Absalom, Absalom!: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

That Sutpen can only discern that he is “surrounded by faces” reflects his youthful lack of awareness about the racial or social hierarchies that dictate who deserves respect and humanity and who doesn’t. When the enslaved Black man turns young Sutpen away from the front door, redirecting him toward the back, it teaches Sutpen that his poverty makes him unworthy of respect. That the enslaved man’s clothes are nicer than Sutpen’s reinforces how low on the social hierarchy Sutpen’s poverty makes him—even lower than an enslaved man, who at this point in history would legally be considered property. This humiliating experience represents Sutpen’s loss of innocence—it’s the catalyst that pushes him toward his single-minded pursuit of his ambition.

Quentin’s aside to Shreve reminds readers that they are hearing about Sutpen’s origins from Sutpen’s perspective. It’s worth being somewhat skeptical about Sutpen’s claim that the rejection he experienced at the planter’s front door didn’t sadden or anger him—clearly, the incident was a major formative experience for him, kicking into gear the fierce ambition that would consume the rest of his life (and ultimately bring about his demise). 

Sutpen’s earlier humiliation seems to inspire the observation he makes now about how “brutish and stupidly out of all proportion to its reward” his sister’s hard work is. Before, his youthful innocence shielded him from the reality of class, race, and the existence of a social hierarchy. Now, he’s no longer able to accept his station in life and so leaves his family behind to make a new name for himself, unmarked by his shameful, lowly past.

Quentin’s grandfather picks up on the artificiality and learned quality of Sutpen’s mannerisms. It’s clear that the humiliating experience of being denied entry to the planter’s mansion created in Sutpen a drive to never be looked down on again—and so he strategically crafts a persona and studies mannerisms he believes will make him appear worthy of others’ respect. When Quentin’s grandfather notes that there’s no “vanity” in Sutpen’s mannerisms, and when he emphasizes Sutpen’s “innocence,” he seems to gesture toward Sutpen’s underlying belief that he can rise above his humble origins, creating a new self that’s worthy of the respect he aspires to and leaving his past and the experiences that shaped him behind.

Sutpen regards “the girl” quite like he’ll later regard Ellen, Rosa, and Wash Jones’s granddaughter—as a possible means to reach “his purpose,” or to achieve his goal of success in the social, racial, and class hierarchies of the Old South. Thus, readers may speculate that Ellen was in fact not Sutpen’s first wife—that this “girl” came before her and, for reasons the novel has yet to reveal, Sutpen “found [her] unsuitable” and thus abandoned her.

Sutpen, in the origin story he tells to Quentin’s grandfather, presents himself as a mythic figure of extraordinary proportions. Readers (and recipients of Sutpen’s story in general) have no choice but to take his word for it, but it’s difficult to believe that Sutpen could have subdued the enslaved people’s revolt on his own. Again, it’s difficult to arrive at the truth of history when all one has are incomplete, heavily subjective accounts of it.  

Shreve seems understandably frustrated by the meandering, incomplete structure of Quentin’s story—especially when all Quentin has to offer as explanation are brief responses that do little to clarify any of the story’s missing pieces. When Quentin fixates on how cold the room is, it indicates that he’s feeling out of place in the cold North. The difference in climate between the North and the South reflects their different cultures and histories. It's also significant that Quentin fixates on the temperature in response to Shreve’s insistence on Quentin giving him more information about Sutpen—it shows that Shreve’s inability to understand Quentin’s story intuitively (which Shreve would, if he were raised in the South and grew up haunted by its past) creates distance and unfamiliarity between the college roommates.

It’s almost comical that Sutpen takes a 30-year hiatus to resume telling Quentin’s grandfather the story of his life, but it also reinforces Sutpen’s disregard for others—even people like Quentin’s grandfather who consider Sutpen their friend. Sutpen tells his story the same way he does everything else in life: entirely on his own terms, and for nobody’s benefit but his own.

Quentin’s sparse details here suggest that it was Mr. Compson who told him about Sutpen’s illicit business deals—everything that Mr. Compson knows about Sutpen comes from his father, General Compson, who was Sutpen’s friend. Because of this, details about Sutpen that Quentin gleans from his father tend to minimize Sutpen’s bad behavior and portray him in a more sympathetic light. Meanwhile, he extends far less sympathy to people whom Sutpen wronged—like Mr. Coldfield. Here, for instance, he portrays Mr. Coldfield as having a slippery “conscience” and a hatred of the South, taking an almost nihilistic pleasure in the knowledge of the inevitability of the Civil War.  This stands in contrast to Sutpen, who has a clear sense of what he wants, knows what moral compromise is involved in getting it, and has formed his entire sense of self around the South.

Sutpen’s impulse to tell Quentin’s grandfather his story—to “explain” the trajectory of his life—gestures toward the power of storytelling to create lasting truth. Sutpen’s children have failed to carry on his legacy—Judith and Clytie by being born female and Henry, the male heir, first by rejecting his family name and then by becoming a fugitive. But telling his story to General Compson, on the other hand, immortalizes his “design” and the ambition that fueled it. 

Shreve’s remark about Quentin sounding like Mr. Compson mirrors Quentin’s earlier observation about Shreve. In both cases, the characters gesture toward the ability of storytelling to bring to life and immortalize the past—Shreve and Quentin’s storytelling immortalizes Mr. Compson’s words and could continue to do so long after Mr. Compson passes. Mr. Compson’s words have done the same for Sutpen. Finally, Quentin’s cryptic tangent is typical for Faulkner, who frequently draws on the stream of consciousness technique in his writing. Quentin’s cryptic observation that stories dissolve into the next “like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks” resists a straightforward interpretation, but it seems to gesture toward the inability of stories to convey truth. Each retelling gets further from the truth, like the water that ripples out after a rock hits water.

Until now, the novel has only alluded to the existence of Sutpen’s first wife. Here, it offers clear confirmation of the woman’s existence while also revealing the critical and perhaps shocking detail that Sutpen had a child with his first wife—and that he abandoned them both upon learning of the woman’s apparent mixed-race ancestry. The stiff, impersonal language with which Sutpen rationalizes his decision to abandon his first wife and child suggests that it’s not an inherent, hateful sense of racism that fuels his decision—his choice is impersonal and amoral, informed by the simple fact that the racialized social hierarchy of plantation culture of the pre-war South would never accept the woman and child due to their ancestry, meaning the child could never be a suitable heir to Sutpen’s dynasty. The woman and child therefore stand as obstacles to Sutpen’s one goal in life: to realize his “ambition” and achieve respectability in the South.

Recall that Shreve has already heard this entire story—he’s asking Quentin to go back and clarify certain points that don’t make sense to him. Thus, his request that Quentin elaborate on Sutpen and Henry’s fateful Christmas Eve argument, right after Quentin has been describing Sutpen’s choice to abandon his first wife and child, suggests that the two topics are linked—specifically, that Bon is “the face [Sutpen] believed he had paid off and discharged twenty-eight years ago,” or Sutpen’s abandoned eldest son.

Quentin’s father’s scathing description of Sutpen’s children as “that entire fecundity of dragons’ teeth” reflects his sympathetic view of Sutpen—and his harsh view of anyone who was an obstacle to Sutpen’s ambition. Collectively, Sutpen’s children failed to carry on his dynasty, and so Mr. Compson condemns them, likening them to sharp and destructive dragons’ teeth. 

Shreve astutely identifies an oddity in Mr. Compson’s version of events: wouldn’t it make more sense for Sutpen to prohibit the marriage between Bon and Judith because they are half-siblings? Bigamy would certainly carry less social stigma than incest, after all. Quentin’s admission that his father never knew Bon was Sutpen’s son is a major plot twist. Bon’s being Sutpen’s son severely changes the significance of nearly every Sutpen family conflict the reader has learned about thus far (Henry and Sutpen’s falling out, Henry’s murder of Bon, Judith’s relationship with Bon and her sense of responsibility toward his illegitimate child), and for Mr. Compson not to know this major detail severely undermines the authenticity of his version of events.

It’s unclear where Quentin has learned these details of Sutpen’s story, given his admission that Mr. Compson wasn’t aware of Bon’s relationship to the Sutpen family until Quentin told him after his visit to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa. Perhaps the details in this passage represent Mr. Compson’s amended version of events after learning this critical bit of information. Or perhaps Quentin is merely speculating about what Sutpen must have thought when he first recognized his abandoned son. Regardless, Quentin here makes the case that Sutpen saw Bon as a threat to his “design” and so began a series of strategic decisions geared toward ensuring that Bon’s return wouldn’t upend the life he’d built for himself in the intervening years. 

Now that readers know that Bon is Sutpen’s son, it opens Bon’s pursuit of Judith to new avenues of interpretation—some of which support Mr. Compson’s critical portrayal of Bon as scheming and opportunistic. For instance, if readers assume that Bon knows that Sutpen is his father, it’s plausible to interpret Bon’s incestuous—and interracial—courtship of Judith as his plan to get back at Sutpen for abandoning him as a child. While Bon’s rage certainly is justified, his using Judith to exact his revenge is hardly honorable.

This passage gestures toward the impossible task of knowing the truth about everything that happened between Bon, Henry, Judith, and Sutpen—without knowing what information each character was privy to, one can only speculate on what their motivations might have been. If Bon didn’t know Sutpen was his father, for instance, his courtship of Judith becomes romantic and tragic rather than vengeful and immoral.

In keeping with behavior that he has exhibited his whole life, Sutpen exploits other people to further his design. After realizing that Bon is determined to carry out his scheme to marry Judith, Sutpen resorts to a backup plan, hoping that Henry’s admiration for and loyalty to Bon will compel Henry to go to New Orleans, discover the truth about Bon (Henry, the born-and-raised Southern gentleman, would find Bon’s bigamy as immoral as incest), and turn him against Bon. Quentin’s grandfather seems to think Sutpen may have predicted and even hoped that Henry’s betrayal of Bon would drive him to murder. It speaks to Sutpen’s asocial personality that he would exploit and manipulate his own children to further his ambition.

Sutpen anguishes over what to do not because his choice could harm his children, but because it could harm his “design.” This reinforces his asocial personality. He sees even his own children as means to an end—or obstacles that will prevent him from realizing his design. Sutpen believes his design is doomed at this point because his options for dealing with Bon are limited. The “last trump card” he refers to involves destroying his design himself, revealing the truth about Bon to Henry and letting Henry destroy Bon and himself. This option destroys Sutpen’s design because it leaves him without an heir: Bon would be dead, and Henry would be a criminal. The other option is to do nothing to stop Bon, and to accept Bon—a mixed-race man—as his son and thus destroying the image of Southern respectability he’s spent decades curating. If the whole point of Sutpen’s design is to never have anyone shut a door in his or one of his son’s faces ever again, then accepting Bon as his son ruins this—as a mixed-race man living in the South, Bon will have infinite doors shut in his face.

Sutpen’s “first choice” (marrying Bon’s mother) requires Sutpen to make a second choice (to deal with Bon in one way or another) because of Bon’s race. Sutpen here cryptically suggests that Bon’s mother disclosed her mixed-race ancestry to Sutpen, which is what compelled Sutpen to leave her and Bon then and what compels him to rid himself of Bon now: in both cases, it’s because Bon’s mixed-race identity (even if Bon passes as white, which seems to be the case) is incompatible with Southern “respectability” and thus threatens Sutpen’s plan. 

Shreve is alluding to the fact of Bon’s mixed-race heritage, and Quentin confirms that neither his grandfather nor father knew this about Bon—and Quentin only knows because he and the other boys saw Clytie and Jim Bond (Charles Bon’s grandson, who apparently is obviously of mixed-race ancestry) and put two and two together. This further complicates Quentin’s father’s and grandfather’s abilities to tell the full truth about Sutpen. Not knowing about Bon’s mixed-race ancestry explains why Quentin’s father believed Sutpen prohibited Bon’s courtship of Judith because he knew about Bon’s mistress and   child back in New Orleans—and why, presumably, Quentin’s grandfather believed Sutpen prohibited the courtship due to the threat of incest. Quentin and Shreve, with their more complete understanding of the story, may come closer to the truth: that Sutpen prohibited the marriage not because of the bigamy or threat of incest, but because of the threat that Bon’s race posed to Sutpen’s design. 

Quentin and Shreve are around the same age, yet Quentin sees himself as older and warier than Shreve. The reason for this relates back to remarks Quentin made in the first chapter of the novel about being haunted by ghosts even though he doesn’t deserve to be—his Southern roots force him to inherit the weight of slavery, the South’s great, unacknowledged sin. Shreve’s contrasting “hard and often crass levity” comes from his not having to shoulder this burden.

Sutpen is putting into action the choice he made about how to deal with Bon—whatever he tells Henry likely directly influences Henry’s ultimate choice to murder Bon to prevent Bon from marrying Judith. Shreve's refusal to stop making jokes—especially during such a tense pivotal point in the story—reinforces the distance that exists between Quentin and Shreve due to their different origins.

Quentin’s anxiety about “hav[ing] to hear it all again” mirrors other characters’ inabilities to pass through doors or gates: it’s an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge and accept hard truths about history, the past, and their potential complicity within it. Sutpen’s brief tears could suggest that he’s sad about having his son killed, but he could just as easily be crying about the loss of his dynasty—now that Henry is a fugitive, he’ll need a new son to make his heir. 

Sutpen’s confidence about being able to start a new family for a third time reflects the singlemindedness of his ambition. Where his design is concerned, he can’t and won’t accept defeat. Only time stands in his way—or so he thinks. Rosa’s rejection of Sutpen marks a turning point in his efforts—the power he’s amassed is starting to crumple, and other people are standing in the way of him completing his design.

Slowly—perhaps too slowly—Sutpen is learning that his ambition doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s subject to other people and to forces larger and more powerful than himself, like the South’s decimated economy following the Civil War and the shifting social landscape. Sutpen created his design to achieve respectability in the planation culture of the pre-war South—but following the Confederacy’s loss of the Civil War, that culture doesn’t exist in quite the same way, and Sutpen hasn’t altered his design to fit the changing times. His failure to acknowledge the changes the South has undergone and adapt his design accordingly will be his demise. Wash Jones exhibits a similar stubbornness: he’s aghast that Clytie, a former enslaved woman, denies him entry to Sutpen’s mansion.

The “Kernel” whose gifts Wash Jones delivers to his granddaughter is Colonel Sutpen. That Wash Jones calls him “Kernel” suggests that Jones is uneducated or lower class. That Milly is so easily won over by beads and ribbons emphasizes her youth and makes Sutpen’s pursuit of her all the more craven and unconscionable. Once more, Sutpen’s behavior demonstrates his steadfast commitment to his ambition and his lack of regard for others. 

If the reader takes Quentin’s grandfather’s claim to have overheard an argument between Sutpen and Wash Jones at face value, it’s logical to guess that Wash Jones has murdered Sutpen, though the precise details of how Jones killed Sutpen or what motivated him to commit murder remains unclear at this point. Presumably Milly’s condition—meaning her pregnancy—had something to do with it. Regardless, Sutpen’s death marks the point at which his blind ambition finally went too far—he insulted the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong way, and he’s paid the ultimate price.

As repeatedly happens throughout the book, readers (and most of the book’s characters) learn about an important plot development not firsthand but through hearsay. If what the midwife says is true, then it seems that Sutpen asked Milly the sex of her baby (“horse or mare”), she gave him an answer that displeased him (likely she told him the baby was a girl), and so he tossed her aside as easily as he initiated their relationship. Milly’s worth to Sutpen was entirely dependent on her ability to produce a male heir to his dynasty—because she failed at this task, he deems her less worthy than one of his horses. When Wash Jones kills Sutpen in retaliation, it shows how misguided Sutpen has been to believe that he could build a life entirely by his own hand without others’ interference. In fact, his words and actions affect others and have consequences. 

This gruesome scene describes the violent deaths that Wash Jones inflicted upon his granddaughter and her newborn after he killed Sutpen—he takes the scythe to their neckbones, using such force that the crowd of men assembled outside the stable can apparently hear it. His reasons for doing so are unclear, but perhaps it’s as a symbolic affront to Sutpen, killing off his youngest offspring and her mother to ensure that Sutpen’s third attempt at a family dies with him. 

Quentin’s casual tone as he clarifies that Milly’s baby was a girl speaks to Sutpen’s cold, unfeeling character. It doesn’t strike Quentin as even marginally interesting that Sutpen would react so callously to Milly’s giving birth to a girl.