Absalom, Absalom

Content Warning: This guide contains references to slavery, racial violence, rape, incest, and suicide. The source text uses racial slurs including the n-word, which is reproduced and obscured in quotations in this guide.

One of the central themes in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is the tragic and violent legacy of slavery in the American South. This theme is explored through the rise and fall of the Sutpen family and how individuals within the family struggle with their pasts and meet tragic ends. The novel revolves around the life and legacy of Thomas Sutpen, whose life is marked by a ruthless ambition to become the patriarch of a longstanding familial dynasty. Sutpen and his lineage(s) are depicted as victims of tragic fates catalyzed by their patriarch’s exploitative violence toward enslaved people.

Rosa, the younger sister of Sutpen’s deceased wife, Ellen—and later, Sutpen’s fiancée—is one lens into the family’s demise and how the family’s tragedies emerge from an original evil: racism within its patriarch. Rosa’s hatred for Thomas Sutpen has spanned 43 years, up to the point she relays the tale to 20-year-old Quentin Compson. Rosa speaks of Sutpen in almost mythological terms, depicting him as a violent and selfish “fiend blackguard and devil […] that every man in our armies would have to fall before bullet or ball found him” (10).