William Faulkner is the author of Absalom, Absalom!, a Southern novel published in 1936. Faulkner dedicates his writing in Absalom, Absalom! to follow the story of ruthless Thomas Sutpen and his life as he struggles against the suspicion and doubt of the small-town folk that were born and raised in Jefferson, Mississippi. Himself a native-born Mississippian, Faulkner entered the world in September of 1897, and left it in July of 1962 at sixty-four years of age. He was the eldest of four brothers, and the son of parents whose prominent families had been destroyed and leveled to poverty with the advent of the Civil War in America during the 1860s. Faulkner was christened William Cuthbert Falkner after his great-grandfather, Colonel William Faulkner, who achieved relative literary success with his publication of The White Rose of Memphis during the 1880s. The setting of Absalom, Absalom! is located in the town of Jefferson in the fictitious Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, where the story of the protagonist, Thomas Sutpen, is relayed to Quentin Compson through various characters that either were directly involved in the events that unfolded, or were privy to friends or relatives with first-hand knowledge of the happenings with the Sutpen family. The actions and motives of Sutpen are explored and expounded upon through a literary technique known as stream of consciousness writing; Faulkner wastes no time with introducing characters and plot in favor of allowing the reader to delve into the woven web of Southern life related in the novel. Through the use of various view points, narration in the form of a flowing stream of consciousness, detailed asides, and immersion in the Southern approach to living and way of life, Faulkn... ... middle of paper ... ...ild untutored genius of the backwoods.” Overall, Faulkner masterfully blends several elements of literature with his own personal flair, producing a novel simmering with the life and story of the characters. His round-about narration technique, paired with his stream of consciousness writing, produce a twisted, difficult plot line, complete with complex and eccentric characters, all within the bounds of a single novel. Works Cited Millgate, Michael. "The Achievement of William Faulkner." The Achievement of William Faulkner Constable (1966). Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Feb. 2012. Young, Thomas Daniel. "Absalom, Absalom!: Overview." Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Feb. 2012.
William Faulkner is widely considered to be one of the great American authors of the twentieth century. Although his greatest works are identified with a particular region and time (Mississippi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the themes he explores are universal. He was also an extremely accomplished writer in a technical sense. Novels such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Feature bold experimentation with shifts in time and narrative. Several of his short stories are favorites of anthologists, including "A Rose for Emily." This strange story of love, obsession, and death is a favorite among both readers and critics. The narrator, speaking for the town of Jefferson in Faulkner 's fictional Yoknapatawpha
Growing up in Mississippi in the late Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth Century, young William Faulkner witnessed first hand the struggles his beloved South endured through their slow progression of rebuilding. These experiences helped to develop Faulkner’s writing style. “Faulkner deals almost exclusively with the Southern scene (with) the Civil War … always behind his work” (Warren 1310. His works however are not so much historical in nature but more like folk lore. This way Faulkner is not constrained to keep details accurate, instead he manipulate the story to share his on views leading the reader to conclude morals or lessons from his experience. Faulkner writes often and “sympathetically of the older order of the antebellum society. It was a society that valued honor, (and) was capable of heroic action” (Brooks 145) both traits Faulkner admired. These sympathetic views are revealed in the story “A Rose for Emily” with Miss Emily becoming a monument for the Antebellum South.
Thomas Supten symbolizes the fundamental characteristics of the Southern society. Donald M. Kartiganer suggests that Faulkner uses Supten to describe the brutality of the Southern system of slavery. He concurs that Faulkner criticizes the values of the South and judgment of man’s fate because of their blood line and not their deeds. Kartiganer analyzes Absalom! Absalom! to prove the methods and values of the South and how they contribute to the theme of miscegenation.
Faulkner uses the view point of an unnamed town member while he uses a third person perspective to show the general corrosion of the southern town’s people.
Faulkner portrays the townspeople and Emily in the southern town of Jefferson during the late 1800's to early 1900's. The town is more than just the setting in the story; it takes on its own characterization alongside Emily the main character. It is the main reasoning behind Emily's attitude and actions. It gives the reader an easier understanding into why Emily makes the decisions she does as the story unwinds.
“He heard what Sutpen said, and something seemed to stop dead in him before going on” (1). In the story “Wash” by William Faulkner, Faulkner writes about a man who slowly begins to go crazy and goes to great lengths to kill his family and Colonel Sutpen, a man he once respected. Faulkner creates interesting characters along with riveting conflicts to support his central theme of the story.
of the South, and at the same time represents the failure of the South by
When asked by his Canadian roommate, Shreve, to "[t]ell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all", Quentin Compson chose to tell the story of Colonel Thomas Sutpen (142).The previous summer, Quentin had been summoned by Miss Rosa Coldfield, the sister of Sutpen's wife, to hear the story of how Sutpen destroyed her family and his own. In Miss Rosa's home, he sat "listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times"(4). Over the course of that summer, before his arrival at Harvard, Quentin was drawn deep into the story of this "fiend blackguard and devil"(10). In Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner, using Thomas Sutpen as a microcosm for the Old South, wrote of the decline of Sutpen's dynasty in order
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.
The women of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! embrace fundamental characteristics of the nature of the South and its relation to the women who inhabit the area. The women particularly challenge the reader to an examination of the time of the Civil War, the relation of the war to the South, and the relation of the people to their surroundings. There is a call for recognition of the intrinsic complexities of the South that stem from the mythological base of the gentlemen class and the qualities of hierarchy that so ensue. The women are very much caught in the web that is the South, the intricacies of their lives linked to the inherent social structures.
In many of Faulkner’s stories, he tells about an imaginary county in Mississippi named Yoknapatawpha. He uses this county as the setting for his story “Barn Burning” and it is also thought that the town of Jefferson from “A Rose for Emily” is located in Yoknapatawpha County. The story of a boy’s struggle between being loyal to his family or to his community makes “Barn Burning” exciting and dramatic, but a sense of awkwardness and unpleasantness arrives from the story of how the fictional town of Jefferson discovers that its long time resident, Emily Grierson, has been sleeping with the corpse of her long-dead friend with whom she has had a relationship with.
But Faulkner develops his own, more structured variety of stream of consciousness. In his densest paragraphs, he often lets his characters fall into reveries in which they perceive more deeply than their conscious minds possibly could. His characters connect past and present and reflect on the meaning of events and on the relationships between them in a manner that sounds more like Faulkner himself than like the characters in their usual states of mind.
Beloved written by Toni Morrison in 1987 and Absalom, Absalom written by William Faulkner in 1936 have similar characteristics. The two novels discuss race relations in the South and how they affect everyone involved. Beloved tells the story of an ex-slave named Sethe and her daughter Denver. They live in a house which is haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s child, named Beloved. Beloved comes back to haunt the family in human form and tries to tear the family apart. In the end, the neighborhood, who abandoned the family many years before, comes back to exorcise the baby ghost and rid the family of all of its misfortune. Absalom, Absalom is about a man named Thomas Sutpen who comes to Mississippi in search of wealth and a woman who will give
Palumbo, Donald. "The Concept of God in Faulkner's "Light in August," "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying" and "Absalom, Absalom!"" The South Central Bulletin 39.4 (1979): 142-46. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
The Themes of Faulkner's Absalom! The Absalom. The theme of the Absalom! The Absalom.