Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! — Sutpen and the Making of a Myth

[Read Part One] [Read Part Two] [Read Part Three]

Coming back to Absalom, Absalom! after three decades felt like returning to a haunted house you once loved. The place is still there, echoing with monstrous voices, still as impressive and unlivable as ever. I have already unpacked Faulkner’s radical experiments with narrative, Quentin’s psychic collapse, and the South’s impossible “design,” but one last reckoning remains. This is not just a book about a failed family or a doomed culture. It is a book about how collapse itself is transformed into legend. Faulkner lets you see the machinery of myth-making in real time, how rumor and trauma and speculation fuse into a story that outlives its facts. At the molten core of that story is Thomas Sutpen.

Sutpen is more than a character in a Gothic tragedy or a symbol of a collapsing civilization. He is a force of nature, vibrant, unstoppable, with a tragic flaw burning right through his design. He takes wilderness and sculpts it into aristocracy, fathers a dynasty by sheer will, then sets fire to everything he built through blind pride and moral stupidity. Rosa Coldfield’s haunted voice frames him as a demon. Quentin absorbs him as an inherited burden, something lodged in the bloodstream. Shreve, the bright-eyed Canadian outsider, recasts him as a tragic titan out of an epic poem. These three narrators — Rosa the embittered witness, Quentin the broken inheritor, Shreve the myth-maker — raise Sutpen out of history altogether. What is left standing is not a man but a legend, so vivid you can still feel its heat.

Faulkner builds the first version of this legend through Rosa. She is the only one of the novel's narrators who saw Sutpen in flesh and blood, heard his voice, felt the chill of his ambition up close. Yet even Rosa cannot see him clearly. Her voice is saturated with Gothic rage, burned by personal humiliation, warped by the collapse of her family. Her memories carry the truth of her feelings, but not the truth of events. That is what makes her so powerful and so unreliable. She needs Sutpen to be a monster because only a monster could explain the destruction he caused in her life.

Her language is unforgettably poisoned by the Gothic. She describes Sutpen’s Hundred like a haunted fortress, cursed before it was ever completed. She sees Sutpen himself as an unnatural force, more storm than man, driven by a design that had no room for love or decency. Yet Rosa cannot look away. There is a harsh respect buried under her venom. Sutpen may have ruined everything she valued, but he did it with such unstoppable energy that she cannot quite deny his mythic stature.

That tension is the seed of his legend. Rosa hates him, but her storytelling makes him immortal. She repeats his story over and over, shaping him into a monstrous archetype that transcends any individual crime. Faulkner uses her voice to open the novel because it carries that contradiction. She is wounded, yet awestruck. She is terrified, yet compelled. Sutpen comes alive in her telling, half demon, half unstoppable hero, made more unforgettable precisely because she cannot bear to forgive him.

Quentin takes up Rosa’s story like a man carrying poison in his veins.

His father steps in next, giving Quentin a version of the story that feels steadier, more reflective, less fevered than Rosa’s shrieking Gothic nightmare. Mr. Compson does not foam with horror. Instead, he lays out Sutpen’s history with a sort of resigned precision, a voice that seems to carry no illusions. He does not try to protect Quentin, because there is nothing left to protect. This is a man who will eventually drink himself to death in The Sound and the Fury, and you can already feel the slow burn of that collapse. It is almost as if two ghosts meet here — Quentin, who will drown, and his father, who will poison himself with whiskey. Neither of them believes there is a way out of the South’s tangled legacy.

Mr. Compson is not a typical Southerner, not one of those romantic, doomed Cavaliers still longing for some code of honor. He is closer to a nihilist, someone who sees that the entire culture was rotten from the ground up, yet cannot imagine anything to replace it. That makes his storytelling oddly honest, if also fatalistic. He offers Quentin no illusions, no heroic gloss, only a weary account of Sutpen as a man destroyed by the very same design he tried to embody.

Faulkner does something remarkable here. He gives Quentin a story he cannot verify and makes him to carry it anyway, as if it were a birthright. Quentin has never laid eyes on Sutpen, yet he cannot escape him. Sutpen’s legend is baked into Quentin’s childhood, in the decaying mansion he and other boys dared each other to visit, in the whisper of incest rumors, in the old graves. Quentin knows this story before anyone really tells him, because the South planted it in him before he had language for it.

And so Quentin absorbs both Rosa’s raw wound and his father’s bleak fatalism. He tries to hold them together inside one mind. That mind does not hold. He cannot keep Rosa’s shriek separate from his father’s grim acceptance, cannot keep Gothic horror apart from philosophical collapse. It all fuses into one overwhelming inheritance, pressing down on him until there is no room left for his own voice.

Faulkner uses Quentin to show how a legend becomes a prison. Quentin tries to understand why the South fell, why Sutpen failed, why everything rotted from within, but the closer he looks, the more he is drawn into the same trap. The past is not a lesson for him, it is a curse. It devours every calm word his father offered, every attempt at reason. Quentin cannot separate what he knows from what he feels, and that is what destroys him in the end.

Shreve arrives like a fresh breeze. Faulkner brings him in to remind us that stories never stay put. Shreve is Canadian, far enough from Mississippi to treat this entire saga like a fascinating puzzle. Where Rosa rages and Quentin broods, Shreve gleefully reconstructs. He takes all the contradictory bits, the gaps, the rumors, and invents the missing parts. Shreve does not worry about what is true. He needs a story that feels complete, so he builds it.

You can feel how excited Shreve becomes, playing with these pieces, giving Sutpen a grand design worthy of epic poetry. He invents motives, imagines conversations, decorates the story until it gleams. Shreve makes Sutpen larger than life, and in doing so, makes him immortal. Faulkner is honest about this. We see how Shreve essentially creates myth on the fly, transforming a broken family saga into a legend so compelling you almost believe it.

Shreve is the one who finishes the story, the way the South finished its own. He ties up the narrative with a tragic flourish, giving Sutpen the stature of a fallen king. Myth has to satisfy the ache left by reality, so Shreve obliges. The real Sutpen is dead, but Shreve’s version will live on, passed around dormitories and dinner tables, retold by people who have never stepped foot in Mississippi. That is how myth travels.

It might be too easy to treat Sutpen as only a monster. Rosa certainly does. But there is in equal measure a vitality in him that is impossible to ignore. He has a kind of savage determination, the same relentless drive as mythic founders throughout history. He conquers a wilderness, he constructs a grand manor, he makes a family, however horribly. He tries to build a kingdom out of nothing. There is an American impulse in that, one that still echoes.

He fails because the foundation is rotten. His marriage in Haiti, the child he abandoned (all of which happens outside the story), the absolute ruthlessness of his plan, these things presage collapse. Still, you cannot deny the energy. That is what makes him a myth. Monsters who do nothing get forgotten. Sutpen is remembered because he did so much, so boldly, and then lost it all in a cascade of violence.

Faulkner understands this. The novel would not work if Sutpen were merely evil. He is magnetic, impressive, forceful. Rosa’s family and the entire town orbit around him. Even after his death, his name carries enough weight to warp Quentin’s future. That is the power of a mythic hero, even one gone terribly wrong.

At the broadest level, Faulkner is showing how cultures use myth to survive truths they cannot stand. The South could not live with the knowledge that its grand plantation culture was built on stolen labor and moral fraud, so it turned defeat into romance, turned its ruin into a tragic epic. Sutpen’s legend is a miniature version of that. People keep repeating him, reshaping him, refusing to let him vanish. His myth allows the South to dramatize its own collapse as something noble and grand rather than simply rotten.

Quentin’s father sees this with a sort of detached fatalism. Rosa feels it in her bones. Quentin cannot help absorbing it. Shreve, with his clean northern air, recognizes how myth covers failure with poetry. There is nothing abstract about this. It is the raw human impulse to make sense of horror by giving it grandeur. The South lost its bid for independence but told itself it had fought for chivalry and pride. Sutpen built an empire on bondage but died like a tragic hero. That is how you anesthetize moral collapse.

Faulkner does not forgive this, but he understands it. He does not give us a single “truth” about Sutpen. Instead he shows the process, how myth rises out of a culture’s need to redeem the unforgivable.

Sutpen’s Hundred rots. The house decays. The children die. The family line is ruined. But the legend is indestructible. By the time Shreve and Quentin are done retelling, Sutpen feels eternal. Faulkner shows how myth is stronger than stone, stronger than fact. Even in Quentin’s Harvard dormitory, far from Mississippi, Sutpen lives, unstoppable, unforgettable.

That is a horror all its own. Quentin cannot kill the story. Rosa cannot kill the story. Even Wash Jones, with his scythe, cannot kill the story. It keeps moving, shifting, feeding on new fears and new dreams. That is how cultures work. They build heroes out of nightmares, if the nightmare is grand enough. Sutpen is that nightmare, the Gothic dream of the South’s own sins and glories, raised to mythic stature.

Faulkner’s brilliance lies in showing how a people destroy themselves and then retell the destruction as a noble saga. He shows how a man can become an epic even while the society that produced him crumbles. Sutpen is no mere villain, no cautionary tale, no tragic hero alone. He is all of them, folded into a legend that no one can bear to look away from.

There is no final accounting with Thomas Sutpen. He outlives the novel, outlives Rosa’s tormented voice, outlives Shreve’s myth-making inventions. His legend is so overgrown and thorny that the actual man seems long buried under it. And that is fine. I can leave Sutpen where Faulkner left him, rotting under the Mississippi sky.

It is Quentin who stays with me, though, because Quentin is the one who shows how myth seeps into a person until they can no longer stand outside of it. Nobody forces Quentin to live inside the Sutpen legend, but he cannot seem to stand apart from it, either. That is what makes his collapse so haunting. The story grows until it devours him, twisting around every thought, making it impossible for him to believe in any future separate from its ruin.

Faulkner shows how myth is a trap. It begins as a cautionary tale or a local rumor, then grows through retelling, picking up half-truths and inventions until it becomes something stronger than fact. Once that happens, it cannot be killed, and anyone born into its orbit risks losing themselves inside it. Quentin is not an architect of that myth, but he is one of its casualties.

When he repeats “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” you can hear him trying to claw free from a story that feels older than he is. He cannot. The Sutpen legend, stitched together from Rosa’s Gothic rage, his father’s fatalistic history, and Shreve’s grand imaginative epic, has become bigger than the people who tell it. Quentin goes down trying to find where he ends and the story begins.

(to be continued)