Absalom, Absalom! traces Thomas Sutpen’s quest—and ultimate failure—to build a life from the ground up. Born into poverty in the mountains of West Virginia, Sutpen leaves his family and attempts to start from scratch, gradually amassing a substantial fortune before settling in Mississippi, where he builds a plantation and a dynasty. At first, it seems that Sutpen has achieved the impossible, rising above his humble origins to achieve a life entirely of his own making. And decades later, when General Compson recounts stories about Sutpen, he repeatedly stresses Sutpen’s “innocence.” That is, Sutpen either disregards or is unaware of the broader social, economic, and cultural forces (particularly the institution of slavery) that have allowed him to thrive as a white man in a racist society. Instead, he believes his success is the consequence of his ambition alone.
But when a figure from Sutpen’s past, Charles Bon, reappears, it disrupts that innocence and sets into motion a series of events leading to Sutpen’s demise. Charles is the son Sutpen had with his first wife, Eulalia Bon, whom he abandoned after discovering Eulalia had concealed her Black ancestry from him. In essence, Charles’s reappearance shatters the illusion that Sutpen can fully control his own life and remain willfully ignorant of the broader social issues around him. When Sutpen’s past—namely, his racially and economically motivated rejection of his first-born son—catches up with him, it dispels the innocent belief that Sutpen’s ambition alone has propelled the trajectory of his life. To the contrary, the success that Sutpen has seen in his life is inextricably tied to specific circumstances that have allowed him to thrive: namely, his whiteness and the privilege it grants him within the plantation culture of the pre-Civil War South.
Throughout the novel, characters repeatedly speak of Sutpen’s doomed fate or of the curse he has brought upon his family. This explanation does not convey Sutpen’s lack of personal responsibility; rather, it gestures toward the external forces that Sutpen repeatedly tries—and fails—to compete against. Ultimately, Sutpen’s ambition is not great enough to overcome the “mistakes” of his past (Bon). Nor can it insulate him from the circumstances of his present (a depressed Southern economy) or the challenges that plague the human experience more generally (betrayal, misunderstanding, the inevitable passage of time). In this way, Sutpen’s rise and fall illustrates the inability of personal ambition to overcome the cultural, social, and historical forces that shape the broader human story.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Limits of Ambition ThemeTracker
The Limits of Ambition Quotes in Absalom, Absalom!
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.
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.
“[…] 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 […].”
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.
“Yes. I remember your grandpaw. You go up there and make her come down. Make her go away from here. Whatever he done, me and Judith and him have paid it out. You go and get her. Take her away from here.”
