Just before noon on a hot September day in 1909, Quentin Compson receives a note from Miss Rosa Coldfield in Yoknapatawpha County, just outside of Jefferson, Mississippi. In old-fashioned prose Miss Rosa asks Quentin to call on her that afternoon. He goes to her house around two o'clock. They sit in the "office," "a dim hot airless room" with the blinds closed so that only slivers of light shine through, and for three hours Miss Rosa tells Quentin the story of her youth and of the ruination of her family and her history. Quentin, who is twenty years old and comes from a prominent family (his grandfather was a general in the Civil War), is confused about why she would want to tell him this story, which has become a popular local legend. When he returns home after his talk with Miss Rosa, around five p.m., he asks his father about it. Mr. Compson explains that Quentin's grandfather had been part of the story, as he had made friends with Thomas Sutpen, the man at the center of Miss Rosa's tale. By telling Quentin, Mr. Compson explains, "in a sense, the affair, no matter what happens out there tonight, will still be in the family."

But Miss Rosa's excuse to Quentin is different. She tells him that she hears he will be attending Harvard and guesses that he may have literary aspirations. If he does, she says, perhaps this story will be of use to him one day when he is looking for material. Quentin guesses that she wants the story told, "so that people...will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War." This reason is because the South was in the hands of men like Thomas Sutpen. But Quentin already knows that, having grown up in the South. The real reason for her summons is not to be revealed for several hours.

Most of the chapter is narrated by Miss Rosa. She recounts the events that have shaped and stilted her life for the past forty years. In 1833, Thomas Sutpen rode into Jefferson with "no discernible past and acquired his land no one knew how." Through sheer force of will Sutpen built an enormous house on his estate, which he called "Sutpen's Hundred." Then he married Ellen Coldfield, Miss Rosa's older sister. From then on began the terror that filled first Ellen, and then Rosa's life.

Sutpen, as Miss Rosa explains, "wasn't a gentleman." With only his violent will and his savage tendencies--he invited the men of the town out to Sutpen's Hundred so that they could "drink and gamble with him and watch him fight those wild negroes"--to recommend him, he was on a hunt for respectability. He got that by marrying Ellen Coldfield, Rosa's older sister. Ellen, the daughter of a Methodist merchant, was twenty-two years older than Rosa. Rosa was not yet born when the marriage took place in 1838. They had two children: Henry, born in 1839 (six years older than Rosa) and Judith, born in 1841 (four years older than Rosa). The marriage did not stop him from engaging in his past behavior, Rosa explains. He continued to race horses and engage in violence. Not only did he "fight" his black slaves in the stables at Sutpen's Hundred--ordering them to beat each other for the entertainment of a white crowd--but he participated in the fighting. One night Ellen discovered her husband participating in a fight with a black slave, with the children watching. Henry, who had been held up front close to the action, vomited and cried, but Judith, whom Sutpen had not brought to watch, impassively studied the fight from a nearby window with a "negro girl." We learn that Judith possessed her father's temperament: she also cried when he was forced to stop his horse races in front of the church.

In addition to these hard facts, we learn the wisps of stories that are developed fully later on. Miss Rosa, for example, admits that even though Sutpen was a "demon," she too married him. She also mentions that Thomas Sutpen and his son Henry both fought in the War, and she repeats over and over again Ellen's deathbed wish: that Rosa, then a young girl, would "protect" Judith, who was four years older than Rosa. Rosa is still upset at this request and told Ellen that the only thing Ellen's children needed protection from was themselves. She also mentions, briefly, the second storyline that will become central to this novel: the assassination of Judith's fiance on the day of their wedding, by Henry, in front of Sutpen's Hundred.

Analysis

Before entering into an analysis of the first chapter of this book, it is helpful to begin with the title. "Absalom, Absalom!" is the lamenting cry of King David in the second book of Samuel (18:33), upon hearing of the assassination of his beloved son. It is useful to read the story of Absalom in the second book of Samuel--a dramatic story of dynasties, rebellion, incest, and death--as it is a direct influence on Faulkner's own tale, contains many of the same events, and is, on a first reading, infinitely easier to understand!

Understanding, in fact, is a central concept of this book. Although almost everything in the novel's central tale is presented in the first two chapters of the book, readers new to Faulkner may be frustrated and confused with the circular and often convuluted style of the narrative. The narrative switches in form, style and point of view quickly and often. Narrators change and the sentences are long and fractured. In fact, one of Faulkner's purposes with this style is to disorient and confuse the reader. Faulkner's point is that memory, and specifically the ways in which people remember and reinterpret events, can be as malleable, shape-shifting, and convuluted as is the style of this book. Just as characters can reinterpret and reorder events, the prose of the story can be reinterpreted and reordered. The theme of memory is played out in all sorts of ways throughout the book, and Faulkner makes the revolutionary and fascinating decision to force the reader to participate in remembering the central story of the book through his own narrative techniques.

Since Sutpen's story is not the actual point of the book--remembering Sutpen's story is--Faulkner takes the unusual step of spelling out almost all of the plot in the first two chapters. The purpose of this is to allow the story to take shape through its reinterpretation by various characters--not just Miss Rosa, but also Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Quentin's roommate at Harvard, Shreve. And since, as Quentin explains, he is already familiar with the legend, it is also presented to us as if we know all the characters already. Although this makes reading the book frustrating during the first few chapters, the purpose of it is to allow for constant revisions of events and characters' personalities as the story is told over and over again in different ways.

The theme of memory is linked to the biggest theme of all, the theme that pervades all of Faulkner's work--the question of the South, its tragic past, and what its role in the future will be. Memory is so important to a place like the South, where people live in the past, that the act of remembering the Sutpen story has deep resonances for Faulkner's overall project of how to remember the South itself. Note that Quentin links the Sutpen story to a greater overall theme: "why God let us lose the War." And when Quentin's roommate at Harvard, Shreve, asks him to talk about the South, Quentin responds by relating and reinterpreting the Sutpen story. Their collaborative act of reordering the story speaks to a sophisticated notion of memory: to use old tragedies to form a new relief of modern concerns and contemporary historical events.

In this chapter, Mr. Compson narrates a linear chronology of Sutpen's early years in Jefferson, supplemented with information from Miss Rosa. Mr. Compson speaks as he sits on the porch with Quentin in the early evening, waiting for Quentin to depart with Miss Rosa.

On a Sunday morning in June 1833, the 25-year-old Sutpen rode into Jefferson on a strong roan horse. He looked as though he had been ill--not ill with a peaceful sickness, but a violent, feverish illness. At that time he had nothing but the horse, two smooth pistols, the clothes on his back and a bit of spare linen. He took a room at the boarding house in town and kept to himself--he did not drink with the other men (as Quentin's grandfather learned later it was because he had no money for drinks) and did not socialize with them. But he was obviously driven by some urgent need, for he left every morning at sunup and did not return until night. He bought one hundred miles of the best virgin land in the county by duping a Chickasaw Indian agent, and paid in Spanish coin--his last money. Then he disappeared for two months, and made a dramatic return with a French architect dandy and a wagonful of mud-covered slaves.

The mud-covered slaves became the center of the town's gossip--they were "wild men" who communicated with Sutpen in a French dialect and drove the swamp "like a pack of hounds." It was their labor that Sutpen used to erect his massive house over the next two years. They worked from sunup to sundown every day, under Sutpen's wordless direction and the grim amazement of the embattled French architect. Sometimes Sutpen worked alongside them--naked so as to save his clothes for his first "assault" on respectability after he had moved into the house. Finally the house was finished, except for windows, paint, ironware and furnishings. For the next three years, Sutpen lived in the unfinished house and seemed to slip--at least in the eyes of the town--into a strange state of quiet and stasis. He prepared the land for planting and used the seed cotton loaned to him by General Compson, Quentin's grandfather. But other than that he seemed to do nothing. He invited the other men of the town to hunt and gamble and drink and watch the slaves fight, which they did with aplomb, but spoke his motives to no one.

The women of the town divined his purpose sooner than the men did. They suspected that Sutpen wanted a wife. Sure enough, one Sunday morning three years after his house was erected, he put on the clothes in which he had arrived in Jefferson and went to the Methodist church. To everyone's surprise, he set his sights on Ellen Coldfield, the daughter of a respected but modest merchant. People had no idea what in the world Mr. Coldfield could offer Sutpen--"who obviously could do nothing under the sun for him save give him credit at a little cross-roads store." The hunting and drinking parties ceased immediately, and he spent all his time with Mr. Coldfield, Ellen's father.

Then one day Sutpen disappeared again. He returned "in a sense a public enemy," as Mr. Compson explains to Quentin. He returned laden with wagons full of mahogany and crystal and furnishings, and no explanation as to where he had received the money to buy such things. The people of the town suspected that he had acquired the goods through criminal activity and they were disturbed that they were being drawn into his misdeeds. While the slaves equipped the house, talk fermented in town. Finally, a party of men led by the sheriff rode out to confront Sutpen. He met them halfway and did not acknowledge the threat of their presence. They followed him all the way into town, where he took a room at Holston House. More and more people gathered until about fifty men were waiting for Sutpen to emerge. He did emerge, and looked at the crowd without speaking. Then, dressed in a new hat and tailcoat, and carrying a bundle of flowers, he walked across the square to Mr. Coldfield's house and walked out engaged. The mob arrested him. He was arraigned, but General Compson and Mr. Coldfield arrived and arranged for his release on bond. In June 1838, two months after his arrest, he married Ellen Coldfield.

Mrs. Coldfield talked Mr. Coldfield into letting Ellen wear powder--necessary since she wept before, during, and after the ceremony. She wept, in fact, throughout the whole carriage ride back to Sutpen's Hundred. Her tears were motivated in part because of her humiliation--Sutpen had insisted on a large wedding, and sent out one hundred invitations. But on the day of the wedding the church was empty. A large crowd assembled outside of the church, and let Ellen pass by them unharmed as she left. Then they pelted Sutpen with dirt and garbage as he emerged. The ugliness of the wedding, "blew away, though not out of memory."

Analysis

Mr. Compson's narration will continue over the next two chapters of the book. After the fierce, circumlocutious passion of Miss Rosa's narrative, Mr. Compson's calm, measured voice will be a relief. For one thing, he tells the story of Sutpen in linear order, which makes it much easier for the reader to understand. He also pares down the emotionality of Miss Rosa's narrative with his own distance from the story's events. Even the words of his narrative are quieter and more direct.

Simply because Mr. Compson's narrative is less confusing and passionate than Miss Rosa's, however, does not mean that it is less subjective or less telling. One of the purposes of having Mr. Compson tell part of this story is to poke holes in the idea of an "objective" narrator--someone who can stand back far enough from a story to tell it truthfully and without any bias. Although Mr. Compson is probably the most objective narrator we will receive in this story, his voice is far from the truth, whatever that may be.

Instead, Faulkner uses Mr. Compson's voice to develop the theme of memory, and to show how even an "objective" narrator brings reinterpretations to legend that are significant to our understandings of history. Mr. Compson uses some of Miss Rosa's crucial information to form his own picture of the legend: a kinder and gentler one. The critic Olga Vickery compares the narratives of Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson, who are of two different generations, this way: "[they are representative of the way] in which society creates its myths, legends and histories...with successive generations the diverse versions coalesce, the inconsistencies are ironed out, and the legend assumes an independent existence."

Note, for example, the differences in Sutpen's character based on these two narratives. In Rosa's story, he is a demoniacal monster set on destroying people, especially her family. In Mr. Compson's story, he is a man of sheer will and tremendous focus--morally neutral, perhaps leaning towards bad rather than good, but a man with distinctively human attributes. His quest for respectability is sympathetic and his courage is admirable. Note, as well, that the two narrators have different concerns. Miss Rosa focuses on her family, specifically her sister, and tries to divine Ellen's motivations and troubles. These topics receive almost no treatment in Mr. Compson's version of the story, perhaps because they would shed a harsh light on Sutpen. It is Faulkner's purpose to show how a story can change, depending not just on what people say, but on what they do not say. Thus, memory changes over years and over narrators.

Why, asks Quentin, if Thomas Sutpen "threw her off," would Miss Rosa want to tell Quentin about their engagement? It is the early evening and Quentin is still waiting for Miss Rosa, on the same day of their conversation. He sits with his father on their porch. Mr. Compson answers this question by telling Quentin the story of Miss Rosa's early life.

Miss Rosa's mother died giving birth to Rosa. Consequently, for the first sixteen years of her life, Rosa lived with her father-- "whom she hated without knowing it"--and her spinster aunt, a woman who shared Rosa's skill of retaining grudges and bitterness against Sutpen. Ellen had been married for seven years when Rosa was born, and Henry and Judith were both born before Rosa was. Mr. Compson suggests that, after her father died, Rosa saw herself as the only woman who had the ability to handle Sutpen, through marriage. When Sutpen returned from the Civil War, he found Miss Rosa, then twenty years old, living at Sutpen's Hundred (her father was dead by then) with Judith and Clytie, Sutpen's half-black daughter from one of his slaves. (The "negro girl" who stood with Judith in Chapter One.) At that point "[Miss Rosa] had not seen him a hundred times in her whole life," because she grew up visiting the Sutpens infrequently. Those visits, Mr. Compson explains, were "guarded and lugubrious" and, on the whole, probably rather wretched for Miss Rosa, who was forced to play with her several-years-older niece and nephew. Although Ellen came to visit with her children several times a year, Sutpen himself, out of arrogance or "delicacy" or disinterest, never accompanied them.

After her aunt ran off with a man, abandoning the household, Mr. Coldfield insisted on the annual visits to Sutpen's Hundred. But soon it became apparent that Ellen was disengaged from her father and her sister, opting instead to focus on the wealth and privilege that Sutpen's plantation had brought her. She took Judith to town often, shopped for all sorts of baubles, made social calls, and in general played the part of the privileged lady. Mr. Coldfield stopped going to the plantation, and Rosa went for many years without seeing Sutpen at all.

"Now the period began which ended in the catastrophe which caused a reversal so complete in Miss Rosa as to permit her to agree to marry the man whom she had grown to look upon as an ogre"--says Mr. Compson--that is, the summer after Henry's first year at the University of Mississippi. (The catastrophe which ends this period, adds Mr. Compson, is Henry's murder of Charles Bon on the day of his wedding to Judith, after the Civil War and the death of Mr. Coldfield.) It was some time after Bon's murder that Rosa decided to move out to Sutpen's Hundred. Up until that time she had been secretly feeding her father, who was hiding himself in the attic, writing heroic poetry about the Confederate soldiers who, if they had caught him, would have hung her father for avoiding military service, and attempting to keep her father's home in order. During that summer after Henry's first year at the University of Mississippi, she saw Ellen and Judith two or three times a week in town. Ellen began to speak of Judith's engagement to Charles Bon, a wealthy and mysterious older college friend whom Henry brought home for the holidays. After visiting the Sutpens, Bon returned to his home--New Orleans--on a steamboat. After Bon left, Sutpen also left, supposedly on business. No one but perhaps General Compson and Clytie knew that Sutpen had followed Bon to New Orleans.

Mr. Compson goes on to describe the Sutpen environment. By this time, Sutpen was the wealthiest independent planter in the county. Great balls and parties were held at Sutpen's Hundred during Charles Bon's holiday visits. Although Sutpen was not liked, he was too rich to be rejected or ignored. People feared him, "which seemed to amuse, if not actually please, him." Then Rosa stopped seeing Ellen. The whole Sutpen family, in fact, disappeared behind a wall of stony silence.

At first there were conjectures for why--it was 1860 and everyone could admit that war was inevitable--but then, slowly, word leaked out from the slaves on Sutpen's plantation that Henry had had a dispute with his father, renounced his birthright, and fled Sutpen's Hundred with Charles Bon. Rosa, busy making a trousseau for Judith's wedding with cloth stolen from her father, sews throughout Mississippi's secession, the formation of the Confederate states, and Sutpen's departure for the front. She continues to sew while her father, Mr. Coldfield, climbs into the attic and nails the door shut. She hauls food up to him once a day and keeps the house as best she can while wartime hardship sets in. Mr. Coldfield has also locked the store, which is eventually looted by passing soldiers. Then Mr. Coldfield himself dies, apparently starving himself to death.

After his death, Miss Rosa, "both pauper and orphan," does not go out to Sutpen's Hundred right away. Her sister, Ellen, died a couple of years before Mr. Coldfield, but Judith and Clytie live on at the mansion. Although the slaves have run away and the field lies fallow, it would make more social and economic sense for Rosa to move out to the plantation where there is a better chance of getting food and having company. She didn't, and Mr. Compson speculates that it was because she felt Judith did not need her protection yet (the protection she promised to give Judith at Ellen's dying request), because Judith was still subsisting on her love for Charles Bon. Rosa had no idea whether Bon was dead or alive until Wash Jones, a squatter on Sutpen's property, rode up to her house on an unsaddled mule and called her name.

Analysis

This is one of the most difficult chapters of the book--Faulkner jumps around in time and space, casually brings characters into the action to whom we have not been introduced, and describes the strange actions of characters without describing their motivations. All of these information gaps will be filled at length at later stages of the book. One of the reasons why this chapter may seem so disorienting is because Chapter Two is, in comparison, relatively straightforward and linear. Throughout his body of work (he also does this in The Sound and the Fury and A Light in August) Faulkner purposely sets chapters that are relatively clear next to chapters that seem muddled and frustrating. Not only does this juxtaposition heighten the tension of the plot and continue to give the reader an intellectual workout (it is akin, in some ways, to giving the reader a crossword puzzle with both easy and difficult clues), but it allows Faulkner to comment on the circular nature of storytelling. As with all storytellers, Mr. Compson is attempting to create not a truth, but a version of the truth, and there is no proof that he knows everything in the story he tells Quentin. With this strange, fractured and jumpy chapter, Faulkner is asking the reader to critique the veracity of Mr. Compson's narrative. Faulkner's question is, how many of these gaps in the story are gaps because Mr. Compson assumes that Quentin already knows the story, and how many of these gaps are gaps because Mr. Compson is inferring (or even inventing) information?

But Faulkner doesn't make it easy for you. Note that, unlike Miss Rosa's version of the events, Mr. Compson's narrative is told without quotation marks. The lack of quotation marks makes Mr. Compson's narrative seem more credible than Miss Rosa's, just as the detatched authority of Mr. Compson's narrative (unlike Miss Rosa, he does not tell his narrative with any "I" at all) comes to embody the voice of a history textbook. And the truth is that Mr. Compson is a more reliable narrator than Miss Rosa, perhaps the most reliable narrator of this book. But by scrambling this chapter, Faulkner is asking the reader to remember that no one's word can be taken for granted regarding this story.

Still, through Mr. Compson's narrative, we begin to get a fuller picture of the Sutpens and the community they inhabited. Mr. Coldfield, mysterious even to his daughters, is a decent, ineffectual man without the mental strength or emotional resources to confront the harsh realities of the world. Faulkner hints that he hides himself in the attic not only because he does not want to go to war but also out of guilt at a criminal venture he almost undertook with Sutpen. His action, though cowardly, is also morally courageous in its own way: in a world where everything is crazy, the line between the crazy and the sane is not so clear anymore.

It is interesting that Faulkner spends very little time discussing the peak of Sutpen's dream--the beginning of the catatrosphic period before the war, when Sutpen is the richest single planter in the county and his household is the picture of wealth, privilege and excitement. Compared to his description of Sutpen holding seedy all-male parties and digging his empire out of the mud, the text on Sutpen's height--the closest he comes to achieving his "design"--is slight indeed. Some critics have speculated that this has to do with Faulkner's class bias, his notorious disdain for uncultured whites like Sutpen. Whatever the reason, it is clear that Faulkner intends to dwell not on Sutpen's achievements but his fall--and the rest of the book is spent unraveling how everything fell apart.

Since it is still not dark enough for Quentin to leave, he sits on the front porch and pictures Miss Rosa "waiting in one of the dark airless rooms in the little grim house's impregnable solitude," with her black dress, bonnet, and umbrella. Mr. Compson comes from the house carrying an old letter--the only letter that Judith kept from Charles Bon many years ago. Judith gave it to Quentin's grandmother. Mr. Compson sits down and picks up the story with Henry and Charles Bon. As he describes it, "Henry loved Bon," so much so that Henry would repudiate his own birthright, and Mr. Compson attempts to explain that fact by telling Quentin about the relationship between the two men.

Bon "is the curious one to me," says Mr. Compson, explaining that Bon, wealthy, worldy, and many years older than Henry, came to the provincial University of Mississippi and the "isolated puritan country household" of the Sutpens and, without even trying, "seduced the country brother and sister." Henry met Bon at school and, along with the rest of the student body, completely idolized him. Henry imitated Bon's dress and manner. When he brought him home for Christmas, both Ellen and Judith were entranced. Strangely, though, Bon, owner of a "fatalistic and impenetrable impertubability," did not do the entrancing. As Mr. Compson explains it, it was Henry.

"It must have been Henry who seduced Judith," Mr. Compson explains--Henry who seduced Judith into falling in love with an image of Bon, the image that Henry himself would have liked to be.

But then the mysterious explosion between Henry and Sutpen breaks out, and Henry repudiates his birthright and leaves behind everything he knows to leave with Bon for New Orleans. Mr. Compson says the fight between Henry and Sutpen had to do with Bon's mistress, whom Sutpen had discovered in New Orleans--an "octoroon" (a woman who is 1/8 or less black) who has had a son by Bon. Mr. Compson imagines the confrontation between Henry and Sutpen in the library at Sutpen's Hundred, the confrontation wherein Mr. Sutpen tells Henry he must stop Bon from marrying Judith, because Bon has a black wife and a black baby in New Orleans. Henry sides with Bon, leaves Sutpen's Hundred, and travels to New Orleans with Bon, to meet Bon's other woman. Mr. Compson vividly recreates the scene of their departure, boat ride to New Orleans, and Henry's induction into the voluptuous world of French New Orleans.

In Mr. Compson's rendering, Bon introduces Henry to his black wife--not black at all but "with a face like a tragic magnolia"--and his son, "sleeping in silk and lace." It turns out that the mistress is not a mistress at all but a special kind of helpmate, one whom has been trained and prepared all her life to be the property and pleasure of a white man. She represents part of the world of New Orleans that Henry has never heard of--a world wherein particular women of mixed-blood can gain ease and comfort through a lifetime relationship with a rich white man, to be cemented by a ceremony that Sutpen calls marriage but Bon calls "a shibboleth meaningless as a child's game." But Henry remains conflicted and confused, pulled apart by his loyalty to his values and to his friend. For four years, Mr. Compson explains, Henry waited for Bon to renounce the woman.

That four years covered the Civil War. In the spring Henry and Bon enlisted in the company organizing at the University and rode off to battle. Bon was almost immediately promoted to be a lieutenant, probably against his wishes--"orphaned once more by the very situation to which and by which he was doomed." While the war was fought Henry refused to let Bon write to Judith; for four years Judith received no word about Bon save that he was alive. Meanwhile, the South is in ruins, and Judith, Clytie and Ellen (until she dies in 1863) are scrambling (along with the rest of the town and the rest of the South) to eat. Judith and Clytie have a little garden that feeds them. They also get occasional sustenance from Wash Jones, a squatter who lives on Sutpen's land along with his daughter and granddaughter.

After four years of fighting, Bon finally writes Judith a letter--the very letter that Mr. Compson gives to Quentin. Quentin reads the letter, a strange testament to the hardships of physical privation and mental strain that ends, surprisingly, with Bon's proclamation of his intention to marry Judith. "We have waited long enough," he says, though he cannot tell her when he will arrive to marry her. His intention is enough for Judith, who, along with Clytie, begins sewing a wedding dress out of scraps. Quentin gets a brief flash of the scene before Sutpen's Hundred, the scene that ends with Henry shooting Bon, and then Mr. Compson's voice flashes forward to Wash Jones at Rosa's gate, telling Rosa that Henry has just killed Bon.

Analysis

With the end of this chapter, we complete the first and most objective vision of the legend of Thomas Sutpen, narrated by Mr. Coldfield. This is a misleading chapter--purposely misleading--because Mr. Compson's neat closure leads the reader to believe that the circumstances and motivations he spells out for the characters in this saga--all of them perfectly logical--are the truth. In fact, the search for the truth is only beginning. In order to get to the truth, the reader will have to wade through not only Mr. Coldfield's and Miss Rosa's version, but also Quentin's version and then his or her own version of the events and motivations of this saga.

This is not the truth of what happened between Henry and Bon at the gates of Sutpen's Hundred. Mr. Compson does not have all the information, and although he tries valiently to fill in the gaps with inference, his own psychologizing, and his own knowledge of the times and characters involved, his version falls short. Even if Sutpen's revelation to Henry had been that Bon had a black mistress (which it was not, as we will see later on in the book), it is highly doubtful that Henry would have taken issue with the woman. As Mr. Coldfield explains in the book, it was perfectly acceptable for white men of that era to sleep with, even rape, black women. There were absolutely no social consequences for such behavior. Henry himself grew up with a black half-sister, Clytie, and would have no trouble accepting the fact of Bon's bastard son. Bon himself would understand the barriers between black and white women and behave accordingly. In real life, there would be no problem with Bon marrying a white woman.

Historical realities aside, Mr. Coldfield as much as admits that he does not have the full picture. Almost halfway through this chapter, he utters the most famous line of the book: "They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully...you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens, you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against the turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs."

While many readers have grumbled that this description could describe all of Faulkner's complicated works (!) it is an apt metaphor for this novel in particular. With each chapter, the characters, sketchy and silent at first, seem to come more and more alive with each story, each shading and each piece of information. Later on in the book, Quentin will add his own shades to complete the story, and yet he will still find that the full picture of the characters continues to escape him. That is partially because of Quentin's Southern inheritance of slavery and the Civil War: "the turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs." But it is also because Quentin, like his father in this chapter, is unable or unwilling to add to the legend through active participation of his own. They are unable to critically evaluate the entire bloody past of Southern history, including its bloody racial history. Mr. Compson, for example, shrugs off the moral of the Sutpen story to fate (he refers to both Bon and Henry as "doomed" to perform the actions they perform).

Another fascinating theme that emerges in this chapter is the intimacy between Henry and Bon. Mr. Compson hints at the homoerotic attraction between the two men multiple times throughout the chapter, even suggesting that Bon was set on marrying Judith because he could not marry Henry. This homoerotic tension has gotten a great deal of critical attention. John Duvall, for instance, argues that Faulkner "refigure[s] masculinity" in his works and that his texts contain the space for gay criticism and interpretation.

The narrative resumes with Miss Rosa and Quentin driving in the carriage out to Sutpen's Hundred. Miss Rosa is explaining the story of how she came to be engaged to Thomas Sutpen. The chapter opens with Wash Jones galloping up to Rosa's door with the announcement that Henry Sutpen has killed Charles Bon. Rosa responds by "packing" her belongings-- "I would have had no need for either trunk or bag"--and leaving with Wash Jones for Sutpen's Hundred. They approach Sutpen's crumbling estate and Rosa runs inside, where she confronts "[the] sphinx face" of Clytie. She calls out for Judith and receives no answer. "[P]ossibly even then I did not expect Judith to answer," Rosa says, but she tries to run up the stairs to find Judith anyway, and is stopped by Clytie. Clytie calls her "Rosa," rather than "Miss Rosa," as black people are expected to, and this slight infuriates her. As Rosa explains, it is not merely that Clytie calls her "Rosa," but that "it was as though it had not been she [Clytie] who spoke but the house itself that said the words." She envisions Clytie as possessed by the spirit of Sutpen's house and will, placed there to stop her. This vision gets stronger when Clytie touches her as a restraining measure. Rosa remarks on Clytie's presence in the Sutpen home and her own estrangement from the children she is trying to save. Then, somehow, Clytie's hand is gone and Rosa runs up the stairs.

Upstairs, she meets Judith in front of a closed door. Judith greets her with a calm, "Yes, Rosa?" and Rosa notes that she is holding a photograph. "That's what I found," says Rosa wryly, and launches into a long meditation on "the miscast summer of my barren youth," the period which followed this exchange. She also hints about her "love" for Charles Bon, "[b]ut not as women love," whom she never saw in person. This love, she implies, is more a love for what could have been her youth than for the man himself.

Judith tells Clytie that Rosa will be staying for dinner and instructs her to get out more meal. Calmly, she walks down the stairs. While they eat dinner, Wash Jones builds a coffin at Judith's instruction. The coffin building, corpse-carrying, and burial service all take place with the greatest practicality, Judith's face is "calm cold and tranquil" throughout. Back in the house, Rosa marvels that " ŒShe did not even weep,'" and notes that "For all I was allowed to know, we had no corpse; we even had no murderer."

Rosa claims that she stayed not for food or companionship or shelter or any practical reason, but to wait for Thomas Sutpen to come home. Both Judith and Clytie did too, since "he was all we had, all that gave us any reason to exist." The three women struggled to eke out an existence from the land and keep the house from falling apart. All hierarchical measures of age, class and race are eliminated while the three women drift through the necessary tasks of survival together. "We were three strangers," Rosa explains, three strangers who worked, ate, and slept together in the same room for safety. As stragglers from the Civil War drift back into Mississippi, they also worried about their safety together.

And then, suddenly, one day, Sutpen appears on a thin horse, in a "threadbare" coat. He walks up to Judith and addresses her solemnly, in four sentences they recapitulate everything that has happened between Henry and Bon. As Judith says, " ŒYes. Henry killed him.'" she bursts into brief, sudden tears. Sutpen greets Clytie and Rosa and then goes into the house. As Rosa says, "[t]he shell of him was there." Some part of Sutpen is missing. Sutpen instantaneously goes about repairing his lands and his home with a fury and a focus that is impressive even to Rosa. He does this in the face of Reconstruction and the resulting white Southern backlash--refusing to spend his time engaged in vigilante revenge with other white men of his town, he once again makes himself an outcast.

Three months after Sutpen's arrival, Rosa looks up from her weeding patch in the garden and sees Sutpen looking at her--not simply taking note of her presence, but looking at her with "a sudden over-burst of light." That night at supper, Sutpen walks in and, in front of Judith and Clytie, offers Rosa a tepid marriage proposal which Rosa accepts. For her acceptance, Rosa claims that "I hold no brief, ask no pity," even though at the time Sutpen seemed, to her, insane. But then, one day, after he had spent weeks paying little attention to his fiancee, Sutpen walked into the house and called Rosa downstairs. She came, and he insulted her by implying that they should have a child first, and then if it was a boy, they could get married. Rosa, infuriated, left the house and never returned. She did this out of injured pride, even though the neighbors would talk about how she was unable to keep a man, and even though she had little means for subsistence elsewhere. Nonetheless, Rosa claims that she has forgiven him. "I had nothing to forgive...he was not articulated in this world."

As Rosa rambles on about Sutpen's inhuman qualities, Quentin drifts off into an imagined version of Judith and Henry's conversation just after Henry shot Charles Bon. He is brought into focus by a sentence from Rosa. She says that Clytie has been keeping "something living in" Sutpen's house for the past four years.

Analysis

Overall, Rosa's second chapter is a fascinating example of one of the storytelling techniques that Faulkner develops the book around: how stories are understood not by what is said, but by what is left unsaid. She spends a great deal of time negating possible motivations for the decisions she made after Charles Bon's death, but she spends very little time explaining the motivation that she actually had. The reader is left to infer from the bits of psychological information she unknowingly reveals. For example, the love for Charles Bon that she hints at shows that despite how she feels about Judith, "I did not understand [her] and, if what my observation warranted me to believe was true, I did not wish to understand [her]," Rosa is jealous of the fact that Judith had at least the opportunity to fall in love with a dashing, mysterious man. Indeed, much of the bitterness Rosa feels towards everyone in this chapter--especially Sutpen--is due to a fact that none of them can control: the fact that because of class, birth order, and historical situation, Rosa would not have the opportunity to marry and to enjoy her youth.

The startling revelation at the end of the chapter-- "something" has been living in the Sutpen house for four years--is a great "goosebumps" moment. Faulkner works within the Gothic tradition of haunted houses to keep the story going. Now, we see, this novel is not just about a story in the past--but there's an equally compelling story in the present. It is worth noting that Faulkner doesn't pull out this trump card until the middle of the book. At the beginning of the book, this revelation would not have the rich connection to Sutpen's life, legend, and character--it would merely seem hokey.

This chapter is also important because it shows the beginning of the end for Sutpen. Against a beautifully drawn picture of the Reconstruction South, Faulkner shows his hero as fallible for the first time. There is something "missing" from him--although the iron will remains, and Sutpen begins rebuilding the moment he returns from the war, some crucial element of his character is gone.

Rosa's rendition of her confrontation on the stairs with Clytie has received a lot of critical attention. In these pages, Faulkner begins to develop the theme that will come to dominate this book: race and racism in America. Faulkner himself has received a great deal of criticism for his own racism, which, although it pervades his texts, is mostly unintended. But even Faulkner's own racism serves to enlighten readers about the types of racism and the Southern peculiarities about race that he wrestles with in his texts.

For example, during their confrontation on the stairs, Rosa describes Clytie as "not owner: instrument; I still say that" of Sutpen, his house, and his legacy. This description, and the descriptions that follow it, betrays ignorance because it dehumanizes Clytie, it robs her of her right to speak as an independent human being--but it is telling about the ways in which race is circumscribed in this novel. Clytie will be presented throughout as a keeper of Sutpen, Sutpen's home and Sutpen's legacy, none of which have offered her any real reward or even gratitude. She is never given the right to tell her own version of the Sutpen legend, although she would no doubt have a fascinating and perhaps one of the most accurate versions of all the characters in the book. Unfortunately, very few of Faulkner's black characters in any of his books are given the chance to speak with their own voices, and the specific plight of Clytie is shared by other black characters in Faulkner's work. As Pamela Knights says, "Dilsey [from The Sound and the Fury] and Clytie, indeed, guard the houses of the Fathers, which hold the secrets of the white families. As Arthur Kinney says, this is a "profoundly subtle and profoundly deep" form of racism (266), and even if "wholly unintended" these tragic revisions perpetuate the hierarchies and the exclusions [of racism]."

The action jumps forward several months. Shreve, Quentin's roommate at Harvard, comes into their room from the snow outdoors and hands Quentin a letter from his father. The letter explains that, after lingering in a coma for two weeks, Miss Rosa has died. Shreve, a Canadian, expresses surprise that Quentin should care about the death of someone he was not related to. Then Shreve asks the question that everyone at Harvard has been asking--Tell us about the South. Quentin begins to tell him the story of Miss Rosa, Thomas Sutpen, and the Sutpen family. Shreve recounts Quentin's tale, as if to get it straight, and Quentin thinks to himself that Shreve sounds just like his father, Mr. Compson would if Mr. Compson had known everything Quentin learned the night he rode out to Sutpen's Hundred with Miss Rosa.

Shreve asks--in the form of a long narrative--about Thomas Sutpen early life and later years, the years of Sutpen's decline. We learn two important things in Shreve's questions: the content of Sutpen's insult to Miss Rosa, and the fact that after the war, Sutpen realized the plantation was ruined and he was forced to open a small general store selling "calico and kerosene and cheap beads and ribbons" to freed slaves and poor whites. Then we enter Quentin's thoughts and learn more information about these later years. Sutpen, "the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus" ran the general store and was hounded by creditors. He went into social and economic partnership with Wash Jones, the poor white squatter who had lived on his land for fourteen years, and began drinking heavily. He also took up with Jones' granddaughter, fifteen-year-old Milly, and got her pregnant. In 1869, Milly gave birth to Sutpen's child. Sutpen insulted Milly terribly, and Jones confronted Sutpen and killed him with a rusty scythe in front of the shack where Milly had given birth to the child. Judith, now thirty years old, borrowed two mules to drive her father's corpse to the Methodist church where he had met her mother. The mules bolt and Sutpen's corpse falls out, but Judith pushes the body back in and drives on to the cedar grove, where she reads the burial service herself.

Shreve asks Quentin to remind him what the Sutpen graves looked like--a story that Quentin has presumably already told him. Quentin and his father saw the graves when they were out hunting quail. Quentin remembers seeing the family plot--Sutpen and Ellen both had marble tombstones, bought at great cost and even greater inconvenience by Sutpen during the Civil War. Charles Bon was buried there as well, and Judith had bought his tombstone when she sold Sutpen's general store. There is also a tombstone for Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon, Charles Bon's son with his octoroon mistress, that Judith and Clytie scraped together enough money to pay for partially. General Compson paid the rest on this tombstone. Mr. Compson, standing with Quentin at the plots, tells the story of Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon's first visit to Sutpen's Hundred--Charles Bon's mistress brought her eleven-year-old son to Sutpen's Hundred to mourn at his father's grave. The mistress and her son spent a week with Judith and Clytie at Sutpen's Hundred, where Clytie was fiercely protective of the boy. Then, a year later, Clytie traveled to New Orleans and returned with the boy, who was at that time an orphan, to be raised at Sutpen's Hundred.

The boy grew up in the strange cocoon of Judith and Clytie, and at some point--General Compson "did not know either just which of them it was who told him that he was, must be, a negro"--learned that he was part black. This knowledge ruined his life, making him into a desperate and destructive man. He looked white but was tortured by the knowledge that he was part black. He drank, gambled, and behaved recklessly until he was finally arrested for starting a brawl in a black gambling house. During the trial, the question of his race came up in a disturbing way. General Compson was able to soothe people's fears, get Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon out of prison and send him away, but he returned with "a coal black and ape-like" wife, who was pregnant. For a year he continued his path of dissolution while his wife raised their son, Jim Bond, and hauled him out of jails, bars, and dilapidated rented rooms. Although many tried to save him, including Judith, he "had not resented his black blood so much as he had denied the white" and continued to be tormented until, two years after his return, both he and Judith died of yellow fever. Clytie remained to scrape together enough money for the final gravestone (Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon's) and raise Jim Bond in the ruined house on Sutpen's Hundred. After reading the grim, apocalyptic message on Judith's headstone, Quentin inferred that Miss Rosa had ordered it, had demanded of the executor of her father's estate that the headstone be purchased.

We jump back to Shreve's questions-as-summary. Shreve, in disbelief, recounts the story of how Jim Bond has lived with Clytie for twenty-six years, farming the land, and how Quentin went to Sutpen's Hundred with Miss Rosa that night, where they found Clytie and Jim Bond and--something else.

Analysis

This chapter forms the crucial separation between the first and the second parts of the novel. It is the first time we have narration from Quentin--although, importantly, most of the information is actually narrated by Shreve. In the second part of the book, the present--1909 in the North, at Harvard--takes over, and begins to reinterpret the past. It is during the second part of the book that the reader begins to understand not only the importance of how stories are told, but also how the ways in which stories are told can affect those who have grown up with them--in this case, Quentin--and those who hear them from the outside. It is no accident that our introduction to the crucial information in this chapter comes through Shreve, and is then fleshed out by Quentin. Shreve, too, is coming to be affected by how this story is told. His original passive, even condescending attitude about the South will be transformed by the end of the novel. Shreve comes to understand not just the South, but America.

For the first time in a long time (perhaps longer than the reader may notice), this chapter presents new developments, new twists, and new characters to the storyline. The haunting story of Charles Etienne de St Valery Bon further develops the theme of race and racism in America and is a precursor to A Light in August, Faulkner's classic about a mixed-race man unable to find a place in the segregated South. It also creates the crucial context for understanding Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon's father, Charles Bon. The self-destructive tendencies of the father echo in the son, and over the same issue: the inability of America in general and the South in particular to appropriately atone for the debasement and dehumanization of an entire race. The story of Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon foreshadows the downfall of Charles Bon, to be explored at length later in the novel, although the circumstances surrounding Charles Bon are infinitely more complex.

The story of Thomas Sutpen continues as Shreve touches on the events of Sutpen's later years. It is difficult not to wince at how far Sutpen has fallen. Until Sutpen went away for war, Wash Jones had to come in at the back door and was not even allowed to enter the house. By the late 1860s, Wash Jones had become Sutpen's closest companion. Sutpen's plantation lay in such ruins that he was forced to open a small general store. Such a reversal of fortune would have been humiliating for the man who once owned one hundred acres and was one of the richest men in the county. His insulting of Milly, then, may also be viewed as a self-destructive tendency, as it was surely intended to provoke Wash Jones.

It is a cold night in Cambridge, and typically Shreve opens the window in cold temperatures to do deep breathing exercises, but not tonight. He is enthralled by the Sutpen story and the South. "Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it. It's better than the theatre, isn't it," he says. Quentin responds by telling him about when Sutpen was building his house in the swamp and the French architect ran away. Sutpen went to track him through the swamp with dogs and his black slaves, and General Compson went with him. During the hunt, Sutpen told General Compson about his early life. The story was passed on to Mr. Compson and then to Quentin, who tells it to Shreve along with the new knowledge he had gained from Miss Rosa.

According to Thomas Sutpen, his only "trouble was innocence." He was born in 1808 in the territory that became West Virginia. He was raised in the mountains, in the hillbilly culture of poor whites--and his family was poor, with an lazy, alcoholic father to boot. It was an impoverished, provincial place, "where the only colored people were Indians...[and] where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody." When the soil eroded and it became impossible to eke out a living, Sutpen's father moved the family down into southern Virginia to work on a plantation. It was then that Sutpen--somewhere between the age of ten and twelve, he had lost track of his own age--learned that there were black people, and that there were irrevocable differences between blacks and whites, and rich whites and poor whites. He did not realize at the time that rich whites thought themselves superior to poor whites. He did not envy the rich white man who owned the plantation his father worked on at first, because he did not understand entitlement yet.

He came to understand it one day when his father sent him to the plantation with a message for the rich white owner. When he approached the door, a black servant intercepted him and instructed him to knock at the back door. This shocked the young Sutpen--he was then between twelve and fourteen years old--and caused him to completely re-evaluate the world and his place in it. It was in response to this incident that he conceived his "design" to "combat them" and to found a dynasty that would carry on. In order to do combat, the young Sutpen realized, "You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with." He promptly ran away and went to the West Indies. He had learned in school that in the West Indies, a man could make his fortune if he "was clever and courageous."

By the age of twenty he had distinguished himself in the West Indies. He was working on a plantation and had learned French and patois to communicate with the slaves, when a terrifying slave revolt broke out. Sutpen was barricaded in the house with the French plantation owner's family, but then he decided that he would stop the revolt. He walked out and stopped it single-handedly. In reward, the plantation owner gave Sutpen the privilege of marrying his daughter. Sutpen did marry the daughter, and they had a son. But then, Sutpen said, he discovered that "they deliberately withheld from me the one fact which I have reason to know they were aware would have caused me to decline the entire matter, otherwise they would not have withheld it from me--a fact which I did not learn until after my son was born...this new fact rendered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design." He abandoned his wife and son, leaving them with enough money to be properly cared for. That son, Quentin learned on the night he went to Sutpen's Hundred with Miss Rosa, was Charles Bon.

Therefore, when Charles Bon showed up for a Christmas visit with Henry in 1859, Sutpen "saw the face he believed he had paid off and discharged twenty-eight years ago." Sutpen, Mr. Compson said, probably named Bon himself. Sutpen did nothing at first when Bon appeared, trying to figure out what he should do. The night he and Henry had their break, Quentin explained, it was not because of Bon's mistress--it was because Sutpen told Henry that Bon was his half-brother. Henry refused to believe him, although he knew that Sutpen was telling the truth. For four years, while the country was at war, Henry was at war with himself over whether or not he should allow Bon to marry Judith. Henry "wrestled with his conscience" and maybe even hoped that the war would kill both of them off, but when Bon was wounded, it was Henry to carry him to the rear of the guard, so perhaps Henry was not as fatalistic as anyone thought.

Sutpen, certain by now that Henry was finding some way of justifying incest to himself, went to visit General Compson during one of his few days off. They had another conversation wherein Sutpen revealed that he either "destroy my design with my own hand" or do nothing and let the design stand as a "mockery and a betrayal of that little boy...for whose vindication the whole plan was conceived." In the end, he decided to destroy his own design by playing the final trump card about Charles Bon. In short, he expected his home to look the way it did when he returned from the Civil War: both sons vanished and a spinster daughter.

As Quentin explains, Sutpen "was not for one moment concerned about his ability to start the third time" towards his design. Unfortunately, once again, the design did not go as planned. Recognizing that he was past sixty years old and could probably father only one more son, he "suggested what he suggested to her [Miss Rosa]"--a plan that made a great deal of logic to him but was an insult to her. (That they have a child and, if the child was a boy, they could get married.) When he lost his chance to marry Rosa and proved unable to salvage the plantation, he slid further and further downhill. When he started sleeping with Milly, Wash Jones' young granddaughter, everyone knew about it--including Judith, who made clothes for the girl. Jones had idolized Sutpen for fourteen years, as long as he had lived on Sutpen's property. Therefore he was unwilling and unable to stop Sutpen. Even after Milly became pregnant Jones did not protest, merely saying that he believed Sutpen was brave and would "make hit right."

But on the day Milly's baby was born, things turned out differently. One of Sutpen's mares had foaled the same day, and he went out to look at the colt, which he pronounced "fine." Then he went to see Milly in Wash Jones' camp, and saw the girl on a pallet with the child. He looked at the child without love and then remarked that it was too bad Milly was not a mare, because then he could give her a decent stall in the stable. Then he walked out. Wash Jones, who heard the insult, accosted Sutpen-- "I'm going to tech you, Kernel." Sutpen lashed Jones twice with his riding whip, and then Jones took up the scythe and cut Sutpen down. In a daze, Jones watched the road for the rest of the day and waited for the inevitable search party. Sure enough, the search party, composed of men from the town (probably called by Judith) found Sutpen's body and rode to arrest Jones. Jones greeted the large group and then asked them to wait for a moment. The men claimed later that they remembered, after it was too late, that Jones kept a sharpened butcher knife in his camp. He used this knife to slice the necks of both Milly and her child, then rushed out into the light with the scythe, trying to cut as many of the riders down as he could before they killed him.

As Quentin finishes the story, Shreve is appalled. He asks Quentin why, if Sutpen merely wanted a son, would he insult the son's mother and walk away, bringing down the rightful fury of Wash Jones and provoking Jones into killing both Sutpen and the son, ending any possibility for a Sutpen dynasty? Quentin replies that Milly's child was a girl. Shreve replies, "Oh" and suggests that they go to bed.

Analysis

Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight are the most important chapters of this book. In these two chapters, we get as close as we will ever get to Sutpen and Charles Bon. It is important that even though we get "close" to both of these legendary figures in these two chapters--understanding their motivations and troubles better than ever before--we remain extremely detached from him. Sutpen's words are related over the course of many years and three Compson generations, plus the revelations that Quentin had when he rode out to Sutpen's Hundred with Miss Rosa. Because the channels of Sutpen's words are so long and so scattered, there is great room for distortion and misunderstanding. And in the next chapter, when Quentin and Shreve go into Charles Bon's head, they are fabricating absolutely everything. They are logical and the words coming "from" Charles Bon make a great deal of sense--but Charles Bon is never given the opportunity to speak in his own voice.

Still, we get as close as we ever will to these characters in these two chapters--and although their voices are more diluted than ever, Faulkner's point is that this is as close as anyone got to these two mysterious men. Even though Henry and Judith lived with Sutpen, it is doubtful that they knew him any better than Quentin--and the reader--know him. In fact, they probably knew him even less. Such are the circumstances, Faulkner says, of legends.

But Sutpen comes alive in this chapter, more alive than he ever has before. We finally understand how he came to arrive at the "design" that ruined so many lives and consumed so many resources. The starting point for that design, as Sutpen explains it, was "innocence." This is a strange attitude for a man whose actions suggest absolute scrupulousness, but if Sutpen was anything the way he claimed to be as a child: wholly ignorant of racial and class boundaries, unwilling to accept that men were superior to other men based on something arbitrary like birth position or money, then he was possessed of a special type of innocence. A meritocratic innocence--a democratic, and therefore wholly American, innocence. What is interesting is how Sutpen's fall from innocence reflects his fall from wealth and power. Sutpen questions the idea that wealth makes one man better than another--and so he sets out to obtain wealth and he is successful. What he does not question is the idea that race makes one man better than another--and it is his failure to challenge this idea that winds up destroying his dynasty, as we will see in Chapter Eight.

Although Sutpen questions the idea that wealth makes one man better than another, he fails to live up to a meritocratic ideal in his own life. His treatment of Wash and Milly Jones show that he remains callous towards people of a different class--even though he, too, has lived as a squatter on another man's plantation. Although Sutpen makes a great effort to justify his own actions and moral choices to himself, the hard facts of his life show that he is morally corrupt, even if he was innocent at one time. At the same time, Faulkner's portrait of the violent, dissolute Jones smacks of elitism--Faulkner was an unabashed elitist, coming from an old Southern family that lost its money and therefore its class status after the Civil War. The fact that Wash Jones is the one who kills the "Kernel" suggests that, for all of his money, experience, courage, and will, Sutpen is doomed to die by the same type of man he grew up around, in the same type of environment that he was born in. Sutpen may claim to believe in a democratic ethos, but Faulkner suggests that there is something inborn and impossible to change about the class of poor Southern whites.

Note that in this chapter Sutpen does not say what his final "trump card" is regarding Charles Bon. This is a very important detail for Chapter Eight.

Shreve and Quentin are completely wrapped up in the Sutpen legend now. Although Shreve has just suggested bedtime, he puts on a robe and a coat to ward off the chill and sits back down to finish the story. Shreve picks up the narration of the story with Charles Bon's childhood. Although Shreve is talking the story runs through both of them-- "the two who breathed not individuals now yet something both more andless than twins"--and they seem to embody the people they are describing. Almost everything in this chapter is speculation, since no one could have known about Bon's childhood or his perspective on the events.

They imagine Bon's mother to have been a woman consumed by rage, determined to mold Bon to be the unknowing instrument of Sutpen's undoing. They believe that she would either not tell Bon about what happened at all, or that she would seize Bon during his playtime as a child to remind him about her suffering. Either way, she would have molded Bon to use him as a weapon against Sutpen. They invent another character to assist her: a lawyer responsible for handing out Sutpen's money to her and Bon. This lawyer would have carefully parcelled out money to Bon as the young man became increasingly indolent and dependent on the voluptuous pleasures of New Orleans; all the while he would be negotiating the whereabouts and actions of Thomas Sutpen in Mississippi. He would report these actions to Bon's mother when she asked for them, sometimes twice a year and sometimes five times in two days, and in general try to smooth relations between the passionate mother and son. This lawyer is a slightly unscrupulous character; there are hints of him wishing to take their money and "light out for Texas." Only the fact that Bon has already spent a great deal of the money restrains him.

They envision tension between Bon and his mother, on her part because Bon spends lots of money and she worries that he might not have the necessary fire to avenge her, and on his part because he realizes that what she feels for him is not the type of love a mother should feel for a child. So he decides--not by himself, but thanks to a suggestion planted by either his mother or the lawyer--to go to school, at the age of twenty-eight years old. The lawyer, who has been keeping careful track of Sutpen, knows that Henry Sutpen will be attending the University of Mississippi at Oxford the same year that Bon is to go away to school. It is the lawyer who directs Bon towards the University of Mississippi and makes all the arrangements. Bon, on the boat to Mississppi from New Orleans, ponders why the lawyer would insist on the University of Mississippi and contemplates the way he is being manipulated yet again. And he is being manipulated again, for in Henry and Shreve's version, the lawyer writes Thomas Sutpen a letter warning him that Charles Bon will be at the University of Mississippi.

They envision's Bon's impressions of Henry--a "young clodhopper bastard" who apes his every move, sometimes to his amusement, sometimes to his annoyance, but always with a degree of strange, loving detachment. Bon knows that Henry is his brother and is confused about how he feels about the young man and his invitation to go to Sutpen's Hundred, but he agrees in the hope that he will see Thomas Sutpen's "instant of indisputable recognition" when he appears. Even if Sutpen never acknowledges him as his son, Bon thinks, that will be enough. But that acknowledgement never happens. He deals with Judith--who as a country girl without much worldly experience could not have challenged or interested him for a moment--wth the same strange, loving detachment he must have felt for Henry. But he loved Judith, Shreve and Quentin affirm, the same way he loved Henry--so much that "he never actually proposed to her and gave her a ring for Mrs. Sutpen to show around." All while he would be admitting these incestuous feelings to himself, he would be agonizing over Sutpen's refusal to acknowledge him in even the smallest way.

And then after Henry's break with Sutpen, they go to New Orleans--Henry's first experience with a cosmopolitan city. Shreve and Quentin imagine that the young man was overwhelmed, though not nearly as puritan about the octoroon mistress as Mr. Compson thought he would be. Bon goes to see his lawyer, who suggests blackmailing Sutpen. Bon, in a rage, strikes the attorney and challenges him to a duel, which the lawyer declines. Henry and Bon discuss the matter of incest incessantly, and Henry claims that he needs time to "get used to it." Both men believe that Judith will marry Bon without any compunction, "because they both knew that women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love." Henry tries to justify it to himself with all sorts of examples--famous kings, dukes, popes, etc.--while the war begins and they march off to battle.

The story gets away from them now, taking on a life of its own. They imagine Bon saving Henry from wounds in battle, even though General Compson says that it was Bon who received a wound in battle. In Shreve and Quentin's version, Bon saves Henry and Henry begs Bon to let him die. All the while Bon keeps hoping that Sutpen will give him some type of acknowledgement. But instead of speaking to Bon, Sutpen calls for Henry on the battlefield and plays his final trump card--that Bon's mother was part black. Henry confronts Bon, now certain that Bon cannot marry Judith, and Bon remarks, "So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear." Bon agonizes that Sutpen has still not sent him any word at all and dares Henry to stop him from marrying Judith. When Henry stands up to him, Bon hands Henry his pistol and tells him to kill him, then and there. But Henry does not, and Bon tells him coldly that Henry will have to stop him from marrying Judith.

Shreve and Quentin then relive the scene of Henry and Bon riding up to the gate of Sutpen's Hundred. They think about the picture Bon left in a metal case in his pocket when he died, for Judith's eyes only: a picture of the octoroon mistress and the child, Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon. The picture was in a metal case that Judith had given him with her own picture in it. They wonder why Bon would have left this picture for Judith and conclude that Bon knew Henry was going to kill him, and that he put the picture of the octoroon mistress in his pocket for her to find to let her know that he did not deserve her grief. Satisfied with this explanation, Shreve suggests that they go to bed.

Analysis

Chapter Eight is based almost solely on imagination. Granted, it is two very bright and psychologically sophisticated young men who are doing the imagining--Shreve and Quentin's version of Charles Bon's inner life is extremely persuasive--but it is imagination nonetheless. They could not know what Charles Bon really felt or thought; no one knew that. They create the figure of Charles Bon to fit the story, imagining what type of circumstances and feelings would lead a worldly young man like Bon to seemingly self-destruct. And since the story they know is already colored and shaded by so many different tellers and so many different perspectives, their invention of Charles Bon in reaction to the story necessarily incorporates all of these voices and perspectives. The result is a rich tapestry of reinventions and reinterpretations that say more about the people who have told the story of Sutpen and Charles Bon--Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, General Compson, Quentin, and Shreve--than about Sutpen or Charles Bon themselves. Bon, for example, remains a mystery even after the enlightenments of this chapter. In fact, he is even more mysterious at the end of this chapter than he was at the beginning.

Consider, for example, the incredible ironies that this chapter reveals: Bon, with his mixed-race background, is a colonel in the Confederate army, fighting for a system that wishes to continue slavery and make it impossible for people of mixed-race background to find a place in society. Then there is the role of Charles Bon's mother, who willfully destroys her son, who indeed raises her son for the sole purpose of inflicting revenge on the man who scorned and abandoned her. Finally, there is Sutpen himself, who might have avoided the destruction of his "design" by simply acknowledging Charles Bon as his son and asking him to leave for good. Bon indicated that he would have been perfectly willing to leave the Sutpens alone and not pursue marriage to Judith if Sutpen had simply given him recognition of some kind--any kind.

Despite the frustrations of trying to understand a character with a very limited voice, Shreve and Quentin create a compelling portrait of Charles Bon. Their rendition of the bond between Henry and Bon is particularly good and fleshes out an important part of the story that had not, until now, been fully described. It is interesting to note the similarities between the Henry/Bon relationship and the Quentin/Shreve relationship. Both relationships are predicated on the fascination of a provincial young man with an older, exotic creature (Quentin is a few months older than Shreve and the South is, to Shreve and to many other students at Harvard, nothing if not exotic). In both relationships, tacit understandings are vital to the cooperation of the two men. And finally, as critics have noted, there are glimmers of homoeroticism in the descriptions of both relationships. In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin wrestles with the same feelings of incest that Henry does--what might have happened if Shreve had tried to marry Caddy, Quentin's sister?

In this chapter, though, there is no theme more important and more recepient of critical attention than race. With Sutpen's "trump card," it becomes clear that race, not incest or mistresses, is the central hinge of the Sutpen story and the central theme of the book. As Arthur Kinney says, "But what for Faulkner is most haunting is...the agonizing recognition of the exacting expenses of racism, for him the most difficult and most grievous awareness of all. Racism spreads contagiously through his works, unavoidably. Its force is often debilitating; its consequences often beyond reckoning openly. The plain recognition of racism is hardest to bear and yet most necessary to confront." The "trump card" opens up an entire new story. With Charles Bon's statement about how Henry can overcome incest but not miscegenation, Faulkner implies that there exists, in America, a taboo even greater than the genetically programmed, physiological taboo of incest. This is a serious implication and a serious commentary on the way in which racism has worked its way into the American--especially the South, but do not forget that this story is being related in the North--cultural fabric.

What makes this implication all the more intriguing is that some critics are not altogether convinced that the problem with Bon's mother was mixed blood. Cleanth Brooks, for example, has pointed out that Charles Bon's negro blood is not proven in the story, but is mere supposition. And Noel Polk argues that "the reason Thomas Sutpen puts away his Haitian family has nothing to do with Negro blood, but with his belated discovery, after the birth of the baby, of his wife's previous marriage and/or sexual experience." Remember that the only evidence we have that Bon's mother was of mixed blood comes from Sutpen via Shreve and Quentin's imagined story. Earlier on, when Sutpen was relating his own story, he did not specify what his first wife's defect was. This further implicates everyone--including the reader, who will have naturally gone along with Sutpen's "trump card"--in the problem of racism.

Quentin and Shreve turn out the lights and go to bed, although it seems even colder there than it did when they were in the sitting room. They continue talking, mostly clarifying pieces of the story and speculating on the culture of the South. Quentin thinks back to the September night five months ago that he escorted Miss Rosa to Sutpen's Hundred. On their journey there Quentin wished to turn back, especially when Miss Rosa began to whimper, but when they approach within half a mile of the house and Miss Rosa stops the buggy and hands Quentin a hatchet, he realizes that whatever they are going to meet is not a game. They walk up to the rotting house and Miss Rosa, whom Quentin realizes is "not afraid at all. It's something. But she's not afraid," urges Quentin to break down the door. Instead he slips in through a window and fumbles at the door to let Miss Rosa in. As he is doing this, a match lights up behind him and Clytie appears. She opens the door for Miss Rosa, "as if she had known all the time that this hour must come," and asks Quentin to stop Miss Rosa from going upstairs.

Quentin refuses, and Miss Rosa heads for the stairs. Clytie tries to stop her, and Rosa pushes her away. Clytie tries again, and Miss Rosa hits Clytie with a closed fist, knocking her to the floor, and goes upstairs. As Quentin is helping Clytie to her feet, the "scion, the heir"--the hulking, slack-mouthed Jim Bond appears. Rosa comes back downstairs--her eyes are "wide and useeing like a sleepwalker's"--and Jim Bond escorts her back to the carriage. Quentin makes as if to follow, then decides that he, too, must see whatever is upstairs, even if "I shall be sorry tomorrow." He goes upstairs and finds, in a "bare stale room," the wasted form of Henry Sutpen. Quentin asked his name and why he had returned home, to which Henry calmly replied, "To die." He goes back downstairs, helps Miss Rosa back down the path to the carriage (Jim Bond is an inept escort) and then spurs the buggy all the way back to town. After he drops Miss Rosa off at her house, he hurries home, runs indoors, strips off his clothes and, feeling a need to bathe, scrubs himself desperately with his shirt while the scene with Henry plays over in his mind.

Three months later, Rosa returned to Sutpen's Hundred with an ambulance for Henry. Shreve asks why it took her so long to return, but then answers his own question by imagining that hatred, like drugs or alcohol, is difficult to let go of after one has depended on them so long. But she did at last return to try and save Henry, and as the ambulance was making its way up the muddy and difficult road to the house, Clytie caught sight of it. She thought that they were coming to arrest Henry for the murder of Charles Bon, and so she did what she had been prepared to do for many years: she struck a match to the closet that she had stuffed with rags and doused with kerosene. The dry, rotting house burned before the ambulance could get all the way up the driveway. Rosa tried to run into the house and had to be restrained; Jim Bond began to howl uncontrollably and would not be consoled. Clytie and Henry both died in the fire. Jim Bond remained, but disappeared--the only way people knew that he existed was from the occasional sound of his unearthly howl.

Shreve does some calculations ("It took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom...") and is annoyed because the still-living Jim Bond spoils a perfectly clean slate. He claims that it takes two black Sutpens to "get rid" of one white Sutpen, and prophesizes that the "Jim Bonds" of the world will conquer the Western Hemisphere. He imagines a day where they will overrun everyone, and everyone will have black blood in them. Then, settling down for bed, Shreve asks Quentin one last question: "Why do you hate the South?" Quentin replies, with a fervor that surprises him, that he does not hate the South. He continues thinking this to himself feverishly in "the New England dark": "I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"

Analysis

The final framework of the novel comes together in the last chapter. Quentin, it turns out, has his own Sutpen story to round out the legend of many decades ago, and his story is just as grand and bizarrely tragic as the whole Sutpen legend itself. It is also in this chapter where the reader gains a full understanding of Quentin's character, too--and how Quentin's ghostly obsessions and self-hatred (reflected in his disgust for the South, for the South made him) have, finally, shaped the story we have learned and our vision of the novel.

What is that vision? First, it is the haunted vision of the Sutpen "house" and all it represents. Pamela Knights writes that: "For Faulkner, as many critics have remarked, the "Dark House" was the working title for both Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, and in his texts, the plantation house with its shadows and ghosts, holds deep internal contractions that the narratives can never either resolve or contain: the topic of the blocked threshold and the sudden destruction of the house in flames repeatedly frustrate the reader from seeing into its depths and produce the endless retellings, which can never arrive at single meanings." Sutpen's house, "haunted" with the sins of the South (slavery, the repudiation of the "sons" who are not white), comes to represent the tragic downfall of the entire region. It is no accident that Sutpen's home is eventually destroyed by a black person who has been systematically denied agency throughout this novel.

If the vision and the themes of the novel can be encapsulated into Sutpen's house, then the emotional center of this novel is Quentin Compson. Quentin has been a fairly colorless character until this point, existing mostly to serve as a listener, but in the last chapter he comes into his own as a character who has thoroughly influenced our knowledge of the Sutpen legend. The true heir of the Sutpen legacy is not Jim Bond but Quentin Compson, who has to live with the sins of the South whether he likes it or not. Michael Millgate has described Quentin in this book as a "fatally divided and ghost-dominated personality" unable to reinvent the Sutpen legend for modern times. Locked into the values of the South, Quentin is finally as unable to understand the Sutpen legend objectively as Miss Rosa was. That task falls to Shreve, the Canadian neophyte. Aware that he is trapped within the corridors of his own value system, flawed though it may be, and unwilling or unable to either reject or accept the history that he has grown up with, Quentin is literally struck immobile--left, at the close of the novel, trembling in his bed and attempting desperately to convince himself of something that he is not.

The vision that Shreve leaves us with, however, is strange and disturbing. His idea that black people will take over the world, mixing with others until everyone is black, smacks of the perverted paranoid thinking that abounded among members of the Ku Klux Klan around the same time period. Shreve's strange conclusion can be interpreted in a number of different ways: to Shreve's own latent racism (Faulkner perhaps insisting that Northerners have racial sins to tackle just as their Southern brothers do) or to the idea that everyone must acknowledge the fact of their own mixed blood or that tragedy will befall us all.

• Biography of William Faulkner
• About Absalom, Absalom
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 2
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 3
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 4
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 5
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 6
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 7
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 8
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 9
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