COVE

William Faulkner (depicted in Fig 1) was born September 25, 1897 in Mississippi. Being raised in the American South at the time he was, religion would have been inescapable. Following dashed “dreams of martial glory,” Faulkner turned to writing (Britannica). He was largely self-taught, and his work was deeply informed by the Southern environment he was brought up in. He depicts a South in decay (see Fig 2, the original cover of Absalom, Absalom! which depicts a plantation home overrun by moss and shadow), a place unable to cope with the upheavals brought by a world which will not leave it behind. Each individual novel of his is woven into a greater meta-work, the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner was a modernist through-and-through. This is exemplified both by the meta-structure of his works as a whole and their individual internal components like complex, often stream-of-consciousness prose, inventive narrative structures, and shifting perspectives. While he “was raised sort of Methodist, married in a Presbyterian church, and later became an infrequently church-attending Episcopalian,” Faulkner's relationship to religion was not particularly formal (Tooley). Religion, however, was suffused into the fabric of his South. Deeply religious characters are common in Yoknapatawpha County, and Faulkner takes inspiration from the Bible to inform his storytelling. Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom! In 1936 and revieved the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. He died on July 6, 1962.  

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Not only is summarizing the plot of Absalom, Absalom! not itself a simple task, but—in typical modernist fashion—Falkner’s narrative structure is incredibly complex, further complicating the explication of this book. In this overview, I will attempt to give a brief summary of both the plot itself and its relationship to the overall narrative structure. There are two stories which run parallel to each other. The first is the story of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a mysterious stranger, and his family. Sutpen is born at the start of the 19th century and dies (is killed!) in 1969. For the story of Sutpen and his family’s fall, Faulkner appropriates the plot structure of 2 Samuel 13-18 into the dirt-caked, crumbling Antebellum South and its aftermath. Sutpen mysteriously arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi and constructs a massive plantation which he dubs Sutpen’s Hundred (see Fig 2). He marries a respectable young girl and has two children. But when the children grow up, and Sutpen’s son, Henry, learns that his sister’s fiancé is half-black (and also his half-brother), he kills the fiancé; leading to a downward spiral which takes the whole of the family with it.  
The second story frames the former: in 1909, a young man, Quinten Compson, who slowly uncovers Sutpen’s story through different fragments that he gathers from different narrators. Quinten acts as a surrogate for the audience as he learns and becomes consumed by Sutpen’s story. Each time that the story is told, each fact added to the whole reflects just one perspective on Sutpen. Sometimes there is tension between the different tellings of what happened to the Sutpen family. This web of narration is mapped out in Fig 4 which demonstrates the complexity and uncertainty of Sutpen’s story as it is received by Compson and the reader. The final effect being that of disjunction and misunderstanding between the different characters who all are trying to comprehend the fall of Sutpen and the South.  

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The most obvious and important connection between Absalom, Absalom! and the Bible is, as previously stated, that Sutpen’s story follows the structure of the story of King David and his son, Absalom. In that story [2 Samuel 13-18], one of David’s sons, Amnon, rapes his brother, Absalom,’s daughter. Angered at his father, David, for not acting against Amnon, Absalom tricks Amnon and kills him at a feast (depicted in Fig 3). Absalom then leads a rebellion against his father and is ultimately executed after a battle despite David’s orders to leave him unharmed. The title of the book, Absalom, Absalom!, comes from David’s cry when he hears that his son has been killed: “The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!’” (2 Samuel 18:33). This complex story of familial violence is unique in the Bible for its centering on human interactions with little direct reference God themself. As this human drama unfurls the reader may begin to question the role of the divine in human affairs and the extent to which explanation of experience is possible when limited by that which is under the sun. While deeply human, this story can be interpreted as part of David’s punishment for his sins. God warns David that “the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife” (2 Samuel 12:10). This gives a divine explanation for all that occurs and undergirds the human drama, framing it all as a part of a divine plan.  

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In Absalom, Absalom!, the characters do not understand what is happening to the world around them. The story of the Sutpen family functions as a metaphor for the fall of the South and its incomprehensibility. During the Civil War, the Old South was in its death throes; there was much chaos and destruction (see Fig 5 for an etching of Charleston, Sout Carolina being burned to the ground by Union soldiers after its capture and Fig 2 for the decaying plantation home, a symbol of the Old South) as well as a total destruction of the previous way of life. All possible explanatory systems were failing: characters question God’s role in the South’s defeat and collapse, they blame individual psychology, they question whether there is any meaning in any of it at all. Faulkner emphasizes this crisis of explanation through his appropriation of the David-Absalom story. In that story, though deeply human, it is ultimately explained by God’s punishment of David. There is a sense that—though chaotic and violent it may be—the story is intelligible in terms of a hermeneutics of divine drama. While the religious Southerners of Jefferson, Mississippi may have been previously able to explain the world around them in terms of God, Faulkner depicts them at a loss. Their understanding of the world is stuck in archaic racist explanations which are becoming less and less fit, leading to more and more contradiction. This is emphasized by the departure in form from the original Biblical prose. Faulkner’s depth of psychology, non-linear structure, and unreliable narrators juxtapose with the more direct and economical, plot focused prose of the 2 Samuel. Below is a line of Faulkner’s and a line from the Bible, each describing the fratricide of their respective stories.  

Absalom, Absalom!: “...—a shot, then an interval of aghast surmise above the cloth and needles which engaged them, then feet, in the hall and then on the stairs, running, hurrying, the feet of a man: and Judith with just time to snatch up the unfinished dress and hold it before her as the foor burst open upon her brother, the wild murderer whom she had not seen in four years...” (pg 108).    

2 Samuel: “Then Absalom commanded his servants, ‘Watch when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine, and when I say to you, “Strike Amnon,” then kill him. Do not be afraid; have I not myself commanded you? Be courageous and valiant.’ So the servants of Absalom did to Amnon as Absalom had commanded” (13:28-29).  

Hopefully, this makes clear the difference between the way each text narrates a plot and how this narration creates new forms of narrative causality: the first, deeply psychological; the second more external, mechanistic, and even dramatic.  

Works Cited 

American author William Faulkner, shown smoking a pipe, in a publicity photograph issued in the summer of 1924 to promote the publication of his poetry collection The Marble Faun. William Faulkner, Wikipedia , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner.  

THE BURNING OF COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, FEBRUARY 17, 1865. [SKETCHED BY W. WAUD. for HARPER’s WEEKLY]. Who Burned Columbia In 1865, https://www.wadehamptoncamp.org/hist-bc.html.  

First-edition dust jacket cover of Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Absalom, Absalom!, Wikipedia , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalom,_Absalom!  

Hannon, Charles. The Sutpen storytelling network in Absalom, Absalom!, representing narrators who refer to Sutpen, and their named sources of information about him (however implausible). Topologies of Discourse in Faulkner, https://www.uxappeal.com/topologies-of-discourse.html.  

The New Oxford Annotated: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 2018. 

The Servants of Absalom Killing Amnon. Picryl, https://picryl.com/media/the-servants-of-absalom-killing-amnon-8160a1.  

“William Faulkner – Biographical.” NobelPrize.Org, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1949/faulkner/biographical/. Accessed 2 May 2025.  

“William Faulkner.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., www.britannica.com/biography/William-Faulkner. Accessed 2 May 2025.