi with the complementary aims of
becoming rich and a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks
narrated mostly by Quentin Compson, Rosa Coldfield, and his father, with events told in non-
chronological order and often retold by different people with differing details, resulting in a
peeling-back-the-onion way of revealing the true story of the Sutpens to the reader. Rosa
initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson,
whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpens. Quentin's father then fills in some of the details
to Quentin, as well. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate at Harvard University,
Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the
story by adding layers.
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French
architect who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred
square miles of land from a local Native American tribe and immediately begins building a
large plantation called Sutpens Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to
complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he
ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the mans daughter, Ellen Coldfield.
Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of
whom are destined for tragedy.
Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets a fellow student who is a few
years his senior named Charles Bon. Henry brings Bon home for Christmas, where he and
Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, Sutpen
realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop the
proposed union.
Sutpen had worked on a plantation in Haiti as the overseer, and after subduing a
slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon, who
bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen had not known that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the
marriage and birth of Charles, but when he found out he had been deceived (which was his
own interpretation of events), he renounced the marriage as void and left his wife and child
(though leaving them his fortune as part of his own moral recompense). The reader also
later learns of Sutpen's childhood, where young Thomas learned that society could base
human worth on material worth. It is this episode that sets into motion Thomas' plan to start
a dynasty.
While Henry, possibly because of his own incestuous designs on his sister, is initially
jealous of Charles, he eventually accepts Charles suit of Judith. When Sutpen tells Henry
that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to marry him, Henry
refuses to believe, repudiates his birthright, and accompanies Charles to his home in New
Orleans. They then return to Mississippi to enlist in their University company where they join
the Confederate Army and fight in the Civil War. During the war, Henry wrestles with his
conscience until he presumably resolves to allow the marriage of half-brother and sister; this
resolution changes, however, when Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is part black. At the
conclusion of the war, Henry enacts his father's interdiction of marriage between Charles
and Judith, killing Charles at the gates to the mansion then fleeing into self-exile.
Thomas Sutpen returns from the war and begins to repair his home and dynasty. He
proposes to Rosa Coldfield, his dead wife's younger sister, and she accepts. However,
Sutpen insults Rosa by demanding that she bear him a son before the wedding takes place,
and she leaves Sutpen's Hundred to begin her forty-three years of hate. Sutpen then begins
an affair with Milly, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, a squatter who lives
on the Sutpen property. The affair continues until Milly becomes pregnant and gives birth to
a daughter. Sutpen is terribly disappointed, because the last hope of repairing his Sutpen
dynasty rested on whether Milly gave birth to a son. Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside.
An enraged Wash Jones kills Sutpen, his own granddaughter and Sutpen's newborn
daughter, and is in turn killed by the posse that arrives to arrest him.
The story of Thomas Sutpen's legacy ends with Quentin taking Rosa back to the
seemingly abandoned Sutpens Hundred plantation, where they find Henry Sutpen and
Clytie, herself the daughter of Thomas Sutpen by a slave woman. Henry has returned to the
estate to die. Three months later, when Rosa returns with medical help for Henry, Clytie
starts a fire that consumes the plantation and kills Henry and herself. The only remaining
Sutpen is Jim Bond, Charles Bon's half black grandson who remains on Sutpen's Hundred.

Analysis
Like other Faulkner novels, Absalom, Absalom! allegorizes Southern history; the title
itself is an allusion to a wayward son fighting the empire his father built. The history of
Thomas Sutpen mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture. Sutpen's failures
necessarily reflect the weaknesses of an idealistic South. Rigidly committed to his "design",
Sutpen proves unwilling to honor his marriage to a "black" woman, setting in motion his own
destruction.
Akin to the modern detective story, Absalom, Absalom! also juxtaposes ostensible
fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation, with the implication that any and all
narratives--any and all reconstructions of the past--remain irretrievable and therefore
imaginative.
By using various storytellers/narrators expressing their interpretations of the facts, it
alludes to the historical cultural zeitgeist of the old South, where the past is always present
and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time,
which give the story a strong magical-realist element.
The use of Quentin Compson as the primary perspective (if not exactly the focus) of
the novel makes it something of a companion piece to Faulkner's earlier work The Sound
and the Fury, which tells the story of the Compson family, with Quentin as one of the main
characters. Although the action of that novel is never explicitly referenced, the Sutpen
family's struggle with dynasty, downfall, and potential incest parallel the familial events and
obsessions that drive Quentin to suicide.

Influence & Significance

Absalom, Absalom is, along with The Sound and the Fury, almost universally
considered a literary masterpiece. Its groundbreaking out of order storytelling, and frequent
use of stream of conciousness often has had many critics calling Faulkner a pioneer of the
modernist movement, along with other unconventional authors like James Joyce.