The main story of Absalom, Absalom! takes place in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. It traces the rise and fall of the enigmatic Thomas Sutpen, who built his sprawling plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred, on the outskirts of the town of Jefferson. The novel opens with Quentin, a young man whose grandfather sitting in the stuffy, darkened house of an elderly shut-in, Miss Rosa Coldfield. Quentin’s grandfather, General Compson, was friends with Sutpen, while Rosa’s sister Ellen was married to Sutpen (and Rosa herself was once engaged to him, too). Miss Rosa has nursed an intense hatred toward Sutpen for the past 43 years because of the anguish and suffering to which he’s supposedly “doomed” her family. Now, she has asked requested that Quentin listen to her tell her story.
Rosa describes Sutpen’s arrival in Jefferson in 1833, the fortune he made there, and the family he started with Rosa’s much-older sister, Ellen. Sutpen and Ellen had two children together, Henry and Judith. Rosa claims that Sutpen used her family’s good name, marrying Ellen to gain “respectability.” She describes how Henry later fought alongside Judith’s fiancé, Charles Bon, in the Civil War—and then shot him dead outside the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred as Judith stood waiting in her wedding dress.
Rosa describes the yearly visits she and her father, Goodhue Coldfield, would make to Sutpen’s Hundred, and how Ellen became a shell of her former self when she married Sutpen. She portrays Sutpen as a man too preoccupied with his own ambition to give much care or affection to his family.
After Rosa finishes that day’s story, Quentin returns home and listens to his father, Mr. Compson, tell his own stories about Sutpen. Mr. Compson fills in details that Miss Rosa left out and sometimes contradicting her version of events and also recounts Sutpen’s arrival in Jefferson. He describes how his father, General Compson, loaned Sutpen seed cotton to plant, and he details the construction of Sutpen’s grand mansion. He also tells Quentin about the dubious business venture that Sutpen convinced Mr. Coldfield to join him in, Sutpen’s engagement to Ellen Coldfield, and the elaborate wedding that hardly anybody attended.
Mr. Compson’s story fills in more details of Judith’s engagement to Charles Bon, Henry’s friend from college who accompanies Henry to Sutpen’s Hundred over the Christmas holiday one year. Bon is a little older than Henry and from New Orleans; Henry admires Bon’s refinement and natural ease and tries to imitate him. Rosa doesn’t meet Bon and only hears about what he’s like through Ellen, who seems determined to force a romance between Judith and Bon.
The second Christmas that Bon and Henry spend at Sutpen’s Hundred, Sutpen summons Henry to the library, and they get into an argument that upsets Henry so much that he rejects his birthright and leaves with Bon that night. Nobody in town knows what the fight is about. Despite Henry and Bon’s abrupt departure, everyone carries on as though nothing is wrong, and Rosa continues to sew Judith’s wedding dress.
Soon after, the Civil War begins, and Sutpen, Henry, and Bon go off to fight. Meanwhile, Mr. Coldfield, a conscientious objector, locks himself in the attic after passing troops loot his store, and he remains there until his death. Ellen has died by this point, as well. It’s now 1864, and Rosa, orphaned and destitute, goes to live at Sutpen’s Hundred.
Later, in the novel’s present, Mr. Compson walks outside and presents Quentin with a letter that Bon wrote to Judith while he was away fighting in the war, explaining that Judith kept the letter and gave it to Quentin’s grandmother following Bon’s death. As Mr. Compson and Quentin sit together on the veranda, Mr. Compson continues his story, speculating about what the argument between Henry and Sutpen was about. Mr. Compson believes that Sutpen went to Bon’s home in New Orleans and discovered that he had a mixed-race mistress and a child there—meaning he would be committing bigamy by marrying Judith.
In Mr. Compson’s telling of the story, Bon is scheming and opportunistic, seducing Henry with his charm as much as Judith. In fact—at least at first—Henry eagerly encourages the courtship between Bon and Judith. But things change after Sutpen tells Henry about the other woman. After this (in Mr. Compson’s telling) Henry accompanies Bon to New Orleans to confirm whether Sutpen’s admission is true. There, Bon scandalizes Henry by taking him to the brothel where the mistress lives. Henry urges Bon to break things off with the mistress.
After their trip to New Orleans, Bon and Henry head north to Mississippi and enlist in the military. Henry remains fearful that Bon will marry Judith before breaking things off with the other woman. After four years, Bon sends Judith a letter (the letter that Mr. Compson has presented to Quentin) telling her it’s finally time for them to marry. Not long after, Henry and Bon return to Sutpen’s Hundred, and Henry kills Bon at the gate.
Sometime later, Quentin returns to Miss Rosa’s house, and the story continues from her perspective. Miss Rosa’s story picks up after Wash Jones, a squatter who’d been living on Sutpen’s property, informs Miss Rosa of Bon’s murder. After Bon’s death, Rosa helps Clytie (Sutpen’s daughter with an enslaved woman) and Judith carry Bon’s coffin to the gravesite. Following the burial, the three women continue to live in Sutpen’s house, barely scraping by as they await Sutpen’s return from the war. When Sutpen returns, he hardly reacts to the news of Bon’s murder.
Later, Sutpen proposes to Rosa, who accepts. Then one day he insults her, causing her to call off the engagement, leave Sutpen’s Hundred, and become a shut-in in her father’s old house. (Later in the book, it’s revealed that Sutpen suggested to Rosa that he’d only marry her after they had sex and she gave birth to a male heir.)
In the present, the story picks up in Quentin and his roommate Shreve’s dorm room at Harvard. Quentin has just received a letter from his father announcing Rosa’s death. The letter’s arrival has prompted Shreve, a Canadian, to ask Quentin to tell the story of Sutpen. As Quentin tells Shreve the story, Shreve repeats sections back to him, occasionally interjecting with glib, joking remarks.
This section fills in details about the aftermath of Bon’s death, describing how his son (Charles Etienne) and mistress travel to Mississippi to visit Bon’s grave. After the mistress’s death, Charles Etienne comes to live with Judith and Clytie at Sutpen’s Hundred. They care for him but didn’t offer much affection to the grieving boy. His lonely childhood and confusion about his racial identity lead him to grow up to be a troubled and sometimes violent man. Eventually he marries an unnamed Black woman and has a son named Jim Bond with her. They live in an old slave cabin on Sutpen’s property, and Charles Etienne works the land until falling ill with Yellow Fever. Judith cares for him until his death; shortly after, she too succumbs to the illness and dies. Clytie raises Jim Bond and lives with him in the house after the others die. In the present, Quentin tells Shreve about a shocking admission Rosa made to him: there has been someone else hiding in the cabin.
Quentin and Shreve continue to tell the story of Sutpen, describing his impoverished childhood in the mountains of West Virginia. The family later moves to Tennessee and works for a wealthy planter, who also owns enslaved people. One day, young Sutpen approaches the planter’s mansion to deliver a message, and the Black enslaved man orders Sutpen to use the back door, humiliating him. It’s at this point that Sutpen conceives of his “design”: his ambitious plan to acquire so much wealth and respect that nobody will ever shut the door on him or any of his sons ever again.
After this, Sutpen leaves his family and travels to the West Indies, where he makes a fortune. He marries a woman named Eulalia Bon and has a child with her. After discovering the woman concealed her Black ancestry from him, he abandons her and the child but continues to support them. This child, it’s revealed, is Charles Bon—a fact Quentin only learned from Miss Rosa. Quentin and Shreve believe that this is what Sutpen told Henry in the library that fateful Christmas night.
In Quentin and Shreve’s imagined version of events, Bon’s motives for courting Judith and inserting himself into the Sutpens’ affairs are unclear. Perhaps he woos Judith to get back at Sutpen for his abandonment; perhaps his mother put him up to the task. Or perhaps he simply wanted Sutpen to acknowledge him as his son and only fell in love with Judith incidentally. In Quentin and Shreve’s version of the story, Sutpen seeks out Henry during the war and tells him about Bon’s Black ancestry, and this—not the incest or the mistress—is what causes Henry to turn on Bon and eventually kill him.
Quentin and Shreve’s version of the story also describes Sutpen’s failed efforts to regain his former glory following the war and Sutpen’s death. After Rosa calls off the engagement, Sutpen initiates a sexual relationship with Wash Jones’s granddaughter, Milly. The girl gets pregnant but gives birth to a girl—not a male heir—so Sutpen insults her, and Wash kills Sutpen in retaliation before killing Milly, the baby, and himself.
Finally, in the present, Quentin describes to Shreve how Miss Rosa took him to Sutpen’s Hundred to find the person Rosa claimed was hiding in the house where Clytie and Jim Bond still live. Despite Clytie’s protests, they walk upstairs and finds an old, dying Henry lying in a bedroom upstairs. Three months later, Rosa summons an ambulance to deliver Henry medical attention, but Clytie mistakes the ambulance for the authorities and sets the house on fire, killing herself and Henry as Jim Bond looks on and wails from outside.
In the present, Shreve tells Quentin he has one more question for him: why does Quentin hate the South? Quentin insists—first aloud to Shreve, and then silently to himself, that he doesn’t hate the South.
