What Might Have Been in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

What Might Have Been in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Emerging from and dwelling within an all-consuming lamentation, the characters of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! enwrap themselves in a world of hurt wherein they cannot or will not release the past. Each comes to know the tragic ends of lingering among an ever-present past while the here and now fades under fretful shadows of days gone by. As the narrative progresses. the major players in this installment of Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County grow ever more obsessed by what alternative actions different circumstances might have afforded. Trapped in his/her own notions of "what might have been" (115), Miss Rosa Coldfield's wistful, yet indignant exhortation, the historicized characters of Thomas Sutpen and Miss Rosa remain fixated by Antebellum illusions--he in a desperate effort to gain what he could not, she in bitter remembrance of what had never, but might have been.

... in that barren hall with its naked stair... rising into the dim upper hallway where an echo spoke which was not mine ut rather that of the lost irrevocable might-have-been which haunts all houses, all enclosed walls erected by human hands, not for shelter, not for warmth, but to hide from the world's curious looking and seeing the dark turnings which the ancient young delusions of pride and hope and ambition (ay, and love too) take.

--Miss Rosa p. 109, Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner

The novel's effective narrative technique of expansion and contraction via a series of interconnected yet ever more distanced recollections, retellings. and speculative reconstructions of the Sutpen-Coldfield-Yoknapatawpha County past offers various perspectives in its chronicle of what might ...

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...th this bright glitter of delusion" (59). From her seat there she sees the "might have been which is more true than truth" (115), as "the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality" (120).

And so it is... if only...

Works Cited

Edenfield, Olivia Carr. "'Endure and then endure': Rosa Coldfield's Search for a Role in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" Southern Literary Journal 32 (Fall 1999): 57-68.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Random House, 1936. (Vintage International Edition. November 1990).

Goeffroy, Alain. "Through Rosa's Looking-glass: Narcissism and Identification in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" Mississippi Quarterly 45.3 (Summer 19.92): 313-321.

Ryan, Heberden W. "Behind Closed Doors: The Unknowable and the Unknowing in Absalom, Absalom!" Mississippi Quarterly 45.3 (Summer 1992): 295-312.