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Literary Devices
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Key Examples in Absalom, Absalom!
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Cassandra :
In a passage that introduces the character of Clytie, short for Clytemnestra, Faulkner alludes to figures from Greek mythology and foreshadows the death of Thomas Sutpen:
He named Clytie as he named them all, the one before Clytie and Henry and Judith even, with that same robust and sardonic temerity, naming with his own mouth his own ironic fecundity of dragon’s teeth which with the two exceptions were girls. Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name her Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who must have almost taught himself to read)——–
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Sphinx:
As she recounts her return to Sutpen's Hundred following Henry's murder of Charles Bon, Rosa uses several allusions to mythology in her description of Clytie:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I could see nothing at first: then gradually the face, the Sutpen face not approaching, not swimming up out of the gloom, but already there, rocklike and firm and antedating time and house and doom and all, waiting there (oh yes, he chose well; he bettered choosing, who created in his own image the cold Cerberus of his private hell)-the face without sex or age because it had never possessed either: the same sphinx face which she had been born with, which had looked down from the loft that night beside Judith's [...]
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Faustus :
Summarizing what he has learned from Quentin about the Sutpen and Coldfield families, Shreve, a student at Harvard, makes multiple allusions to figures associated in Christian thought with sin and evil:
Unlock with LitCharts A+“That this Faustus, this demon, this Beelzebub [...] was merely engaged in one final frenzy of evil and harm-doing before the Creditor overtook him this next time for good and all;—this Faustus who appeared suddenly one Sunday with two pistols and twenty subsidiary demons and skuldugged a hundred miles of land out of a poor ignorant Indian and built the biggest house on it you ever saw and went away with six wagons and came back with the crystal tapestries and the Wedgwood chairs to furnish it [...]"
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The South :
Through the figure of Shreve, one of Quentin's fellow students at Harvard, Faulkner satirizes what he regards as the condescending attitudes toward the South held by those who live in the North of the United States. In the later chapters of the novel, Quentin recounts what he has learned about the events surrounding the deaths of Thomas Sutpen and Charles Bon, and Shreve takes a morbid interest in his classmate's tale, repeatedly and incorrectly assuming that Rosa is Quentin's aunt or cousin:
Unlock with LitCharts A+“You mean she was no kin to you, no kin to you at all, that there was actually one Southern Bayard or Guinevere who was no kin to you? then what did she die for?” and that not Shreve’s first time, nobody’s first time in Cambridge since September: 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)—"
Related Themes:
