Sutpen’s “design” symbolizes the limits of ambition and the inability of any person to exist outside the broader human story. Sutpen’s design—the term he and others use to describe his great ambition to achieve wealth and “respectability” in the plantation culture of the pre-war South—leads him to treat people with cold indifference, exploiting them to meet his ambitious ends. He does so believing that he can not only rise above the social and economic hierarchies that so disadvantaged him as a youth (Sutpen was born into a poor family and disrespected because of it), but also that he can achieve so much power that he may exist beyond the reach of society and other people altogether. Ultimately, though, Sutpen’s indifference toward and exploitation of others becomes his demise: his rejection of his illegitimate son Charles Bon due to Bon’s mixed-race ancestry deprives him of an heir to his dynasty when Sutpen’s legitimate son, Henry, murders Bon, forcing Henry to go into hiding. Later, he tries to produce a new heir by impregnating Wash Jones’s granddaughter Milly. But when Jones overhears Sutpen cruelly insult Milly for giving birth to a girl, he murders Sutpen in retaliation, effectively proving that Sutpen cannot pursue his ambition without taking into account how that ambition impacts others. Regardless of his aspirations to rise above his humble roots and above humanity altogether, he is nevertheless a part of the broader human story, and his actions have consequences.
Sutpen’s Design Quotes in Absalom, Absalom!
He brought the two women deliberately; he probably chose them with the same care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses and mules and cattle—which he bought later on.
I waited for him exactly as Judith and Clytie waited for him: because now he was all we had, all that gave us any reason for continuing to exist, to eat food and sleep and wake and rise again: knowing that he would need us, knowing as we did (who knew him) that he would begin at once to salvage what was left of Sutpen’s Hundred and restore it.
I mean that he was not owned by anyone or anything in this world, had never been, would never be, not even by Ellen, not even by Jones’ granddaughter. Because he was not articulated in this world. He was a walking shadow.
“So he just wanted a grandson,” he said. “That was all he was after. Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than the theatre, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn’t it.”
“His trouble was innocence. All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life […].”
“[…] ‘I found that she was not and could never be, through no fault of her own, adjunctive or incremental to the design which I had in mind, so I provided for her and put her aside.’ […]”
—Yes. What else can I do now? I gave him the choice. I have been giving him the choice for four years.
Sutpen’s Design Symbol Timeline in Absalom, Absalom!
