Here's a list of the books I read over summer:

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
James Joyce, The Dubliners (only a few of the stories, however)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
Keith Devlin, The Millennium Problems
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (in progress)

And numerous short works, including:

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Sultan's Dilemma

As William Faulkner is widely recognized as a giant of modern literature, we should expect great works befitting his stature. It was clear to me from the outset that Absalom, Absalom! surely fits into this category. The story is itself about a story of a man named Thomas Sutpen, who rose to and fell from power in the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi. The Biblically-minded among us will instantly recognize the allusion of the title, David's cry of lament for his rebellious son. Appearing one day out of nowhere with a French Architect and many slaves, he builds his house with his own bare hands. He finds himself a wife and bears a daughter and son, and by all means appears to be set for life. His downfall is brought about by a vengeful son, whose crimes deprive Sutpen of a suitable heir. In his desperation to replace Henry, he is killed by Wash Jones, a squatter on Sutpen's property whose granddaughter he impregnated then cast aside.


The various narrators tell this story—or at least their versions of it. Sutpen is many things to many people; to his ex-fiance, Rosa Coldfield, he is the “man-horse-demon”, while to Mr. Compson, Quentin Compson's father (who in turn heard this story from his own father), there is not as much personal hatred, though other biases are present. In turn, the audience of these two narrators, Quentin Compson, narrates this story to his roommate at Harvard, Shreve.

It seems to me that the most important point of the novel is not what is being said, but the overall narrative structure. Through these many interactions, we get a web of tellings and re-tellings; Rosa tells Quentin, Quentin's grandfather tells Mr. Sompson who in turn tells Quentin, and Quentin tells the story to Shreve, who retells the story to Quentin in order to get everything straight. It is interesting to not that it is while at Harvard that these two boys are fleshing out the story, almost as historians would. In this way, Faulkner personalizes very abstract problems of historical truth; although his stories are about the South, he writes about topics far grander than the goings on of a group of people in Mississippi.

In a way, though, I can also see this as a criticism of the planter aristocracy of the South. For all the suspicion that the townspeople show towards Sutpen, implying that he is not “one of them,” he is really no different from the other slaveholders of the South in his methods of starting and maintaining a plantation. His personal downfall, betrayal by both is black and white sons, is coincident with the Civil War both go off to fight; thus is the South as a whole linked with Sutpen.

In the final pages of Absalom, Absalom!, Shreve asks Quentin if he hates the South. Quentin's denial is so strong as to seem almost forced out, as though Quentin were fooling himself into tolerating his ancestry: “I dont! I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” Would a reader, in general, feel the same? I think I did.