William Faulkner's Absalom

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

revealed in the conflicts that Henry Sutpen undergoes in
Absalom, Absalom.
Thomas Sutpen is the son of a poor mountain farmer who founded the
Sutpen estate. Thomas Sutpen stands for all the great and noble qualities
of the South, and at the same time represents the failure of the South by
rejecting the past and committing the same types of acts that his ancestors
did (Brodhead 34). He rejects his own father to adopt a plantation owner
as his surrogate father, who acts as a model of what a man is supposed to
be. When the plantation owner tells Sutpen to use the back door instead of
the front door, Faulkner is using this as an example of the negative
southern mores of the period. This act changes Sutpen from a boy wanting
no privileges into a man wanting everything and is what started Thomas
Sutpen's quest to be better than his father. To fulfill his quest, Sutpen
spends his entire life trying to repeat the past only to correct it (Bloom
38). He has a grand design to be ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

out of his plan, therefore causing his own failure. Faulkner
makes his reader realize that Sutpen's failure represents the failure of
the South.
In Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner uses three narrators. Of the three
narrators, Quentin Compson is the main narrator. Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson
are secondary narrators used to express their own sense of hatred and
prejudice towards the South (Thompson 99). Faulkner uses these narrators
to explain the negative mores and morals of the south. Each narrator
misunderstands the cultural patterns of the South, hates it, and has to
find a way to deal with it. Quentin tries to prove that he is a better man
than his father is by being a ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: