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Chapter 5
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Absalom, Absalom!, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling, Perspective, and Truth
The South
The Limits of Ambition
Social Taboos, Racism, and Inherited Trauma
Summary
Analysis
The narrative picks up in 1910 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Quentin and his roommate Shreve, a Canadian, are sitting in their dorm room at Harvard. An opened letter sits on the table—it’s from Quentin’s father, announcing Miss Rosa’s recent death and burial. She had been in a coma for weeks before her death and died painlessly in her sleep. The letter’s arrival has necessitated Quentin’s catching Shreve up to speed about who Miss Rosa was to him and his family. Quentin describes her as “an old lady that died young of outrage in 1866 one summer,” which only increases Shreve’s curiosity. It prompts Shreve to make a request that he (and so many others at Harvard) have requested of Quentin before: “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
Chapter 6 introduces a new narrative perspective: that of Quentin’s Canadian roommate, Shreve. Shreve’s perspective shines new light on the Sutpen story. As a Northerner, he considers Sutpen through the lens of an outsider and doesn’t have Quentin’s personal attachment to the region and people the story is about. This could supply his perspective with an objectivity that other characters’ versions have lacked. The detail of Rosa’s death is shocking and sudden; given its juxtaposition with Rosa’s shocking admission about the person hiding inside Sutpen’s old house that concluded the previous chapter, one can’t help but wonder whether this mystery is related to her death in any way. Finally, the detail of Quentin’s classmates at Harvard pestering him with questions about the South—many of which are insulting (“Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”) emphasizes how alien the region is to people who don’t live there. Outsiders’ dismissal of the South also shows how the South has remained in the past, having failed to recover—economically or culturally—from the devastation of the Confederacy’s loss of the Civil War.
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Quentin has been telling Shreve what happened after Miss Rosa told him that someone was hiding in the old house on Sutpen’s Hundred. Shreve is shocked that Miss Rosa, who apparently hadn’t left her house in 43 years, could know that someone was hiding out in Sutpen’s Hundred and then would leave in a buggy at midnight to confirm her suspicion. As they talk, Shreve keeps calling Miss Rosa “Aunt Rosa,” and Quentin repeatedly corrects him. Quentin assures Shreve that he’s got it right—this is exactly what Miss Rosa did. Throughout the rest of their conversation, he continues confirming or correcting Shreve as Shreve relates the stories that Quentin has already told him.
As an outsider, Shreve expresses skepticism toward elements of the story Quentin takes for granted—he reasonably questions how a shut-in like Miss Rosa could possibly know that somebody is hiding in Sutpen’s Hundred when she hasn’t left her house in decades. Shreve’s error in calling Miss Rosa “Aunt Rosa” reflects his unfamiliarity with—and lack of respect for—the Southern customs that shaped Quentin’s upbringing. To Shreve, the people in Quentin’s story are merely quirky characters—they aren’t real people, and their suffering has no bearing on his personal experience as it does Quentin’s.
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Shreve repeats back the basic arc of Rosa’s life, starting with the childhood she spent “in a household like an overpopulated mausoleum” and describing the lifetime she spent hating everyone. He speaks of Mr. Coldfield’s shutting himself inside the attic to avoid “being drafted in the Rebel army,” and how Rosa’s being left a penniless orphan following Mr. Coldfield’s death led her to Thomas Sutpen for security.
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Shreve’s account also sheds light on the insult that caused Rosa to leave Sutpen’s Hundred: Sutpen suggested he and Rosa have sex before marrying, and if Rosa became pregnant with a male heir, then they’d marry. After Rosa left (in Shreve’s summary), Sutpen turned to a “successor,” which ultimately led to his death by a “scythe.” Shreve refers to Sutpen as “Faustus,” a “demon,” and “Beelzebub” in his retelling. Quentin affirms that everything Shreve has repeated back to him is correct.
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Shreve continues to clarify points of the story Quentin has told him. After turning Henry against Bon, prohibiting Bon’s marriage to Judith, poisoning Henry against Bon, and “doom[ing Judith] to spinsterhood” by manipulating Henry into murdering. Bon, Sutpen comes back from the war and decides to try to rebuild his dynasty. To do this, he sets to work finding a new wife to give him new children to replace the old, doomed ones. Then he hopes to return his plantation to what it was before the war.
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As Shreve talks, Quentin thinks to himself, “He sounds just like Father.” Quentin observes Shreve, “naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless.” Of course, Shreve, unlike Mr. Compson, knows about what happened after Quentin “came back” from Sutpen’s Hundred that night.
At this point, the story shifts to a different perspective (it isn’t clear whose), picking up after Rosa’s departure from Sutpen’s Hundred. Sutpen, at some point, begins a sexual relationship with Milly, the granddaughter of Wash Jones. (Wash Jones is the white man whom Sutpen gave permission to squat in the abandoned fishing house on the property. He looked after Sutpen’s property while Sutpen was serving in the military).
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Milly becomes pregnant. After she gives birth in the stable, Sutpen insults her, proclaiming, “Well, Milly, too bad you’re not a mare like Penelope. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.” Afterward, Wash Jones, who overheard Sutpen’s insult of his granddaughter, kills Sutpen with a scythe. The body is found later that night and returned to Judith, who decides he should be buried in a cedar grove at the Methodist church where he married Ellen all those years ago. Judith doesn’t cry, perhaps because she’s too busy (she ran Sutpen’s general store by herself until she found someone to buy it). Jones is dead now too.
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In the present, Shreve halts his retelling of the Sutpen saga to ask about a story Quentin told him about hunting quail with Mr. Compson. The narrative shifts away from the ambiguous narrator and back to Quentin’s perspective as he describes a Black boy named Luster who led Quentin and Mr. Compson around a ditch as it started to rain. In his story, Quentin looks up and sees a grove of cedars ahead of him, and beyond them a grove of oak.
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Mr. Compson leads Luster and Quentin into the cedars, and it’s there that Quentin sees the gravestones of Ellen Coldfield Sutpen and Thomas Sutpen. Mr. Compson explains that Sutpen bought them when Judith informed him of Ellen’s death. He ordered them from Italy, wanting only the finest quality. He left his own headstone with a blank date of death, despite serving with an army that had the highest mortality rate in history.
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As Mr. Compson speaks, Quentin can imagine Sutpen leading his suffering troops into Pennsylvania. Then he led them through the Cumberland Gap, the Tennessee mountains, and finally into Mississippi in late 1964, evading Yankee troops all along the way. Quentin, in the story’s present, imagines Miss Rosa at Sutpen’s Hundred following Ellen’s death, gazing at the gravestone Sutpen prematurely ordered for himself with romantic longing, as though it were a beloved’s portrait.
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Quentin asks Mr. Compson about the other three gravestones, which belong to Charles Bon, Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, and Judith Sutpen. Mr. Compson urges Quentin to think about it: “Who would have paid for them?” Quentin replies, “She did it,” and deduces that “she” paid for the gravestones with money she earned from the store’s sale. Mr. Compson confirms that Quentin’s guess is correct. Quentin notes that Charles Etienne’s year of death, 1884, is the same as Judith’s.
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Mr. Compson next describes an afternoon in the summer of 1870—the summer Judith sold the store. In Mr. Compson’s telling, Quentin’s grandfather witnesses the arrival of Bon’s mistress—whom he assumes has come in response to Judith writing her in New Orleans to inform her of Bon’s death. The woman arrives with an 11-year-old boy, Charles Etienne. She’s dressed in an elaborate gown rather than mourning clothing. Charles Bon’s widow and son visit his grave, then they return to the house. They stay for one week, spending the entire time in the only room in the house that still has linen sheets. Clytie delivers coarse cornbread and coarse molasses to Charles Etienne but treats him coldly.
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After Bon’s widow and her child, Charles Etienne, return to New Orleans, Clytie (or maybe Judith) keeps tabs on them and goes to New Orleans to fetch Charles Etienne after Bon’s widow dies. She brings him back to Sutpen’s Hundred. Charles Etienne is 12 now. He speaks no English, and the others can’t speak French. Judith cares for him but is not affectionate toward him, regarding him only “with a cold unbending detached gentleness.” He sleeps in her room, and she washes him in water that’s either too hot or too cold, scrubbing as though to “wash the smooth faint olive tinge from his skin.”
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Quentin’s grandfather isn’t sure who—Judith or Clytie—tells Charles Etienne he must be Black. Before this, the concept of race was alien to him, for Clytie has watched him like a hawk, intervening whenever anyone—Black or white—crossed paths with him. Judith, meanwhile, never prevented him from sleeping in the white child’s bed in her room. The town knows of Charles Etienne’s arrival and thinks they now understand why Henry murdered Bon, though Quentin’s grandfather doesn’t quite connect the young boy with Bon’s widow, the mixed-race woman he saw at Bon’s graveside years before.
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Five years later, Judith, now in her forties, goes to the courthouse to retrieve Charles Etienne, who is handcuffed to an officer and in poor shape after getting into a fight. Apparently, he attended a “negro” ball at a cabin a few miles away from Sutpen’s Hundred and got into a fight there. But Charles Etienne won’t say anything in his own defense at the courtroom. The justice, Jim Hamblett, is making an indictment when Quentin’s grandfather enters and interrupts Hamblett’s speech. He pays Charles Etienne’s fine and takes Charles Etienne back to his office to talk.
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Judith waits outside Quentin’s grandfather’s office while Charles Etienne and Quentin’s grandfather speak. Quentin’s grandfather asks if Charles Etienne is Charles Bon’s son, and Charles Etienne curtly replies that he doesn’t know. Quentin’s grandfather tells Charles Etienne that he can be whatever he wants to be once he’s among strangers. If Charles Etienne leaves town, Quentin’s grandfather will tell Judith that he’s gone but won’t specify where.
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Not long after this, Charles Etienne leaves town for a time and returns with a dark-skinned Black woman he married while he was away. She comes from a “two dimensional backwater” place and is apparently simple minded. The woman later gives birth to her and Charles Etienne’s son in the old slave cabin on land that Charles Etienne rents from Judith. He fixes up the cabin and lives there with his family, flaunting his wife’s dark skin in front of Judith and around town. He passes as white among white men, who see his wife as an indication of “sexual perversion.”
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Judith pleads with Charles Etienne to renounce his wife and child (Jim Bond) and go to the North, where he can start fresh and pass as white. She even offers to take care of the woman and child—after all, her own father “begot one.” She says General Compson can sell some of the land to give Charles Etienne money to fund his journey. She says she’ll tell people around town that he is Henry’s son. But Charles Etienne refuses. When he calls her Miss Sutpen, she asks him to call her Aunt Judith.
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But nobody really knows what words Judith and Charles Etienne exchanged that day; certainly, Quentin’s grandfather doesn’t know. He only knows the story town gossip has settled on. After speaking with Judith, Charles Etienne returns to his cabin where his wife and child are waiting for him. He continues to live there and farm the land. He associates with neither white people nor Black people. Occasionally he gets drunk and starts fights, and after each altercation, Quentin’s grandfather pays his bond to get him out of jail.
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Charles Etienne later falls ill with yellow fever. Judith moves him into the house and cares for him, and eventually she catches the disease herself. Judith dies first, and Charles dies not long after. Clytie raises Charles Etienne’s son after Charles Etienne’s passing.
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The narrative shifts back to Quentin’s perspective as he, Mr. Compson, and Luster look on the gravestones while Mr. Compson tells the story of Charles Etienne. Quentin isn’t really listening to the story anymore, since he knows it all already. The rain is coming down harder now, and Mr. Compson urges them to seek shelter in the old slave cabin where Charles Etienne lived. Luster refuses, making up excuses for why he can’t go inside. Mr. Compson laughs at Luster, but Quentin doesn’t.
The narrative shifts to Quentin’s memory of himself, Luster, and some other boys their age approaching the old cabin and seeing Charles Etienne’s son, Jim Bond, who is just a few years older than they are. Bond is wearing unwashed, ill-fitting clothes. The boys don’t even notice the woman sitting on the porch at first. She’s old, small, and wrinkled, with a “coffee-colored face.” When she asks the boys what they want, they reply, “Nothing,” and then run away, scared but not knowing why.
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“Yes,” Quentin says, as the story shifts forward in time to 1910. He and Shreve are at Cambridge, and Shreve is repeating back to Quentin the story of the South that Quentin has told him, confirming that he’s gotten all the unbelievable details of the story correct. Shreve verifies that Jim Bond and “the old woman”—Clytie—lived in the cabin for 26 years. Quentin confirms that this is true. Shreve then expresses disbelief that “Aunt Rosa” could think that there was someone else living there—after all, Judith and Bon are both dead, and Henry is still on the run. Was there really someone else living in the cabin when Quentin traveled to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa to see for themselves? Quentin replies, “Yes.” “Wait then,” Shreve replies, in disbelief.
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