One of the aspects of Absalom, Absalom! that makes the novel so difficult to read is its narrative perspective. The perspective shifts frequently—and often without clear or obvious transition—as different narrators tell their version of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, the novel’s main character. The book’s complicated, meandering narrative style reflects one of its central themes: the idea that a person’s understanding of history is subjective, flawed, and incomplete. As Quentin listens to the elderly Miss Rosa Coldfield’s embittered tirade against Thomas Sutpen, the “demon” who insulted her honor and doomed her family to a lifetime of suffering, his understanding of Sutpen as a cruel, calculating man is filtered through the lens of Miss Rosa’s especially biased, spiteful perspective. But in between Quentin’s visits with Miss Rosa, Quentin’s father, Mr. Compson, relates to Quentin a far more sympathetic story of Sutpen’s plight. Mr. Compson’s version details Sutpen’s humble beginnings in the mountains of West Virginia, his ambition, and his supposed “innocence.”
Complicating matters further is the fact that, for the most part, none of the storytellers who enlighten Quentin about Sutpen are describing events they witnessed firsthand. For example, the stories that Mr. Compson tells Quentin are based on the stories Mr. Compson has heard from his own father, General Compson—Sutpen’s only friend. And the story of Sutpen’s life that General Compson passed down to his son is itself incomplete. Ultimately, all General Compson knows of his friend comes from what he was able to observe firsthand or from the cherry-picked details Sutpen deemed fit to share with him.
When Quentin later relates these stories to his college roommate, Shreve, at Harvard, it only further compromises their factual integrity: not only has Shreve never met any of the people who feature in Quentin’s stories, but as a Canadian, Shreve lacks the cultural and historical context to fully appreciate the weight and importance of the stories Quentin is telling him (which mostly take place in the American South). The complex, multifaceted narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! rejects the notion of a single, objective understanding of history, instead presenting history—and, in a broader sense, truth—as a collage of competing, subjective perspectives.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Storytelling, Perspective, and Truth ThemeTracker
Storytelling, Perspective, and Truth Quotes in Absalom, Absalom!
Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now—the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times;
His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.
Maybe you have to know anybody awful well to love them but when you have hated somebody for forty-three years you will know them awful well so maybe it’s better then maybe it’s fine then because after forty-three years they cant any longer surprise you or make you either very contented or very mad.
It was a day of listening too—the listening, the hearing in 1909 even yet mostly that which he already knew since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 […].
He might not have gone out of his way to keep Sutpen in jail, but doubtless the best possible moral fumigation which Sutpen could have received at the time in the eyes of his fellow citizens was the fact that Mr Coldfield signed his bond—something he would not have done to save his own good name even though the arrest had been a direct result of the business between himself and Sutpen—that affair which, when it reached a point where his conscience refused to sanction it, he had withdrawn from and let Sutpen take all the profit, refusing even to allow Sutpen to reimburse him for the loss which, in withdrawing, he had suffered, though he did permit his daughter to marry this man of whose actions his conscience did not approve. This was the second time he did something like that.
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.
That’s what Miss Rosa heard. Nobody knows what she thought.
There was no time, no interval, no niche in the crowded days when he could have courted Judith. You can not even imagine him and Judith alone together. Try to do it and the nearest you can come is a projection of them while the two actual people were doubtless separate and elsewhere—two shades pacing, serene and untroubled by flesh, in a summer garden […].
“[…] Oh he was shrewd, this man whom for weeks now Henry was realising that he knew less and less, this stranger immersed and oblivious now in the formal, almost ritual, preparations for the visit, finicking almost like a woman over the fit of the new coat which he would have ordered for Henry, forced Henry to accept for this occasion, by means of which the entire impression which Henry was to receive from the visit would be established before they even left the house, before Henry ever saw the woman: and Henry, the countryman, the bewildered, with the subtle tide already setting beneath him toward the point where he must either betray himself and his entire upbringing and thinking, or deny the friend for whom he had already repudiated home and kin and all […].”
That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.
Now you will ask me why I stayed there. I could say, I do not know, could give ten thousand paltry reasons, all untrue, and be believed:—
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.
“Yes,” Quentin said. He sounds just like Father he thought, glancing (his face quiet, reposed, curiously almost sullen) for a moment at Shreve leaning forward into the lamp, his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless, the twin moons of his spectacles glinting against his moonlike rubicund face, smelling (Quentin) the cigar and the wistaria, seeing the fireflies blowing and winking in the September dusk.
But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do […]
“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.’ […]”
There would be no deep breathing tonight.
That was why it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived—in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false.
—Yes. What else can I do now? I gave him the choice. I have been giving him the choice for four years.
Wait. Listen. I’m not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because 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 aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves […] and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget.
