Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
Summary
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere in particular, seizes a hundred square miles of land from its Chickasaw owners, and builds a mansion and a dynasty by main force, marrying Ellen Coldfield and fathering two children, Henry and Judith. Faulkner reveals only slowly, through four different narrators reconstructing the story decades later, that Sutpen had married once before, in Haiti, to a woman named Eulalia Bon, and abandoned her and their son Charles once he learned she carried Black ancestry. When Charles Bon later befriends Henry at university and becomes engaged to Judith, Sutpen forbids the marriage; Henry accepts his own half brother until Sutpen reveals Charles's race rather than his kinship as the real objection, and Henry shoots Charles dead at the gates of Sutpen's Hundred rather than let the marriage happen. Sutpen himself dies later at the hands of Wash Jones, a poor tenant enraged after Sutpen discards the daughter Jones's granddaughter has borne him. Decades on, Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield find Henry, old and dying, hidden in the ruined mansion along with Clytie, Sutpen's daughter by an enslaved woman; when outsiders arrive, Clytie sets the house on fire rather than let Henry be taken, killing them both and leaving only Sutpen's last descendant, a Black man with a mental disability named Jim Bond, wandering the ruins.
Faulkner tells almost none of this directly, filtering the same events through Rosa's bitterness, Quentin's father's secondhand account, and finally Quentin and his Harvard roommate Shreve's own speculative reconstruction of a story neither of them lived through, so that a reader assembles the plot the same way the characters do, out of guesswork and contradiction. It reads as one of the most demanding novels in American fiction, sentences running for pages at a stretch, and the effort it asks is inseparable from its argument that no single person can ever see the whole truth of anything.
The 1983 Guinness Book of World Records once credited a single sentence in the novel's sixth chapter, 1,288 words long, as the longest in English literature, a record since broken elsewhere but still a fair measure of how far Faulkner was willing to push a reader's patience. Many critics, including several of Faulkner's own contemporaries, consider it his most ambitious novel, more demanding even than The Sound and the Fury.
Historical Context & Significance
Random House published Absalom, Absalom! in 1936, eligible for the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for the novel alongside Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, a book covering strikingly similar ground, a doomed Southern dynasty built and lost across the Civil War. The Pulitzer went to Mitchell's novel that May, and Faulkner's harder, more fractured telling of a comparable story received nothing.
The novel sold modestly on release and took decades to reach the readership it has now, overshadowed at the time by Faulkner's own more accessible earlier work. Faulkner's career recognition arrived instead with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, awarded for his body of work rather than this book specifically, and Absalom, Absalom! has since climbed to a position many critics rank above The Sound and the Fury, taught widely as one of the clearest demonstrations of how completely an unreliable narrator can be built into a novel's own structure.