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Who Narrates 'Absalom, Absalom!' And Why Is It Significant?

2025-06-15 19:34:40
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3 Answers

Hazel
Hazel
In Absalom, Absalom! the puzzle of voices presented by the narrator of this novel are explored by the protagonist Quentin Compson and his Harvard room-mate Shreve. The way in which this pair of writers try to piece together the history of Thomas Sutpen is by and large composed of gossip, half-truths, myth, and pure invention, and reveals how in a matter of years history can become highly fluid in the hands of writers who are often biased, of abstract or idiosyncratic. In particular, it is Quentin, muddled as he is in the devastating and ultimately crushingly tedious irrelevance of the South to his own life in ‘The Sound and the Fury’, that is foregrounded in the bulk of these stories. His word on Sutpen’s tragic collapse is substantially a schematized, embellished and wildly-epic representation of his own existential terrors.
2025-06-16
Yvonne
Yvonne
You see narrative jazz played by an ensemble of players outlining the life of Thomas Sutpen. The lead saxophone is that of Quentin Compson in the later half of the novel but the opening section of Absalom, Absalom! is given by the fiery, the personal and bitter Rosa Coldfield. Her section is raw, bluesy and lacks closure. The more mellow, analytical Mr. Compson provides a necessary bass line in most sections of the novel and Faulkner here notes that memory and history are never completely objective for they are colored by the bigotisms, the unknown information and the personal obsessive complexes of the various tellers of the Sutpen tale.

The novel then becomes the duet of two men, Quentin and Shreve, in their reclining positions inQuéentin’s Quebec bedroom, all brought into the scene late at night in a moderately dark room as two imaginative young men reenact Sutpen’s story as they imagine it to have happened. The/dialogue with Shreve’s interruptions into his rethinking of how he thought Sutpen’s life and death came to be are fascinating. He tries to rework the story in another plausible form. His increasing incredulity and/or despair leads us to the same conclusion, however, that the myths and legends of our individual lives are retold over and over again in order to satisfy some need in each of us. Why do we continue to tell the tragedies of others? Because they are legends and in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ Faulkner brings them to life for us once again.
2025-06-17
Weston
Weston
A fractured narrative, interestingly. What a novel! The two major tellers of Thomas Sutpen’s story are Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon, but the bulk of the story is told by Rosa Coldfield in her bitter, vivid remembrance of decades past and then by Mr. Compson, the aging father of Quentin. By choosing these tellers, Faulkner shows that any biography of Sutpen is going to be as significant a study of the individual biographer as of Sutpen himself.

The story of Thomas Sutpen is tell by two young men, Quentin Compson and his friend Shreve McCannon, who are both in their early twenties. The two young men are in a dorm room in Harvard University, late at night, and they go over and over the story of Thomas Sutpen, adding to it and rephrasing it, inventing parts of it as they go along. The Canadian outsider, Shreve, functions as a stand-in for the reader, challenging Quentin’s deadly serious Southern Gothic visions of the past. Their collaborative re-creation of Sutpen’s life constitutes a pai ng of the ways of how history is written: a rough patchwork of solid fact, reckless conjecture, and collective psycho-historical trauma.

This aligns with the two other attributes of Faulkner’s choice of narrators that I noted earlier: the past never stays past, and the racial and familial secrets that sink beneath the surface of his characters’ daily lives are typically revealed through narrative. It is particularly significant in the case of ‘Absalom, Absalom!’, given that Quentin is already a suicidal character in The Sound and the Fury. In Absalom, it is as though Sutpen’s own curse has possessed the young man.
2025-06-19

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