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Chapter 6
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
It’s cold in Shreve and Quentin’s room in Cambridge. Shreve glibly announces that the point of Quentin’s story is that “he just wanted a grandson,” With amusement, he declares the South “better than the theatre, isn’t it.” Quentin says nothing, frozen. Then he starts to tell another story about Sutpen, which picks up during Sutpen’s second year in Mississippi. The architect Sutpen hired to design his mansion tried to escape. Sutpen alerted Quentin’s Grandfather and some other townsfolk, then he got his dogs and enslaved people to go after him. Shreve jokes that the architect might have been going off to meet a woman. Quentin ignores Shreve’s remark and continues his story. He describes how the architect jumped into the swamp, wearing all his clothes, and how Sutpen’s enslaved people saw it happen. Sutpen didn’t notice the architect’s absence until later.
The cold of Quentin and Shreve’s dorm room in Cambridge contrasts with the stifling warm of Miss Rosa’s house in Jefferson—this difference reinforces how out of place Quentin is in the North. It also reinforces how removed Shreve is from Quentin’s stories of the South—and how this removal changes how the stories affect him. Also note that this story about Sutpen picks up years before the last story left off: Sutpen has only recently arrived in Jefferson and has yet to marry Ellen or achieve success as a planter.
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Quentin’s story moves back in time to summarize Sutpen’s origins. Sutpen is born in 1808 in the mountains of West Virginia. He has many siblings, and the family is very poor. Sutpen doesn’t even know it’s possible to tame and own land. One day, when Sutpen is 10, his father announces to the family that they are moving. They travel “down the mountain to where roads exist[].” The family travels for a long time, though, years later, Sutpen won’t be able to recall if they traveled for months or for a year.
Later, Sutpen will try to build a life from the ground up in Jefferson—he’ll reveal nothing about his past, seeming determined that it not define him. But he did come from somewhere, and likely his past does inform the decisions he makes later in life. Here, readers learn more about Sutpen’s past and how it inspired the ambition that would dominate his decisions and perspectives as an adult.
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Sutpen’s father drinks heavily, and his “mountain drinking manners” get him thrown out of bars in town. Sutpen sees his first enslaved Black man during his family’s travels, and he learns the difference between Black men and white men—and “between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room.” At this point, though, Sutpen still thinks that a person’s success in life is a matter of luck. He won’t learn otherwise until later.
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Eventually the family stops traveling and settles in a cabin on a plantation in Tennessee that’s almost identical to the mountain cabin they left behind. Sutpen doesn’t know where he comes from or where he’s moved to; he’s simply “there, surrounded by faces.” The white man who owned the plantation and the enslaved people who worked it lived in the biggest house Sutpen had ever seen. One day Sutpen goes to the house to deliver a message to the planter from his father. He is excited, thinking he’ll finally see inside it. But when he approaches the front door, a Black enslaved man tells him to use the back door, putting Sutpen in his place. Sutpen notes that the Black man is dressed in finer clothes than his own. He considers shooting the man who owns the house but realizes it won’t do any good.
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The man’s insult doesn’t sadden or anger Sutpen. He calmly runs into the woods and crawls inside the cave-like space under a fallen oak tree. (When Sutpen later recounted the insult to Quentin’s grandfather, Quentin relates to Shreve in the novel’s present, Sutpen insisted that he wasn’t angry about the insult. He merely decided the insult had alerted him to a problem he would have to address.)
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Eventually dinner time approaches, and Sutpen grows hungry. He walks toward his family’s cabin and sees his sister outside, wearing an old dress and a pair of old men’s boots as she does laundry. Sutpen realizes how “brutish and stupidly out of all proportion to its reward” her work is. She orders Sutpen to fetch wood, but he refuses. When their father returns, Sutpen’s sister tells on Sutpen, and their father makes Sutpen get the wood. Nobody asks about Sutpen’s errand earlier that day. At night Sutpen can’t stop replaying the interaction with the enslaved man who hadn’t even paused to hear why Sutpen had come to the house. Sutpen resolves to get back at the enslaved Black man for the insult. He leaves that night for the West Indies and never sees his family again.
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Sutpen apparently conveyed this story of his youth to Quentin’s grandfather as they waited for Sutpen’s enslaved Black men and dogs to track down the escaped architect. Quentin’s grandfather would later say that Sutpen told this story with a slight tilt of his head, a mannerism he must have picked up from someone or some book long ago—perhaps the same place he picked up the lofty words with which he would pepper his speech. But there was no “vanity” or humor in this affected demeanor. It conveyed the “innocence” that Sutpen still had, having forgotten all about whatever loss of innocence he experienced the day the enslaved Black man insulted him at the plantation.
Sutpen told Quentin’s grandfather that he attended school for a few months when he was 13 or 14, not long before he left for good. It was there that he learned of the West Indies and about how men could get rich there. He never told Quentin’s grandfather or anyone else if the journey was difficult. In the West Indies, he realized he’d have to learn a new language, so that’s exactly what he did. When Sutpen told Quentin’s grandfather the story of his time there, he mentioned “the girl” only momentarily to explain that “he had found [her] unsuitable to his purpose and so put aside, though providing for her.”
Quentin’s story of Sutpen’s origins continues. Sutpen works his way up in the West Indies, overseeing a sugarcane plantation as he learns French and the island patois. At one point, enslaved people on the plantation stage a revolt. The planter and his family barricade themselves inside the house as the enslaved Black men come at him with machetes. Sutpen goes out and subdues the revolting enslaved people, though he doesn’t give many details about how he did it. When he returns, he and the girl—whose name he has yet to learn—become engaged to be married.
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In the present, Shreve interrupts Quentin’s story, urging Quentin, “Go on.” Quentin repeats the words he spoke before Shreve’s interrupted him: “I said he stopped.” Shreve protests the story’s many remaining loose ends and Sutpen’s many omissions, complaining about Sutpen’s purported inability to remember how he got to Haiti, how he subdued the slave revolt, and how he got married. Quentin explains that he can’t clarify any of these points, as Sutpen stopped telling the story to Quentin’s grandfather at this point in the chronology. Inwardly, Quentin thinks about how cold their room is. Shreve tells Quentin to continue the story. Quentin is silent at first, contemplating how different he and Shreve are. While Quentin was born in Mississippi, Shreve was born in Alberta, Canada.
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Quentin tells Shreve that it took Sutpen 30 years to continue telling the story to Quentin’s grandfather, perhaps because Sutpen was too busy “furthering that design which he had in mind.” In those intervening years, he finished his house and settled down with a wife “and two children—no, three.” He had been arrested for the shady business dealings he engaged in to buy the house but was later released. Afterward, he got rich off cultivating the land with the seed Quentin’s grandfather loaned him.
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Shreve interjects at this point to ask about Sutpen’s shady business dealings and how Mr. Coldfield was involved in them. Quentin only knows vague details and mentions something about “a bill of lading” and a questionable way Sutpen instructed Mr. Coldfield to use his credit. Sutpen apparently persuaded Mr. Coldfield to join him in the venture by promising to take the fall if they got caught. Coldfield supposedly doubted the scheme would even work in the first place, which is how his “conscience” allowed him to participate in it at all. And when it did fail, it wasn’t Sutpen he hated but “his conscience and the land.” In fact, he “hated that country so much that he was even glad when he saw it drifting closer and closer to a doomed and fatal war.”
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Shreve urges Quentin to continue the story of Sutpen’s “design,” and Quentin obliges, telling the story Sutpen resumed telling to Quentin’s grandfather 30 years after he abruptly stopped. At this point, Sutpen recognizes he’s old and doesn’t want to excuse any of his behavior—he just wants to “explain” himself before time runs out.
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As Quentin speaks, Shreve jokingly remarks that Quentin sounds just like his father. This prompts Quentin to sink into an internal, rambling, stream-of-consciousness meditation on himself, his father, and Shreve. He wonders if perhaps stories aren’t started and finished but simply dissolve into the next, “like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks.”
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Back in the past, as Sutpen tells his story to Quentin’s grandfather, he tries to explain his choice to disown his first wife and child. Quentin’s grandfather considers this unconscionable, and Sutpen agrees but merely explains that he reasoned with his conscience until he could accept and live with his choice. Plus, he didn’t just walk out on the woman: he provided for her and her son. Sutpen vaguely alludes to why he chose to abandon the woman, seeming to suggest that she misrepresented herself as white (and passed as white) when she in fact had Black ancestry. And Sutpen being married to a woman of Black descent “would have made an ironic delusion of all that he had suffered and endured in the past and all that he could ever accomplish in the future toward that design.”
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At this point, Shreve wordlessly rises and goes to put on his bathrobe, leaving Quentin alone at the table with the opened letter. When he returns, he urges Quentin to pick up the story on the Christmas that Henry brought Charles Bon home to Sutpen’s Hundred for Christmas, during which Sutpen—“the demon”—recognized “the face he believed he had paid off and discharged twenty-eight years ago.” Quentin obliges.
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Quentin explains that General Compson thinks that Sutpen probably named Charles Bon himself, just as he’d named all his other children—“that entire fecundity of dragons’ teeth,” which is how Quentin’s father refers to Sutpen’s collective children.
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Shreve interrupts Quentin to ask why Quentin’s father told Quentin that the fight between Sutpen and Henry (and the reason Sutpen prohibited the marriage between Bon and Judith) was about Bon’s relationship with his mistress (using an outdated racial term to describe her). Quentin explains that his father didn’t know that Bon was Sutpen’s son. Sutpen never told him—Quentin did, after he and Miss Rosa went to the house that one night. (Quentin trails off here, apparently unable to articulate aloud what happened at the house and what he and Miss Rosa found there.)
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Quentin continues his story. Upon realizing that Bon is the son he abandoned in the West Indies, Sutpen doesn’t think of Bon’s arrival as “the sins of the father come home to roost.” Rather, he thinks of it as “just a mistake.” And so, he gets to work ensuring that he doesn’t “mak[e] another one.” So, he lets Bon stay in his house for the duration of the vacation. Ellen arranges for Bon and Judith’s engagement even before Bon arrives—she might have gotten the idea in her head from the moment she saw Bon’s name mentioned in one of Henry’s letters (at least, this is what Quentin’s grandfather assumes must have happened).
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After Christmas, Henry and Bon return to Oxford for school, and Bon’s letters to Judith start to arrive at Sutpen’s Hundred. Ellen, meanwhile, starts spreading news of the supposed “engagement” around Jefferson. Sutpen does nothing until spring, when Henry writes to say Bon will be staying at Sutpen’s Hundred with him for a couple nights before continuing on to his home in New Orleans. Sutpen later leaves for New Orleans, though it’s unclear what his plan is: to speak with Bon and Bon’s mother and reach an agreement, or perhaps to pay them to leave Sutpen and his family alone.
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Nobody even knows if Bon even knew that Sutpen was his father in the first place—and even if he did know, and originally went to Sutpen’s Hundred to court Judith to punish Sutpen for abandoning his mother, perhaps he later ended up genuinely falling in love with Judith.
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Whatever Sutpen went to New Orleans to accomplish doesn’t work out, apparently, and Bon returns to Sutpen’s Hundred that Christmas. At this point, Sutpen realizes (in this telling of the story) that there is no stopping Bon, so he shifts his focus to Henry. Sutpen (Quentin’s grandfather believed) knows that Henry will take “the lie” Sutpen tells him as truth. He also probably thinks he knows what Henry will do in response: renounce Sutpen and leave with Bon, then go to New Orleans to confirm the truth for himself. Thus, Sutpen is counting on Henry to do it. Perhaps Sutpen even hopes that either Bon or Henry will get killed in the impending war (it’s 1861 at this point).
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Sutpen, upon returning home from the war, goes to see Quentin’s grandfather to see if he can guess what “mistake” Sutpen made and how it has come back to haunt him. During their conversation, Sutpen laments the fact that whichever course he decides to take going forward, the “design” to which he’s dedicated so much of his life will be ruined. His first option involves destroying his design himself “if [he] is forced to play [his] last trump card,” and his second option is to do nothing. The second option will result in Sutpen’s design “complet[ing] itself quite normally and naturally and successfully to the public eye,” but it’ll be “a betrayal” of his younger self who the enslaved man insulted many years ago. This insult was what inspired Sutpen to initiate his design in the first place.
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Vaguely and cryptically, Sutpen goes into more detail about the “first choice” which made it necessary to make this second choice now: the choice to marry a woman who wasn’t honest with Sutpen about something, which he only found out about “after the child was born.”
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Shreve interrupts Quentin’s story at this point to clarify that Quentin’s grandfather didn’t know what Sutpen was talking about when he mentioned the first wife not being upfront with him. He also asks if Quentin himself wouldn’t have known what anybody who told him Sutpen’s story was talking about, had he and the other boys not “been out there and see Clytie.” Quentin says yes to both questions and adds that his grandfather was Sutpen’s only friend. Then the intense coldness of Shreve’s and his room distracts him. Shreve hugs himself for warmth, and Quentin inwardly notes Shreve’s “pink naked almost hairless skin” beneath his bathrobe.
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Shreve clarifies that Sutpen “chose lechery,” making a joke that he would do the same. Then he asks Quentin to continue telling Sutpen’s story. Quentin notes the mocking tone of Shreve’s remark and inwardly muses that Shreve isn’t being flippant—rather, his tone is the consequence of “that incorrigible unsentimental sentimentality of the young which takes the form of hard and often crass levity.” Quentin ignores Shreve’s joking and resumes his story, picking up when Sutpen leaves for Virginia following his discussion with Quentin’s grandfather about what to do about Bon’s reappearance and intentions with Judith.
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From Sutpen, Quentin’s grandfather learns that Sutpen rode to Quentin’s grandfather’s old regiment’s headquarters and spoke to Henry there. Then he left that same night. (Shreve, in the present, clarifies that Sutpen made his choice to “play[] that trump card after all.” He continues to add commentary despite Quentin’s increasingly agitated pleas for him to stop.)
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In the present, Quentin briefly finds himself unable to speak, becoming consumed with anxiety about “hav[ing] to hear it all again” as he tells the rest of the story to Shreve. At this point, the narrative perspective becomes unclear as it describes Sutpen returning home from the war. He finds out that Henry murdered Bon, and he briefly cries before swiftly resuming his life. The problem he needed solved (Bon) is no longer a concern.
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The narrative (from a different but still unclear perspective) then documents Quentin’s father’s thoughts on Sutpen’s actions in the aftermath of Bon’s death. Mr. Compson speculates that Sutpen wasn’t “concerned […] about the courage and the will, nor even about the shrewdness now. He was not for one moment concerned about his ability to start the third time,” but he was worried about having enough time to start and finish his design (he’s now in his sixties). So, upon his return to Sutpen’s Hundred, he immediately gets to work. He gets engaged to Miss Rosa, “suggest[s] what he suggest[s] to her,” and then Rosa, insulted, leaves Sutpen’s Hundred for good.
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Quentin’s story picks up with Sutpen’s efforts to regain his wealth following the Civil War. He and Wash Jones operate a general store, but most of the customers are newly freed Black people, and Sutpen gets tired of serving them. He locks up the shop and drinks until he’s unconscious. Wash Jones, meanwhile, resents that the freed Black people—a race of people “that the Bible said had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin”—are better dressed than him and his granddaughter. He’s bitter toward Clytie, who won’t even let him enter Sutpen’s house.
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Meanwhile, Sutpen begins a sexual relationship with Wash Jones’s granddaughter, Milly. Wash accepts the situation initially, delivering gifts from the “Kernel” to Milly. Milly walks around town flaunting these gifts from Sutpen—beads and ribbons, and even a new dress. One day, Quentin’s grandfather ventures by Sutpen’s store and hears Sutpen and Wash arguing about Milly.
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Sometime later, Judith hears Sutpen leave the house and figures he’s headed toward the stable. It’s unclear how much she could have guessed about Wash’s granddaughter’s condition or how much she discerned from what Clytie knew. When Sutpen doesn’t return by midafternoon, she pays a boy to go down to the fish camp and ask Wash for Sutpen’s whereabouts. He screams when he sees what he sees, though it’s not clear if he stumbles upon the scythe or Sutpen’s body first.
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A week later, they track down the midwife who fills in the details of the events that led up to Sutpen’s death. Sutpen apparently went to the stable where Wash’s granddaughter and the baby she’d just given birth to were lying on the pallet. He asked her if the baby was a “horse or mare,” and she told him. In response, he told her it’s “too bad [she’s] not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.” Wash Jones overheard the insult and killed Sutpen with a scythe.
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News of Wash’s murder of Sutpen spreads around town. Quentin’s grandfather, Major de Spain (the sheriff), and a group of other men assemble, bringing dogs with them. The group surrounds the stable, where Wash Jones has barricaded himself with his granddaughter and the new baby. The men plead with Wash to leave, but he refuses. Then they hear the granddaughter scream, and all the men outside (minus de Spain) swear they can “hear[] the knife on both the neckbones.” Wash exits the stable and lunges toward the group of men with the scythe, but they overpower and kill him.
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In the present, Shreve expresses disbelief that Sutpen, after wanting a son for so many years, could insult Milly, taunting Wash Jones into killing first him and then the baby. Quentin looks up, puzzled, and corrects Shreve: the baby was a girl. Shreve only says, “Oh,” then tells Quentin it’s time to “get out of this damn icebox and go to bed.”
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