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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 quicklyand 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 isalso 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.

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, hisvoice 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

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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.

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 nottell 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.

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 themperfectly 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 womenand 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

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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 willadd 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 textscontain the space for gay criticism and interpretation.

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,

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guard the houses of the Fathers, which hold the secrets of the white families. As Arthur Kinney says, this is a "pro

foundly subtle and profoundly deep" form of racism (266), and even if "wholly unintended" these tragic revisions

perpetuate the hierarchies and the exclusions [of racism]."

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 isduring 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.

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 thoughHenry 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

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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.

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, forexample, 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. WithSutpen'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 problemwith 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

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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.

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 thisnovel 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.