Themes
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
Quentin and Shreve return to their dorm room, where it seems even colder than it was when they left it. In the room, “the darkness seem[s] to breathe,” and Quentin’s “blood surge[s] and r[uns] warmer, warmer.” Still discussing the story of Henry and Bon, Quentin remarks that Henry and Bon were in the University of Mississippi’s tenth graduating class. Shreve jokingly replies that he didn’t know 10 people total attended college in Mississippi. Quentin says nothing but begins to shiver. Shreve is simultaneously amused and concerned that Quentin is so cold. He offers Quentin his overcoat, but Quentin declines.
Once more, the coldness of Shreve and Quentin’s dorm room contrasts sharply with the stifling warmth of the South, underscoring how far removed they are from the story they’ve been immersed in over the past few chapters. The cold also symbolizes how distant Quentin, as a Southerner, feels from Shreve, a Northerner who cannot possibly begin to understand the story as intimately as Quentin; Shreve’s glib joke about Southerners being uneducated increases this distance.
Themes
Shreve says he can’t imagine coming from the South and having to endure such cold weather. He insists to Quentin that he’s not trying to be funny—he just wants to understand, but he isn’t sure that he can. Shreve explains, “it’s something my people haven’t got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there ain’t anything to look at every day to remind us of it.” Quentin agrees, stating, “You would have to be born there.” Inwardly, though, he questions whether he really understands it.
Shreve somewhat redeems himself for the many jokes he’s made thus far, implying that it’s only his unfamiliarity with the story’s characters, setting, and subject matter that causes him to make so many jokes—it’s as though he is using humor to try to escape the discomfort he feels at his unfamiliarity. He acknowledges the trauma and tragedy that Quentin has inherited as a consequence of the South’s complex, weighty history. Quentin, meanwhile, questions whether this trauma and tragedy can ever be fully understood.
Themes
Shreve returns the focus to “Aunt Rosa,” brushing off Quentin’s correction (“Miss Rosa”). Shreve says that Quentin can’t even know all that much about her. He notes that even after waiting for nearly half a century, “she couldn’t reconcile herself to letting him lie dead in peace.” Nor could she finish the job herself—she had to bring Quentin with her to do it.
Despite Shreve’s reverent acknowledgement of Quentin’s inherited history, he still fails to engage with that history respectfully, referring to Miss Rosa as “Aunt Rosa” even after Quentin has corrected him countless times. The “him” in Shreve’s cryptic remark about Miss Rosa’s inability to “let[] him lie dead in peace” seems to allude to Sutpen and to the mysterious third person who still lives on Sutpen’s estate.
Themes
Though Quentin is currently surrounded by chilly, New England air, he can still feel the dust of that hot Mississippi night in September. He can smell Miss Rosa riding in the buggy beside him. The narrative shifts to that night as Quentin’s memories take over.
Quentin’s Southern roots and the transformative experience of telling his story to Shreve makes the region come alive for him—enough that he can feel the sensation of its hot, muggy air despite the icy cold of his Cambridge dorm room.
Themes
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As Quentin and Miss Rosa approach Sutpen’s Hundred, Miss Rosa notes that they’re “on the Domain. On his land, his and Ellen’s and Ellen’s descendants.” She’s adamant it’s still theirs, though “they” have taken it from them. When they reach the house, Miss Rosa doesn’t let Quentin cross through the gate. Quentin wonders what she’s afraid of. He wants to just return to town, but he doesn’t say this to Miss Rosa. Instead, he looks up at the gate—the same one Bon and Henry rode to that day.
Miss Rosa seems to imply that Sutpen’s design is still alive so long as his descendants—meaning Clytie and Jim Bond—continue living there. But given that Rosa, like Sutpen, is of the pre-war South, it’s doubtful she’d consider Clytie and Jim Bond, who both have Black ancestry, rightful heirs of Sutpen’s estate. Thus, her remarks here hint that Henry Sutpen is the estate’s mysterious third inhabitant. Her initial refusal to let Quentin pass through the gate symbolizes her struggle to confront the past, an act that would free her of the scorn that has tormented but also invigorated her for the past 43 years.
Themes
“She’s going to try to stop me,” Miss Rosa says. Quentin asks what “she” has hidden in the house, but Miss Rosa ignores him. She gets out of the buggy and starts to walk the half mile to the house, ignoring Quentin’s protests that they ride there instead. She takes Quentin’s arm, and he leads her to the house. Then she hands him a hatchet wrapped in cloth and says they’ll need it for protection—or to get inside the house, anyway. Rosa suspects that “she” is watching them.
The “she” Rosa is referring to here is Clytie—recall Quentin’s earlier childhood memory of running from Sutpen’s Hundred with some other boys after finding Clytie and Jim Bond there. Miss Rosa’s telling Quentin the full story of her past and of the Old South seems to be what’s inspired her sudden urge to return to Sutpen’s Hundred and confront the demons she’s been stewing over for the past 43 years.
Themes
When Quentin and Miss Rosa arrive at the door to the old house, Miss Rosa urges Quentin to break it open with the hatchet. When Quentin protests, Miss Rosa tries to take the hatchet from him. Quentin pauses a moment before moving to a window and breaking it. Reluctantly, he climbs inside the house. As he approaches the door to open it for Miss Rosa, he hears someone scrape a match behind him. Terrified, he turns around and sees an old woman with “coffee-colored” skin (Clytie).
The act of breaking through the door holds great symbolic value in the novel—it reflects Miss Rosa’s eagerness to put the ghosts of her past to rest—and Quentin’s hesitancy to do so. Quentin’s hesitancy seems to stem from a fear of the unknown. Symbolically, breaking through the door gives him more direct access to a troubled, painful past he’s thus far only had secondhand exposure to through the stories of his elders.
Themes
Quentin’s memory continues. The woman (Clytie) doesn’t say a single word to him. Instead, she calmly walks to the door and opens it for Miss Rosa, as though she’s been expecting her all these years. Miss Rosa enters the house and starts to make her way upstairs. When Clytie urges her not to, Miss Rosa strikes Clytie, and Clytie falls to the ground. Quentin helps her up. She asks who he is, and he tells her. Clytie tells Quentin she knew his grandfather. Then she urges Quentin to stop Miss Rosa from going upstairs. But Miss Rosa continues ahead of him.
This scene mirrors an earlier scene where Clytie tries to prevent Miss Rosa from walking upstairs and confronting Henry about Bon’s murder. On the one hand, the parallels between these two scenes could symbolize the completion of Rosa’s journey toward confronting the past. On the other hand, it could suggest that the earlier scene didn’t happen that way at all—that Quentin is merely projecting his own experiences (witnessing Miss Rosa and Clytie’s altercation) onto the past to create a story that relates to his own life.
Themes
Quentin hears Miss Rosa fall, then he hears a man’s voice. The man, who is Black, identifies himself as Jim Bond.
Despite Sutpen’s efforts to keep the so-called “mistakes” of his past (the mistake of fathering sons of mixed-race ancestry) from undermining his design, Jim Bond’s presence at Sutpen’s Hundred shows that Sutpen has failed at this task. Sutpen’s male heir has outlived Sutpen, and the squalor in which Jim Bond now resides serves to underscore that failure.
Themes
The narrative abruptly skips forward. Quentin has stopped the buggy at Miss Rosa’s gate after returning from Sutpen’s Hundred. This time, Miss Rosa lets Quentin help her down from the buggy, then tells Quentin goodnight and heads inside her house.
The abrupt skip forward here indicates Quentin’s struggle to come to terms with whatever he and Miss Rosa encountered upstairs. This calls into question the reliability of Quentin’s account of events to Shreve as a whole—has Quentin been omitting critical details all along?
Themes
As Quentin walks back to the buggy, he’s “breathing deep” and thinking to himself, “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.” It’s dark by the time he arrives home, and he finally gives in to his fear and runs the distance from the buggy to his front door. He runs upstairs to his room and hurriedly removes his clothes, thinking he’d like to bathe. He can’t tell if he’s asleep or awake.
The detail of Quentin’s “breathing deep” here emphasizes Quentin’s distress. It also calls back to places throughout the previous couple chapters where the narration has called attention to deep breathing or to breathing in general. Deep breathing seems to symbolize Quentin’s internalization of whatever troubling scene he’s just witnessed at Sutpen’s Hundred.
Themes
With no clear transition, the narrative shifts back to Quentin and Rosa’s trip to Sutpen’s Hundred earlier that night. Quentin enters an empty room and sees a man with a “wasted yellow face” and half-closed eyes lying on a bed made up with yellow sheets. The man confirms that he’s Henry Sutpen and that he’s been there for four years. He explains that he’s come home to die.
This shift back to Miss Rosa and Quentin’s visit to Sutpen’s Hundred signals Quentin’s attempt to make sense of whatever he saw there. This passage confirms that Henry Sutpen is indeed the mysterious third person who’s been living at the old, rotting estate. His action to return there to die is a symbolic reclaiming of his birthright—an effort to reverse the damage Bon did when he reentered the Sutpen family’s life and tried to undermine Sutpen’s design.
Themes
The action returns to the present, to Shreve and Quentin’s cold dorm room in Cambridge. Shreve expresses disbelief that after encountering Henry after all these years, Miss Rosa waited another three months to come back and finish the task she set out to do. He asks Quentin why she did this, but Quentin offers nothing in response. Instead, he stares at the window and thinks to himself, “Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore.” Shreve interrupts Quentin’s thoughts, asking if perhaps it’s because Miss Rosa didn’t want to cut herself off from the hate she’s been feeling all these years. Quentin doesn’t respond.
The narrative jumps back and forth in time abundantly and unpredictably in this final chapter, creating a chaotic and tense atmosphere as the story resolves (at least as well as it can) its many unanswered questions. Quentin’s cryptic repetition of the word “nevermore” here suggests that Miss Rosa’s journey back to Sutpen’s Hundred hasn’t laid to rest all the ghosts she hoped it would. To the contrary, the ghosts of the pre-war South—the traumatic legacy of slavery and the region’s continued failure to atone for that legacy—remain horrifyingly alive and full of scorn.
Themes
Shreve and Quentin relate the rest of the story. Three months after Miss Rosa and Quentin discover Henry in the old house, Rosa calls an ambulance to transport Henry to town. Perhaps (Shreve speculates), Clytie has been watching for this all along. Maybe she thinks the ambulance is in fact the wagon that has finally come to bring Henry into town to hang him for shooting Charles Bon. In the present, Quentin imagines Miss Rosa sitting between the ambulance driver and another man, maybe the sheriff’s deputy. He imagines “it may have been she who cried first, ‘It’s on fire!’” as the flames surrounding the old house came into view.
Clytie takes Miss Rosa’s grudge against Sutpen seriously—she believes that, even 43 years later, Rosa is determined to bring the last remaining (legitimate) Sutpen heir to his death. The irony of this is that Clytie is misinterpreting Rosa’s uncharacteristic gesture of mercy. Still, Clytie’s misunderstanding compels her to take action, setting the house on fire and bring Sutpen’s dynasty to an end by her own hand, killing herself and Henry. There is closure in the fact that it’s Clytie who performs this action: as a former enslaved woman, she’s bringing Sutpen’s dynasty and the pre-war, racist culture it was born of to its end, symbolizing that such a culture has no place in the post-war world.
Themes
In Quentin and Shreve’s telling of the story, the ambulance can’t get to the house in time—and Clytie probably knew this before she started the fire. The three occupants of the ambulance rush out, with Miss Rosa screaming at them to look up at the second-story window, where the figure of a man stares down at them. (In the present, Quentin imagines that Clytie might have appeared in the window for a moment, a look of “triumph” on her face.) And then Jim Bond, “the scion, the last of his race,” cries out from somewhere outside the house when he, too, realizes what is happening. But he flees before anyone can tell where his “howling” is coming from.
The description of Jim Bond, Sutpen’s great-grandson, as “the last of his race,” meaning the last surviving Sutpen, echoes Sutpen’s ambition to exist outside the bounds of the broader human story—including outside the bounds of a Black vs. white social hierarchy. Bond’s speechless howling mirrors Miss Rosa’s earlier description of Sutpen as “not articulated in this world.” The link to Sutpen suggests that Bond will be doomed to misery, just as his ancestors were.
Themes
Shreve picks up the story. Miss Rosa returns to town and goes to bed that night knowing “it was all finished now” and that the only thing that remains is “that idiot boy to lurk around those ashes and those four gutted chimneys and howl,” and then Miss Rosa, too, dies.
Miss Rosa dies because with Henry and Clytie gone, she has no Sutpens left to hate—it was her hatred that sustained her for the past four decades. That she passes off Jim Bond as “that idiot boy” perhaps calls into question whether Miss Rosa is aware that Bond is Sutpen’s great-grandson.
Themes
Quentin doesn’t say anything as Shreve speaks; he simply stares at the window. Then he reflects, “I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died,” and then he finally picks up the letter Mr. Compson sent him and finishes reading it.
Quentin’s remark about being older than his years reinforces the great burden he carries as a result of his inherited history—growing up surrounded by all the ghosts, grudges, and regrets of people so consumed by the past has prematurely aged him.
Themes
In his letter, Mr. Compson expresses his hope that in death, Miss Rosa hasn’t escaped “the objects of the outrage and of the commiseration” but will instead join them, so that they “are no longer ghosts but are actual people to be actual recipients of the hatred and the pity.” It was a beautiful but cold day when they buried Miss Rosa, and they had to use picks to break through the ground.
Mr. Compson’s letter conveys his scorn toward Miss Rosa—he hopes that dying will sustain rather than end her hatred. He also expresses the pointlessness of her maintaining a grudge against people who’d long since died. Allegorically, this reflects the South’s stubbornness in clinging to the hierarchy of its pre-war era.
Themes
Shreve laments how each Sutpen met their end: Charles Bon and his mother killed “old Tom,” Charles Bon and Bon’s mistress killed Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie killed Henry. Shreve notes that just one Sutpen remains now: Jim Bond. He asks if Quentin still hears Jim Bond wailing at night, and Quentin says he does.
Shreve’s observation about how each Sutpen met their end reinforces the links between the various characters, who are all connected within the broader human story and who undid one another for human reasons: hatred, betrayal, revenge. Despite Sutpen’s efforts to exist outside of history and society, ultimately, he fails at this pursuit. Bond’s wailing reinforces the persistent suffering that Sutpen has wrought on the people whose lives he’s touched. It also illustrates the lingering burden and pain of inherited history, which continues to haunt Southerners.
Themes
Shreve poses one final question to Quentin: “Why do you hate the South?” Quentin insists he doesn’t. Then to himself, as he “pant[s] in the cold air,” he thinks, “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”
Shreve seems to believe that Quentin’s inability to romanticize and make entertainment of the story of Sutpen’s dynasty reflects his hatred of the South. Though Quentin fiercely denies the accusation, it seems that there’s truth to it, though perhaps not in the way Shreve means. Perhaps the region’s lingering demons make it impossible to be of that place without hating it.
Themes
