Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom

Absalom, Absalom
Biography of William Faulkner (1897-1962)
William Faulkner was a prolific writer who became very famous during his lifetime, but who shied away from the
spotlight as much as possible. He is remembered as both a gentlemanly Southern eccentric and an arrogant, snobbish
alcoholic. But perhaps the best way to describe Faulkner is to describe his heritage, for, like so many of his literary
characters, Faulkner was profoundly affected by his family.
Faulkner's great grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (Faulkner added the "u" to his name), was born in 1825, and
moved to Mississippi at the age of fourteen. He was a lawyer, writer, politician, soldier, and pioneer who was involved
in several murder trials - including two in which he was accused - and was a best-selling novelist. During the Civil War
he recruited a Confederate regiment and was elected its colonel, but his arrogance caused his troops to demote him, so
he left to recruit another regiment. After the war he became involved in the railroad business and made a great deal of
money. He bought a plantation and began to write books, one of which became a bestseller. He ran for Mississippi state
legislature in 1889, but his opponent shot and killed him before the election.
Faulkner's grandfather was the colonel's oldest son, John Wesley Thompson Falkner. He inherited his father's railroad
fortune and became first an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and then later the president of the First National Bank of Oxford,
Mississippi. Faulkner's father was Murray Falkner, who moved from job to job before becoming the business manager
of the University of Mississippi, where he and his family lived for the rest of his life.
William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, and began to write poetry as a teenager. He was an indifferent
student, and dropped out of high school when he was fifteen. During World War I, he joined the Canadian Royal
Flying Corps - he was too short to join the U.S. Air Force - but never fought; the day he graduated from the Flying
Corps, the Armistice was signed. The only "war injury" he received was the result of getting drunk and partying too
hard on Armistice Day.
After the war, Faulkner came back to Oxford, enrolled as a special student at the University of Mississippi, and began
to write for the school papers and magazines, quickly earning a reputation as an eccentric. His strange routines, swanky
dressing habits, and inability to hold down a job earned him the nickname "Count Nocount." He became postmaster of
the University in 1921, but resigned three years later, after the postal inspector finally noticed how much time Faulkner
spent writing (and ignoring customers). In 1924 his first book of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published, but it was
critically panned and had few buyers.
In early 1925, Faulkner and a friend traveled to New Orleans with the intention of getting Faulkner a berth on a ship to
Europe, where he planned to refine his writing skills. Instead, Faulkner ended up staying in New Orleans for a few
months and writing. There, he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson, whose book Winesburg, Ohio was a pillar of
American Modernism. His friendship with Anderson inspired him to start writing novels, and in a short time he
finished his first novel, Soldier's Pay, which was published in 1926 and was critically accepted - although it, too, sold
few copies. Faulkner eventually did travel to Europe, but he quickly returned to Oxford to write.
Faulkner wrote four more novels between 1926 and 1931: Mosquitoes (1927), Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury
(1929), and As I Lay Dying (1930), but none of them sold well, and he earned little money during this period. Sartoris,
also known as Flags in the Dust, was Faulkner's first book set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The difficulty
Faulkner faced getting Flags in the Dust published led him to give up on the publishing process in general, and he
decided to write only for himself. The result of this was The Sound and the Fury, the first of Faulkner's truly classic
novels. The Sound and the Fury was published to good critical reception, although it still sold very few copies.
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham. He lived with her and her two children from a previous marriage, Malcolm
and Victoria, in Oxford, Mississippi. In 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter, Alabama, who died after just a few days.
His only surviving biological daughter, Jill, was born in 1933. He is known to have had a romantic affair with Meta
Carpenter, secretary of Howard Hawks, the screenwriter for whom Faulkner worked in Hollywood. From 1949-1953,
he had an affair with Joan Williams, who wrote about the relationship in her 1971 novel The Wintering.
Faulkner wrote his next novel, As I Lay Dying, while working the night shift at a powerhouse. With this novel's
publication, Faulkner was finally, if still falteringly, a writer on the literary scene. However, Faulkner still did not have
any financial success until he published Sanctuary in 1931. He wrote Sanctuary to sell well, which it did, but it also
tarnished his reputation in the eyes of some critics, and that affected his success for the rest of the decade. From then
through the 1940s, Faulkner wrote several of his masterpieces, including Light In August, Absalom, Absalom!, The
Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. At the time these books made Faulkner very little money, so he was
forced to work in Hollywood as a screenwriter.
In 1950, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and, in typical Faulkner fashion, he sent his friends into
a frenzy by stating that he would not attend the ceremony (although he eventually did go). This award effectively
turned his career around, bringing him the economic success that had so long eluded him. However, most critics find
the works he wrote after winning the prize largely disappointing, especially compared to his earlier, mythical works.
In the latter part of the 1950s, Faulkner spent some time away from Oxford, including spending a year as a writer-in-
residence at the University of Virginia. He returned to Oxford in June of 1962 and died of a heart attack on the morning
of July 6 of that year.
About Absalom, Absalom
Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936, after Faulkner's three seminal novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I
Lay Dying (1930) and A Light in August (1932). One of the strange things about this chronology is that two of the
narrators of Absalom, Absalom! (Mr. Compson and Quentin Compson) have already met their decline and destruction
in an earlier work about the Compson family, The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner, who was not widely read at the time
but had a small core audience, could have expected his readers to be familiar with Quentin and Mr. Compson. Although
resurrecting Quentin and Mr. Compson for this work has the curious effect of bringing back the dead, it is both
appropriate--given the subject of this novel--and unusual. The two novels have a great deal in common thematically,
and the presence of Mr. and Quentin Compson allow the reader to see the destruction of two Southern families in the
context of the South's destruction.
For the destruction of the South, ultimately, is Faulkner's concern. He was born in 1897, after the Civil War but before
the great project of industrialization had tarnished the memories of Southern residents. At that time the South was
impoverished and fallow, bitter and obsessed with its history. Faulkner was born, indeed, into a region of the country
that was already dead. And he faced this fact with an eye towards fact and observation that far bypassed the skills of
most Southern historians. Many critics, in fact, have quipped that Faulkner is a better historian of the post-Civil War
South than any "real" Southern historians. And Arthur Kinney has said: "The single most indelible fact about William
Faulkner's work is his persistent concentration on observing and recording the culture and country in which he was
born; what is most striking now, as we look back on his legacy from our own, is the enormous courage and cost of that
task. Faulkner's Lafayette County, in northeastern Mississippi, not far from the battle sites of Brice's Cross Roads,
Corinth, and Shiloh, is still marked in its town squares with statues of soldiers of the Confederate Army of the United
States, in full battle dress and, more often than not, facing South towards the homeland they mean to protect with their
lives."
Faulkner's "courage," in facing the torrid history of his homeland is also what attracted the author Toni Morrison to his
work. Although Faulkner has garnered much criticism for his portrayals of black characters, he is also lionized for his
willingness to admit the horrors of racism and slavery. It is Toni Morrison, for example, who claimed that Faulkner was
one of the first people to help her see the possibility of ""that artistic articulation of [the] past that was not available in
history"--and certainly would have not been available in the history books that Faulkner read, as post-Civil War history
as written by Southern historians was notoriously biased. Faulkner's project in Absalom, Absalom! is to correct some of
these biases by showing, through fictional characters, the destructive power of clinging to a terrible past. With his
fascinating project of telling the Sutpen legacy through multiple narrators, Faulkner shows how any history--not just
the history of the South--can be radically different depending on who is telling the story.
Short Summary
Absalom, Absalom! is the story of a legend and the people who tell it over and over again. In September 1909, 20-year-
old Quentin Compson goes to visit Rosa Coldfield, an older woman in his hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi. Miss
Rosa has summoned him to listen to her version of the legend of Thomas Sutpen. That same night, Quentin goes over
the story again with his father, Mr. Compson, who tells the story from a different perspective. Five months later, when
he goes to Harvard, he reinvents the story with his roommate, Shreve.
In 1833, Thomas Sutpen came to Jefferson and built, without any help but his own wild, superhuman will, an enormous
mansion on 100 acres that he swindled from an Indian tribe. With a band of foreign slaves and a French architect, he
raises the house and cultivates a plantation. Within a few years he is one of the richest single planters in the county, and
he marries the daughter of a local merchant (Rosa's older sister) and has a son and daughter, Henry and Judith. The two
children grow up with privilege yet the knowledge that the town resents and despises their father. Henry goes to the
University of Mississippi in 1859, and becomes friends with a worldly older student named Charles Bon. He brings
Bon home for Christmas and holidays, and soon it is assumed that Bon will marry Judith. But Sutpen recognizes Bon as
his own son--the son he abandoned when he discovered that his first wife had black blood. He follows Bon to New
Orleans to be sure of this fact, then tells Henry that they cannot be married because Bon is actually Judith's half-
brother. Henry refuses to believe his father and will not abandon his friend. They quarrel; Henry repudiates his
birthright and leaves. For four years, while the Civil War rages, Henry tries to convince himself that Charles Bon and
Judith can be married even if it means incest. He has almost justified it to himself when Sutpen (a colonel for the
Confederate Army) calls his son to his tent and tells him that Charles Bon must not marry Judith. Not only is he Judith
and Henry's half-brother, but Charles Bon also has black blood.
This information repulses Henry in a way that even incest does not. When Charles Bon insists on marrying Judith
anyway, goading Henry to do something about it, Henry shoots Charles Bon as they walk up to the gates of Sutpen's
Hundred. Then he disappears. Sutpen returns home after the war to a ruined dynasty and a devastated plantation.
Determined to start over again, he first tries to marry Rosa Coldfield, then takes up with Milly, the 15-year-old
granddaughter of a poor white squatter on his property. Increasingly impoverished and alcoholic, Sutpen insults Milly
after she bears his child. Furious, her grandfather kills Sutpen that very day in 1869.
After she tells Quentin her version of the story, Rosa asks him to accompany her to Sutpen's Hundred, where Clytie
(Sutpen's daughter with a slave woman; she is now in her late 60s) still lives. Clytie has been hiding Henry Sutpen
there for four years while he waits to die. Quentin and Rosa discover this when they go to the estate after midnight.
Rosa returns to the house three months later with an ambulance for Henry, and Clytie sets fire to the house, killing
herself and Henry. No one remains of Sutpen's dynasty but Jim Bond, a mentally-impaired man of mixed blood.
Character List
Quentin Compson
Grandson of General Compson, Thomas Sutpen's first (and only) friend in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. He is
20 years old and preparing to attend Harvard in Massachusetts. He has lived all of his life in Jefferson, a member of an
old and socially elite family there, and has grown up with the legend of Thomas Sutpen. He is a troubled young man,
tortured by the horrors of Southern history and unable to be at peace with his own role in that history.
Shreve McCannon
Quentin's roommate at Harvard. A young man from Edmonton, Canada. He is curious about the South and asks
Quentin to explain his home region. Quentin responds with the story of Thomas Sutpen, and Shreve, quick to
understand that storytelling depends on the teller, joins in with his own reinterpretation.
Mr. Compson
Quentin's father. He is one of the first narrators of the Sutpen legend and one of the most objective. He does not have
all the information about Charles Bon, and this leads him to make the wrong conclusions. A wise but ineffectual man
who believes in fate above all else.
Miss Rosa Coldfield
Ellen Sutpen's younger sister; aunt to Henry and Judith Sutpen (although she was born four years after Judith and six
years after Henry). She summons Quentin out to her home in order to tell him her version of the Sutpen legend and
asks him to accompany her to Sutpen's Hundred late at night. She was briefly engaged to Thomas Sutpen after her
sister died, and then left his house when he insulted her. Since then, she has been a spinster, burning up with bitterness
over the events that took place regarding Thomas Sutpen decades ago.
Thomas Sutpen
A mysterious figure who towers over the book. Although we never come to know him fully, he is a man of indomitable
will and frightful immorality. He materialized in Jefferson out of thin air in 1833 and proceeded to swindle Indians out
of 100 acres and use a team of 20 slaves to raise an enormous estate, then marry Ellen Coldfield and begin his
"dynasty." Born of impoverished Scots-Irish stock in the West Virginia mountains, his life was consumed by a "design"
that he decided upon at the age of fourteen.
Clytie Sutpen
Thomas Sutpen's half-black daughter. A dominant, though silent, presence throughout the book. She was born of one of
Sutpen's slaves and lived in the house, serving the Sutpens until the Civil War. After the war, she and Judith and Rosa
scrapped to get food, and she lived on the property until December 1909, when she burned it down.
Ellen Sutpen
Born Ellen Coldfield. Rosa's older sister; mother of Henry and Judith. Thomas Sutpen's second wife in Jefferson,
Mississippi. She is a rather foolish woman, eager only that herself and her children live in comfort. She is done in by
the tragedy that consumed the household during the Civil War, and dies at a young age.
Judith Sutpen
Daughter of Ellen and Thomas Sutpen. She was engaged to Charles Bon although she barely knew him, and was
determined to marry him at all costs. Possessed of her father's will and ability to act quickly, she was also possessed of
his taste for blood and violence. Though she frightened many people--Miss Rosa included--her last act was a gentle
one, nursing Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon while they both suffered from yellow fever.
Henry Sutpen
Son of Ellen and Thomas Sutpen. Raised on Sutpen's Hundred, begins attending the University of Mississippi in 1859.
A romantic, indecisive young man lacking his father's will and his father's taste for blood. (But he does have his father's
sense of purpose and follow-through.) In love with both his sister and his friend Charles Bon, whom he meets at the
University of Mississippi, so much so that he widows the latter before she is married by murdering the former.
Charles Bon
Son of Thomas Sutpen and Eulalia Bon. His mother, Eulalia, was abandoned by Thomas Sutpen for unknown reasons
in 1831, although Quentin belives that it was because Sutpen learned Eulalia had black blood. A worldly and
sophisticated young man who grew up in Haiti and New Orleans, he attended the University of Mississippi beginning
in 1859 and was engaged to Judith Sutpen throughout the Civil War.
Goodhue Coldfield
Father of Ellen Sutpen and Rosa Coldfield. A small-town merchant with strange, but unshakeable morals. When the
Civil War began he nailed himself into the attic and died there.
Wash Jones
A poor white squatter on Sutpen's Hundred. He lives on an abandoned fishing camp with his young granddaughter,
Milly Jones, occasionally doing odd jobs for Thomas Sutpen and, after the Civil War, drinking with Sutpen as well. He
kills Sutpen after Sutpen insults his granddaughter.
Milly Jones
Wash Jones' granddaughter. Only one year old when she begins to live on Sutpen's Hundred, she begins sleeping with
Thomas Sutpen at the age of fifteen and bears his child. She dies the same day that Thomas Sutpen does, and by the
hand of the same man--her grandfather, Wash Jones.
Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon
Son of Charles Bon and his octoroon mistress in New Orleans. Orphaned at the age of 12 and fetched, by Clytie, to live
at Sutpen's Hundred. He grows up a disturbed and tortured young man, unable to reconcile himself to the fact of his
black blood, and finally dies of yellow fever in 1884.
Jim Bond
Son of Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon and his black wife. Described as a "hulking" idiot, he lives on Sutpen's
Hundred with Clytie until the fire in 1909, at which point he disappears. From then on, his "howl" is heard occasionally
by residents of Jefferson.
Major Themes
Race
This comes to be the central theme of the "house" of Sutpen and the "house" of the South. According to the final and
most complete Sutpen legend, Henry Sutpen killed Charles Bon and brought down his father's dynasty to prevent him
from marrying Judith--not because Charles was their half-brother, but because Charles had a bit of black blood. This
revelation makes it clear how the values of the South have affected not only Henry Sutpen, but also the narrator of the
story, Quentin Compson. Faulkner leaves room for some ambiguity as to whether or not Charles Bon actually had black
blood, thereby making it clear that the even the suggestion of black blood is enough to put someone in the South
beyond the pale in a horribly destructive way. Race is a central theme in many Faulkner works, including his famed A
Light in August. Faulkner recognizes that race is the central problem for the South in the post-Civil War period, and
that without a healthy discussion of this topic, the South will never move forward.
Memory
This theme is weaved into the very structure of the book. Each character tells the Sutpen legend from his or her own
memory; each character exercises selective memory. Both Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson omit important details from
their stories and the implication is that Quentin does as well. Memory plays an important role in the plotline of the book
as well: Thomas Sutpen's memories of Charles Bon stir him to follow the young man back to New Orleans and make
crucial discoveries, Miss Rosa has lived her whole life obsessed by memories, and Quentin is attempting to escape his
own memories by fleeing to the North, and Harvard.
History
The history of the South, and especially of the Civil War, forms a compelling backdrop to the book. It is intriguing,
however, that Faulkner does not make a huge effort to ground the novel in the hard-and-fast dates, locations, and events
that many great historical novels do. Instead, Faulkner's goal is to present an emotional history of the South that
matches the strength and power of the factual history.
“The South"
Quentin is asked, over and over again by Northerners at Harvard, about the South. "What's it like there." When his
roommate Shreve asks him to talk about the South, Quentin responds by telling him the story of the Sutpen legend as
he knows it. And in telling this story, Quentin exhibits all the ambivalence, love, and hatred towards the region that
most Southerners have. It is also important that Quentin tells the story of Sutpen, unknowingly, as a metaphor for the
South and its post-Civil War history and memory.
Narration
The structure of this book is a series of different, intertwining narratives. Each narrator brings his or her own set of
preoccupations, misinformed knowledge, and interests to the narrative. As a result, there are three different stories to
piece together. Crucial to this theme is the role of the reader him or herself--Faulkner expects you to participate in
restructuring the Sutpen legend and, through this action, understand how biased each narrative, each memory, each
history, is to each individual.
"Design"
Sutpen's "design" rules his life and causes his downfall. The futility of directing one's life towards an idea or a "design"
without emotional concern for other human beings is well-illustrated through the figure of Sutpen, who is unable to
engage the people that surround him as people, rather than as objects. Sutpen's failure to achieve his design strictly
based on his will is proof that the only designs that succeed in life are those that account for people as humans rather
than as objects.
Haunted House
The original title for this book was Dark House, symbolizing both the work's Gothic roots and its depiction of the "dark
house" of the South. Sutpen's haunted house on Sutpen's Hundred is a metaphor for the South and all of the sins that it
is responsible for, including slavery and the repudiation of the black "sons" of the South. Just as Sutpen's haunted house
fell because it failed to reconcile the black sons with the white, the South, too, fell for the same reason.
Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1
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.
The Biblical Story in Absalom, Absalom!
In writing Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner was inspired by many things--but one of his big inspirations was the
biblical story of King David and his son Absalom in the second book of Samuel.
Reading the story of David and Absalom will help the reader to understand some of Faulkner's plotting decisions and
the title of the book.
Chapter Eleven
* 11:1 And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab,
and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David
tarried still at Jerusalem.
* 11:2 And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's
house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
* 11:3 And David sent and inquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the
wife of Uriah the Hittite?
* 11:4 And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified
from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house.
* 11:5 And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am with child.
* 11:6 And David sent to Joab, saying, Send me Uriah the Hittite. And Joab sent Uriah to David.
* 11:7 And when Uriah was come unto him, David demanded of him how Joab did, and how the people did, and how
the war prospered.
* 11:8 And David said to Uriah, Go down to thy house, and wash thy feet. And Uriah departed out of the king's house,
and there followed him a mess of meat from the king.
* 11:9 But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his lord, and went not down to his house.
* 11:10 And when they had told David, saying, Uriah went not down unto his house, David said unto Uriah, Camest
thou not from thy journey? why then didst thou not go down unto thine house?
* 11:11 And Uriah said unto David, The ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in tents; and my lord Joab, and the servants of
my lord, are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife?
as thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing.
* 11:12 And David said to Uriah, Tarry here to day also, and to morrow I will let thee depart. So Uriah abode in
Jerusalem that day, and the morrow.
* 11:13 And when David had called him, he did eat and drink before him; and he made him drunk: and at even he went
out to lie on his bed with the servants of his lord, but went not down to his house.
* 11:14 And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah.
* 11:15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that
he may be smitten, and die.
* 11:16 And it came to pass, when Joab observed the city, that he assigned Uriah unto a place where he knew that
valiant men were.
* 11:17 And the men of the city went out, and fought with Joab: and there fell some of the people of the servants of
David; and Uriah the Hittite died also.
* 11:18 Then Joab sent and told David all the things concerning the war;
* 11:19 And charged the messenger, saying, When thou hast made an end of telling the matters of the war unto the
king,
* 11:20 And if so be that the king's wrath arise, and he say unto thee, Wherefore approached ye so nigh unto the city
when ye did fight? knew ye not that they would shoot from the wall?
* 11:21 Who smote Abimelech the son of Jerubbesheth? did not a woman cast a piece of a millstone upon him from the
wall, that he died in Thebez? why went ye nigh the wall? then say thou, Thy servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.
* 11:22 So the messenger went, and came and showed David all that Joab had sent him for.
* 11:23 And the messenger said unto David, Surely the men prevailed against us, and came out unto us into the field,
and we were upon them even unto the entering of the gate.
* 11:24 And the shooters shot from off the wall upon thy servants; and some of the king's servants be dead, and thy
servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.
* 11:25 Then David said unto the messenger, Thus shalt thou say unto Joab, Let not this thing displease thee, for the
sword devoureth one as well as another: make thy battle more strong against the city, and overthrow it: and encourage
thou him.
* 11:26 And when the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband.
* 11:27 And when the mourning was past, David sent and fetched her to his house, and she became his wife, and bare
him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.
Chapter Twelve
* 12:1 And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one
city; the one rich, and the other poor.
* 12:2 The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds:
* 12:3 But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up
together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom,
and was unto him as a daughter.
* 12:4 And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to
dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was
come to him.
* 12:5 And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the LORD liveth, the man
that hath done this thing shall surely die:
* 12:6 And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.
* 12:7 And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I anointed thee king over
Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul;
* 12:8 And I gave thee thy master's house, and thy master's wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and
of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things.
* 12:9 Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the LORD, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the
Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of
Ammon.
* 12:10 Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou hast despised me, and hast taken
the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife.
* 12:11 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives
before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.
* 12:12 For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.
* 12:13 And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD also
hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.
* 12:14 Howbeit, because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the
child also that is born unto thee shall surely die.
* 12:15 And Nathan departed unto his house. And the LORD struck the child that Uriah's wife bare unto David, and it
was very sick.
* 12:16 David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth.
* 12:17 And the elders of his house arose, and went to him, to raise him up from the earth: but he would not, neither did
he eat bread with them.
* 12:18 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died. And the servants of David feared to tell him that the
child was dead: for they said, Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spake unto him, and he would not hearken unto
our voice: how will he then vex himself, if we tell him that the child is dead?
* 12:19 But when David saw that his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead: therefore David said
unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they said, He is dead.
* 12:20 Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into
the house of the LORD, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before
him, and he did eat.
* 12:21 Then said his servants unto him, What thing is this that thou hast done? thou didst fast and weep for the child,
while it was alive; but when the child was dead, thou didst rise and eat bread.
* 12:22 And he said, While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether GOD will be
gracious to me, that the child may live?
* 12:23 But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not
return to me.
* 12:24 And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her: and she bare a son, and he
called his name Solomon: and the LORD loved him.
* 12:25 And he sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet; and he called his name Jedidiah, because of the LORD.
* 12:26 And Joab fought against Rabbah of the children of Ammon, and took the royal city.
* 12:27 And Joab sent messengers to David, and said, I have fought against Rabbah, and have taken the city of waters.
* 12:28 Now therefore gather the rest of the people together, and encamp against the city, and take it: lest I take the
city, and it be called after my name.
* 12:29 And David gathered all the people together, and went to Rabbah, and fought against it, and took it.
* 12:30 And he took their king's crown from off his head, the weight whereof was a talent of gold with the precious
stones: and it was set on David's head. And he brought forth the spoil of the city in great abundance.
* 12:31 And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and
under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brickkiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of
Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem.
Chapter Thirteen
* 13:1 And it came to pass after this, that Absalom the son of David had a fair sister, whose name was Tamar; and
Amnon the son of David loved her.
* 13:2 And Amnon was so vexed, that he fell sick for his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin; and Amnon thought it hard
for him to do any thing to her.
* 13:3 But Amnon had a friend, whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimeah David's brother: and Jonadab was a very
subtle man.
* 13:4 And he said unto him, Why art thou, being the king's son, lean from day to day? wilt thou not tell me? And
Amnon said unto him, I love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister.
* 13:5 And Jonadab said unto him, Lay thee down on thy bed, and make thyself sick: and when thy father cometh to
see thee, say unto him, I pray thee, let my sister Tamar come, and give me meat, and dress the meat in my sight, that I
may see it, and eat it at her hand.
* 13:6 So Amnon lay down, and made himself sick: and when the king was come to see him, Amnon said unto the
king, I pray thee, let Tamar my sister come, and make me a couple of cakes in my sight, that I may eat at her hand.
* 13:7 Then David sent home to Tamar, saying, Go now to thy brother Amnon's house, and dress him meat.
* 13:8 So Tamar went to her brother Amnon's house; and he was laid down. And she took flour, and kneaded it, and
made cakes in his sight, and did bake the cakes.
* 13:9 And she took a pan, and poured them out before him; but he refused to eat. And Amnon said, Have out all men
from me. And they went out every man from him.
* 13:10 And Amnon said unto Tamar, Bring the meat into the chamber, that I may eat of thine hand. And Tamar took
the cakes which she had made, and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother.
* 13:11 And when she had brought them unto him to eat, he took hold of her, and said unto her, Come lie with me, my
sister.
* 13:12 And she answered him, Nay, my brother, do not force me; for no such thing ought to be done in Israel: do not
thou this folly.
* 13:13 And I, whither shall I cause my shame to go? and as for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now
therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.
* 13:14 Howbeit he would not hearken unto her voice: but, being stronger than she, forced her, and lay with her.
* 13:15 Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love
wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, Arise, be gone.
* 13:16 And she said unto him, There is no cause: this evil in sending me away is greater than the other that thou didst
unto me. But he would not hearken unto her.
* 13:17 Then he called his servant that ministered unto him, and said, Put now this woman out from me, and bolt the
door after her.
* 13:18 And she had a garment of divers colours upon her: for with such robes were the king's daughters that were
virgins apparelled. Then his servant brought her out, and bolted the door after her.
* 13:19 And Tamar put ashes on her head, and rent her garment of divers colours that was on her, and laid her hand on
her head, and went on crying.
* 13:20 And Absalom her brother said unto her, Hath Amnon thy brother been with thee? but hold now thy peace, my
sister: he is thy brother; regard not this thing. So Tamar remained desolate in her brother Absalom's house.
* 13:21 But when king David heard of all these things, he was very wroth.
* 13:22 And Absalom spake unto his brother Amnon neither good nor bad: for Absalom hated Amnon, because he had
forced his sister Tamar.
* 13:23 And it came to pass after two full years, that Absalom had sheepshearers in Baalhazor, which is beside
Ephraim: and Absalom invited all the king's sons.
* 13:24 And Absalom came to the king, and said, Behold now, thy servant hath sheepshearers; let the king, I beseech
thee, and his servants go with thy servant.
* 13:25 And the king said to Absalom, Nay, my son, let us not all now go, lest we be chargeable unto thee. And he
pressed him: howbeit he would not go, but blessed him.
* 13:26 Then said Absalom, If not, I pray thee, let my brother Amnon go with us. And the king said unto him, Why
should he go with thee?
* 13:27 But Absalom pressed him, that he let Amnon and all the king's sons go with him.
* 13:28 Now Absalom had commanded his servants, saying, Mark ye now when Amnon's heart is merry with wine,
and when I say unto you, Smite Amnon; then kill him, fear not: have not I commanded you? be courageous, and be
valiant.
* 13:29 And the servants of Absalom did unto Amnon as Absalom had commanded. Then all the king's sons arose, and
every man gat him up upon his mule, and fled.
* 13:30 And it came to pass, while they were in the way, that tidings came to David, saying, Absalom hath slain all the
king's sons, and there is not one of them left.
* 13:31 Then the king arose, and tare his garments, and lay on the earth; and all his servants stood by with their clothes
rent.
* 13:32 And Jonadab, the son of Shimeah David's brother, answered and said, Let not my lord suppose that they have
slain all the young men the king's sons; for Amnon only is dead: for by the appointment of Absalom this hath been
determined from the day that he forced his sister Tamar.
* 13:33 Now therefore let not my lord the king take the thing to his heart, to think that all the king's sons are dead: for
Amnon only is dead.
* 13:34 But Absalom fled. And the young man that kept the watch lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, there
came much people by the way of the hill side behind him.
* 13:35 And Jonadab said unto the king, Behold, the king's sons come: as thy servant said, so it is.
* 13:36 And it came to pass, as soon as he had made an end of speaking, that, behold, the king's sons came, and lifted
up their voice and wept: and the king also and all his servants wept very sore.
* 13:37 But Absalom fled, and went to Talmai, the son of Ammihud, king of Geshur. And David mourned for his son
every day.
* 13:38 So Absalom fled, and went to Geshur, and was there three years.
* 13:39 And the soul of king David longed to go forth unto Absalom: for he was comforted concerning Amnon, seeing
he was dead.
Chapter Fourteen
* 14:1 Now Joab the son of Zeruiah perceived that the king's heart was toward Absalom.
* 14:2 And Joab sent to Tekoah, and fetched thence a wise woman, and said unto her, I pray thee, feign thyself to be a
mourner, and put on now mourning apparel, and anoint not thyself with oil, but be as a woman that had a long time
mourned for the dead:
* 14:3 And come to the king, and speak on this manner unto him. So Joab put the words in her mouth.
* 14:4 And when the woman of Tekoah spake to the king, she fell on her face to the ground, and did obeisance, and
said, Help, O king.
* 14:5 And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, I am indeed a widow woman, and mine
husband is dead.
* 14:6 And thy handmaid had two sons, and they two strove together in the field, and there was none to part them, but
the one smote the other, and slew him.
* 14:7 And, behold, the whole family is risen against thine handmaid, and they said, Deliver him that smote his brother,
that we may kill him, for the life of his brother whom he slew; and we will destroy the heir also: and so they shall
quench my coal which is left, and shall not leave to my husband neither name nor remainder upon the earth.
* 14:8 And the king said unto the woman, Go to thine house, and I will give charge concerning thee.
* 14:9 And the woman of Tekoah said unto the king, My lord, O king, the iniquity be on me, and on my father's house:
and the king and his throne be guiltless.
* 14:10 And the king said, Whosoever saith ought unto thee, bring him to me, and he shall not touch thee any more.
* 14:11 Then said she, I pray thee, let the king remember the LORD thy God, that thou wouldest not suffer the
revengers of blood to destroy any more, lest they destroy my son. And he said, As the LORD liveth, there shall not one
hair of thy son fall to the earth.
* 14:12 Then the woman said, Let thine handmaid, I pray thee, speak one word unto my lord the king. And he said, Say
on.
* 14:13 And the woman said, Wherefore then hast thou thought such a thing against the people of God? for the king
doth speak this thing as one which is faulty, in that the king doth not fetch home again his banished.
* 14:14 For we must needs die, and are as water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth
God respect any person: yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled from him.
* 14:15 Now therefore that I am come to speak of this thing unto my lord the king, it is because the people have made
me afraid: and thy handmaid said, I will now speak unto the king; it may be that the king will perform the request of his
handmaid.
* 14:16 For the king will hear, to deliver his handmaid out of the hand of the man that would destroy me and my son
together out of the inheritance of God.
* 14:17 Then thine handmaid said, The word of my lord the king shall now be comfortable: for as an angel of God, so
is my lord the king to discern good and bad: therefore the LORD thy God will be with thee.
* 14:18 Then the king answered and said unto the woman, Hide not from me, I pray thee, the thing that I shall ask thee.
And the woman said, Let my lord the king now speak.
* 14:19 And the king said, Is not the hand of Joab with thee in all this? And the woman answered and said, As thy soul
liveth, my lord the king, none can turn to the right hand or to the left from ought that my lord the king hath spoken: for
thy servant Joab, he bade me, and he put all these words in the mouth of thine handmaid:
* 14:20 To fetch about this form of speech hath thy servant Joab done this thing: and my lord is wise, according to the
wisdom of an angel of God, to know all things that are in the earth.
* 14:21 And the king said unto Joab, Behold now, I have done this thing: go therefore, bring the young man Absalom
again.
* 14:22 And Joab fell to the ground on his face, and bowed himself, and thanked the king: and Joab said, To day thy
servant knoweth that I have found grace in thy sight, my lord, O king, in that the king hath fulfilled the request of his
servant.
* 14:23 So Joab arose and went to Geshur, and brought Absalom to Jerusalem.
* 14:24 And the king said, Let him turn to his own house, and let him not see my face. So Absalom returned to his own
house, and saw not the king's face.
* 14:25 But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even
to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.
* 14:26 And when he polled his head, (for it was at every year's end that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on
him, therefore he polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king's weight.
* 14:27 And unto Absalom there were born three sons, and one daughter, whose name was Tamar: she was a woman of
a fair countenance.
* 14:28 So Absalom dwelt two full years in Jerusalem, and saw not the king's face.
* 14:29 Therefore Absalom sent for Joab, to have sent him to the king; but he would not come to him: and when he
sent again the second time, he would not come.
* 14:30 Therefore he said unto his servants, See, Joab's field is near mine, and he hath barley there; go and set it on fire.
And Absalom's servants set the field on fire.
* 14:31 Then Joab arose, and came to Absalom unto his house, and said unto him, Wherefore have thy servants set my
field on fire?
* 14:32 And Absalom answered Joab, Behold, I sent unto thee, saying, Come hither, that I may send thee to the king, to
say, Wherefore am I come from Geshur? it had been good for me to have been there still: now therefore let me see the
king's face; and if there be any iniquity in me, let him kill me.
* 14:33 So Joab came to the king, and told him: and when he had called for Absalom, he came to the king, and bowed
himself on his face to the ground before the king: and the king kissed Absalom.
Chapter Fifteen
* 15:1 And it came to pass after this, that Absalom prepared him chariots and horses, and fifty men to run before him.
* 15:2 And Absalom rose up early, and stood beside the way of the gate: and it was so, that when any man that had a
controversy came to the king for judgment, then Absalom called unto him, and said, Of what city art thou? And he said,
Thy servant is of one of the tribes of Israel.
* 15:3 And Absalom said unto him, See, thy matters are good and right; but there is no man deputed of the king to hear
thee.
* 15:4 Absalom said moreover, Oh that I were made judge in the land, that every man which hath any suit or cause
might come unto me, and I would do him justice!
* 15:5 And it was so, that when any man came nigh to him to do him obeisance, he put forth his hand, and took him,
and kissed him.
* 15:6 And on this manner did Absalom to all Israel that came to the king for judgment: so Absalom stole the hearts of
the men of Israel.
* 15:7 And it came to pass after forty years, that Absalom said unto the king, I pray thee, let me go and pay my vow,
which I have vowed unto the LORD, in Hebron.
* 15:8 For thy servant vowed a vow while I abode at Geshur in Syria, saying, If the LORD shall bring me again indeed
to Jerusalem, then I will serve the LORD.
* 15:9 And the king said unto him, Go in peace. So he arose, and went to Hebron.
* 15:10 But Absalom sent spies throughout all the tribes of Israel, saying, As soon as ye hear the sound of the trumpet,
then ye shall say, Absalom reigneth in Hebron.
* 15:11 And with Absalom went two hundred men out of Jerusalem, that were called; and they went in their simplicity,
and they knew not any thing.
* 15:12 And Absalom sent for Ahithophel the Gilonite, David's counsellor, from his city, even from Giloh, while he
offered sacrifices. And the conspiracy was strong; for the people increased continually with Absalom.
* 15:13 And there came a messenger to David, saying, The hearts of the men of Israel are after Absalom.
* 15:14 And David said unto all his servants that were with him at Jerusalem, Arise, and let us flee; for we shall not
else escape from Absalom: make speed to depart, lest he overtake us suddenly, and bring evil upon us, and smite the
city with the edge of the sword.
* 15:15 And the king's servants said unto the king, Behold, thy servants are ready to do whatsoever my lord the king
shall appoint.
* 15:16 And the king went forth, and all his household after him. And the king left ten women, which were concubines,
to keep the house.
* 15:17 And the king went forth, and all the people after him, and tarried in a place that was far off.
* 15:18 And all his servants passed on beside him; and all the Cherethites, and all the Pelethites, and all the Gittites, six
hundred men which came after him from Gath, passed on before the king.
* 15:19 Then said the king to Ittai the Gittite, Wherefore goest thou also with us? return to thy place, and abide with the
king: for thou art a stranger, and also an exile.
* 15:20 Whereas thou camest but yesterday, should I this day make thee go up and down with us? seeing I go whither I
may, return thou, and take back thy brethren: mercy and truth be with thee.
* 15:21 And Ittai answered the king, and said, As the LORD liveth, and as my lord the king liveth, surely in what place
my lord the king shall be, whether in death or life, even there also will thy servant be.
* 15:22 And David said to Ittai, Go and pass over. And Ittai the Gittite passed over, and all his men, and all the little
ones that were with him.
* 15:23 And all the country wept with a loud voice, and all the people passed over: the king also himself passed over
the brook Kidron, and all the people passed over, toward the way of the wilderness.
* 15:24 And lo Zadok also, and all the Levites were with him, bearing the ark of the covenant of God: and they set
down the ark of God; and Abiathar went up, until all the people had done passing out of the city.
* 15:25 And the king said unto Zadok, Carry back the ark of God into the city: if I shall find favour in the eyes of the
LORD, he will bring me again, and show me both it, and his habitation:
* 15:26 But if he thus say, I have no delight in thee; behold, here am I, let him do to me as seemeth good unto him.
* 15:27 The king said also unto Zadok the priest, Art not thou a seer? return into the city in peace, and your two sons
with you, Ahimaaz thy son, and Jonathan the son of Abiathar.
* 15:28 See, I will tarry in the plain of the wilderness, until there come word from you to certify me.
* 15:29 Zadok therefore and Abiathar carried the ark of God again to Jerusalem: and they tarried there.
* 15:30 And David went up by the ascent of mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had his head covered, and he
went barefoot: and all the people that was with him covered every man his head, and they went up, weeping as they
went up.
* 15:31 And one told David, saying, Ahithophel is among the conspirators with Absalom. And David said, O LORD, I
pray thee, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness.
* 15:32 And it came to pass, that when David was come to the top of the mount, where he worshipped God, behold,
Hushai the Archite came to meet him with his coat rent, and earth upon his head:
* 15:33 Unto whom David said, If thou passest on with me, then thou shalt be a burden unto me:
* 15:34 But if thou return to the city, and say unto Absalom, I will be thy servant, O king; as I have been thy father's
servant hitherto, so will I now also be thy servant: then mayest thou for me defeat the counsel of Ahithophel.
* 15:35 And hast thou not there with thee Zadok and Abiathar the priests? therefore it shall be, that what thing soever
thou shalt hear out of the king's house, thou shalt tell it to Zadok and Abiathar the priests.
* 15:36 Behold, they have there with them their two sons, Ahimaaz Zadok's son, and Jonathan Abiathar's son; and by
them ye shall send unto me every thing that ye can hear.
* 15:37 So Hushai David's friend came into the city, and Absalom came into Jerusalem.
Chapter Sixteen
* 16:1 And when David was a little past the top of the hill, behold, Ziba the servant of Mephibosheth met him, with a
couple of asses saddled, and upon them two hundred loaves of bread, and an hundred bunches of raisins, and an
hundred of summer fruits, and a bottle of wine.
* 16:2 And the king said unto Ziba, What meanest thou by these? And Ziba said, The asses be for the king's household
to ride on; and the bread and summer fruit for the young men to eat; and the wine, that such as be faint in the
wilderness may drink.
* 16:3 And the king said, And where is thy master's son? And Ziba said unto the king, Behold, he abideth at Jerusalem:
for he said, To day shall the house of Israel restore me the kingdom of my father.
* 16:4 Then said the king to Ziba, Behold, thine are all that pertained unto Mephibosheth. And Ziba said, I humbly
beseech thee that I may find grace in thy sight, my lord, O king.
* 16:5 And when king David came to Bahurim, behold, thence came out a man of the family of the house of Saul,
whose name was Shimei, the son of Gera: he came forth, and cursed still as he came.
* 16:6 And he cast stones at David, and at all the servants of king David: and all the people and all the mighty men
were on his right hand and on his left.
* 16:7 And thus said Shimei when he cursed, Come out, come out, thou bloody man, and thou man of Belial:
* 16:8 The LORD hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead thou hast reigned; and the
LORD hath delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom thy son: and, behold, thou art taken in thy mischief,
because thou art a bloody man.
* 16:9 Then said Abishai the son of Zeruiah unto the king, Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? let me go
over, I pray thee, and take off his head.
* 16:10 And the king said, What have I to do with you, ye sons of Zeruiah? so let him curse, because the LORD hath
said unto him, Curse David. Who shall then say, Wherefore hast thou done so?
* 16:11 And David said to Abishai, and to all his servants, Behold, my son, which came forth of my bowels, seeketh
my life: how much more now may this Benjamite do it? let him alone, and let him curse; for the LORD hath bidden
him.
* 16:12 It may be that the LORD will look on mine affliction, and that the LORD will requite me good for his cursing
this day.
* 16:13 And as David and his men went by the way, Shimei went along on the hill's side over against him, and cursed
as he went, and threw stones at him, and cast dust.
* 16:14 And the king, and all the people that were with him, came weary, and refreshed themselves there.
* 16:15 And Absalom, and all the people the men of Israel, came to Jerusalem, and Ahithophel with him.
* 16:16 And it came to pass, when Hushai the Archite, David's friend, was come unto Absalom, that Hushai said unto
Absalom, God save the king, God save the king.
* 16:17 And Absalom said to Hushai, Is this thy kindness to thy friend? why wentest thou not with thy friend?
* 16:18 And Hushai said unto Absalom, Nay; but whom the LORD, and this people, and all the men of Israel, choose,
his will I be, and with him will I abide.
* 16:19 And again, whom should I serve? should I not serve in the presence of his son? as I have served in thy father's
presence, so will I be in thy presence.
* 16:20 Then said Absalom to Ahithophel, Give counsel among you what we shall do.
* 16:21 And Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Go in unto thy father's concubines, which he hath left to keep the house;
and all Israel shall hear that thou art abhorred of thy father: then shall the hands of all that are with thee be strong.
* 16:22 So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and Absalom went in unto his father's concubines in
the sight of all Israel.
* 16:23 And the counsel of Ahithophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had inquired at the oracle of
God: so was all the counsel of Ahithophel both with David and with Absalom.
Chapter Seventeen
* 17:1 Moreover Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Let me now choose out twelve thousand men, and I will arise and
pursue after David this night:
* 17:2 And I will come upon him while he is weary and weak handed, and will make him afraid: and all the people that
are with him shall flee; and I will smite the king only:
* 17:3 And I will bring back all the people unto thee: the man whom thou seekest is as if all returned: so all the people
shall be in peace.
* 17:4 And the saying pleased Absalom well, and all the elders of Israel.
* 17:5 Then said Absalom, Call now Hushai the Archite also, and let us hear likewise what he saith.
* 17:6 And when Hushai was come to Absalom, Absalom spake unto him, saying, Ahithophel hath spoken after this
manner: shall we do after his saying? if not; speak thou.
* 17:7 And Hushai said unto Absalom, The counsel that Ahithophel hath given is not good at this time.
* 17:8 For, said Hushai, thou knowest thy father and his men, that they be mighty men, and they be chafed in their
minds, as a bear robbed of her whelps in the field: and thy father is a man of war, and will not lodge with the people.
* 17:9 Behold, he is hid now in some pit, or in some other place: and it will come to pass, when some of them be
overthrown at the first, that whosoever heareth it will say, There is a slaughter among the people that follow Absalom.
* 17:10 And he also that is valiant, whose heart is as the heart of a lion, shall utterly melt: for all Israel knoweth that thy
father is a mighty man, and they which be with him are valiant men.
* 17:11 Therefore I counsel that all Israel be generally gathered unto thee, from Dan even to Beersheba, as the sand that
is by the sea for multitude; and that thou go to battle in thine own person.
* 17:12 So shall we come upon him in some place where he shall be found, and we will light upon him as the dew
falleth on the ground: and of him and of all the men that are with him there shall not be left so much as one.
* 17:13 Moreover, if he be gotten into a city, then shall all Israel bring ropes to that city, and we will draw it into the
river, until there be not one small stone found there.
* 17:14 And Absalom and all the men of Israel said, The counsel of Hushai the Archite is better than the counsel of
Ahithophel. For the LORD had appointed to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, to the intent that the LORD might
bring evil upon Absalom.
* 17:15 Then said Hushai unto Zadok and to Abiathar the priests, Thus and thus did Ahithophel counsel Absalom and
the elders of Israel; and thus and thus have I counselled.
* 17:16 Now therefore send quickly, and tell David, saying, Lodge not this night in the plains of the wilderness, but
speedily pass over; lest the king be swallowed up, and all the people that are with him.
* 17:17 Now Jonathan and Ahimaaz stayed by Enrogel; for they might not be seen to come into the city: and a wench
went and told them; and they went and told king David.
* 17:18 Nevertheless a lad saw them, and told Absalom: but they went both of them away quickly, and came to a man's
house in Bahurim, which had a well in his court; whither they went down.
* 17:19 And the woman took and spread a covering over the well's mouth, and spread ground corn thereon; and the
thing was not known.
* 17:20 And when Absalom's servants came to the woman to the house, they said, Where is Ahimaaz and Jonathan?
And the woman said unto them, They be gone over the brook of water. And when they had sought and could not find
them, they returned to Jerusalem.
* 17:21 And it came to pass, after they were departed, that they came up out of the well, and went and told king David,
and said unto David, Arise, and pass quickly over the water: for thus hath Ahithophel counselled against you.
* 17:22 Then David arose, and all the people that were with him, and they passed over Jordan: by the morning light
there lacked not one of them that was not gone over Jordan.
* 17:23 And when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home
to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried in the sepulchre
of his father.
* 17:24 Then David came to Mahanaim. And Absalom passed over Jordan, he and all the men of Israel with him.
* 17:25 And Absalom made Amasa captain of the host instead of Joab: which Amasa was a man's son, whose name
was Ithra an Israelite, that went in to Abigail the daughter of Nahash, sister to Zeruiah Joab's mother.
* 17:26 So Israel and Absalom pitched in the land of Gilead.
* 17:27 And it came to pass, when David was come to Mahanaim, that Shobi the son of Nahash of Rabbah of the
children of Ammon, and Machir the son of Ammiel of Lodebar, and Barzillai the Gileadite of Rogelim,
* 17:28 Brought beds, and basins, and earthen vessels, and wheat, and barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans,
and lentiles, and parched pulse,
* 17:29 And honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of kine, for David, and for the people that were with him, to eat:
for they said, The people is hungry, and weary, and thirsty, in the wilderness.
Chapter Eighteen
* 18:1 And David numbered the people that were with him, and set captains of thousands and captains of hundreds
over them.
* 18:2 And David sent forth a third part of the people under the hand of Joab, and a third part under the hand of Abishai
the son of Zeruiah, Joab's brother, and a third part under the hand of Ittai the Gittite. And the king said unto the people,
I will surely go forth with you myself also.
* 18:3 But the people answered, Thou shalt not go forth: for if we flee away, they will not care for us; neither if half of
us die, will they care for us: but now thou art worth ten thousand of us: therefore now it is better that thou succour us
out of the city.
* 18:4 And the king said unto them, What seemeth you best I will do. And the king stood by the gate side, and all the
people came out by hundreds and by thousands.
* 18:5 And the king commanded Joab and Abishai and Ittai, saying, Deal gently for my sake with the young man, even
with Absalom. And all the people heard when the king gave all the captains charge concerning Absalom.
* 18:6 So the people went out into the field against Israel: and the battle was in the wood of Ephraim;
* 18:7 Where the people of Israel were slain before the servants of David, and there was there a great slaughter that day
of twenty thousand men.
* 18:8 For the battle was there scattered over the face of all the country: and the wood devoured more people that day
than the sword devoured.
* 18:9 And Absalom met the servants of David. And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the thick
boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and
the mule that was under him went away.
* 18:10 And a certain man saw it, and told Joab, and said, Behold, I saw Absalom hanged in an oak.
* 18:11 And Joab said unto the man that told him, And, behold, thou sawest him, and why didst thou not smite him
there to the ground? And I would have given thee ten shekels of silver, and a girdle.
* 18:12 And the man said unto Joab, Though I should receive a thousand shekels of silver in mine hand, yet would I
not put forth mine hand against the king's son: for in our hearing the king charged thee and Abishai and Ittai, saying,
Beware that none touch the young man Absalom.
* 18:13 Otherwise I should have wrought falsehood against mine own life: for there is no matter hid from the king, and
thou thyself wouldest have set thyself against me.
* 18:14 Then said Joab, I may not tarry thus with thee. And he took three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the
heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak.
* 18:15 And ten young men that bare Joab's armour compassed about and smote Absalom, and slew him.
* 18:16 And Joab blew the trumpet, and the people returned from pursuing after Israel: for Joab held back the people.
* 18:17 And they took Absalom, and cast him into a great pit in the wood, and laid a very great heap of stones upon
him: and all Israel fled every one to his tent.
* 18:18 Now Absalom in his lifetime had taken and reared up for himself a pillar, which is in the king's dale: for he
said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance: and he called the pillar after his own name: and it is called unto
this day, Absalom's place.
* 18:19 Then said Ahimaaz the son of Zadok, Let me now run, and bear the king tidings, how that the LORD hath
avenged him of his enemies.
* 18:20 And Joab said unto him, Thou shalt not bear tidings this day, but thou shalt bear tidings another day: but this
day thou shalt bear no tidings, because the king's son is dead.
* 18:21 Then said Joab to Cushi, Go tell the king what thou hast seen. And Cushi bowed himself unto Joab, and ran.
* 18:22 Then said Ahimaaz the son of Zadok yet again to Joab, But howsoever, let me, I pray thee, also run after Cushi.
And Joab said, Wherefore wilt thou run, my son, seeing that thou hast no tidings ready?
* 18:23 But howsoever, said he, let me run. And he said unto him, Run. Then Ahimaaz ran by the way of the plain, and
overran Cushi.
* 18:24 And David sat between the two gates: and the watchman went up to the roof over the gate unto the wall, and
lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold a man running alone.
* 18:25 And the watchman cried, and told the king. And the king said, If he be alone, there is tidings in his mouth. And
he came apace, and drew near.
* 18:26 And the watchman saw another man running: and the watchman called unto the porter, and said, Behold
another man running alone. And the king said, He also bringeth tidings.
* 18:27 And the watchman said, Me thinketh the running of the foremost is like the running of Ahimaaz the son of
Zadok. And the king said, He is a good man, and cometh with good tidings.
* 18:28 And Ahimaaz called, and said unto the king, All is well. And he fell down to the earth upon his face before the
king, and said, Blessed be the LORD thy God, which hath delivered up the men that lifted up their hand against my
lord the king.
* 18:29 And the king said, Is the young man Absalom safe? And Ahimaaz answered, When Joab sent the king's
servant, and me thy servant, I saw a great tumult, but I knew not what it was.
* 18:30 And the king said unto him, Turn aside, and stand here. And he turned aside, and stood still.
* 18:31 And, behold, Cushi came; and Cushi said, Tidings, my lord the king: for the LORD hath avenged thee this day
of all them that rose up against thee.
* 18:32 And the king said unto Cushi, Is the young man Absalom safe? And Cushi answered, The enemies of my lord
the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is.
* 18:33 And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he
said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!
Chapter Nineteen
* 19:1 And it was told Joab, Behold, the king weepeth and mourneth for Absalom.
* 19:2 And the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people: for the people heard say that day how the
king was grieved for his son.
* 19:3 And the people gat them by stealth that day into the city, as people being ashamed steal away when they flee in
battle.
* 19:4 But the king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud voice, O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my
son!

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Absalom, Absalom

Biography of William Faulkner (1897-1962)

About Absalom, Absalom

Miss Rosa Coldfield

Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon

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

The Biblical Story in Absalom, Absalom!

* 17:26 So Israel and Absalom pitched in the land of Gilead.

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