Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! — Made, Not Born

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

I’m standing in the smoldering ruins of Sutpen’s Hundred. The big house is gone—burned down to its bones. I can still smell the smoke and soot, still feel the heat lingering in the air. I move carefully through the blackened debris, pushing aside charred fragments with the toe of my boot. Everything that once stood here—the ambition, the legacy, the illusion of order—is ash now.

And yet, things remain. Figures. Echoes. Debris that isn’t just physical. The novel doesn’t end neatly, because Faulkner doesn’t believe in neat endings. What he leaves behind is more disturbing: pieces of people, fragments of memory, unanswered questions—and characters whose stories don’t conclude so much as hang there, unfinished, unresolved, vibrating with psychic tension.

Here in the rubble, I see Henry Sutpen first—or what’s left of him. The son who pulled the trigger that blew apart a marriage that probably wasn't going to happen because of a family secret born decades earlier in Haiti. The secret of his half-brother, Charles Bon. What are the odds? That the abandoned son from a discarded first marriage would meet his half-brother by accident, in New Orleans, before the war, and that the two would enlist together in the Confederate Army? They form a bond deep enough for Charles to follow Henry home.

It sounds mythic because it is. Faulkner builds it that way, with the strange, inevitable logic of a tragedy unfolding along fault lines nobody can see until the quake hits. Henry’s bullet didn’t just kill Bon. It killed the Sutpen line. It turned the plantation into a mausoleum. And yet, years later, Henry comes back—not to explain, not to repair, but just to die. That’s what he says. He came home to die. Which means, in some quiet, sickened part of himself, he still thought of this as “home.”

And I find that even more disturbing than the murder. Because it suggests that the design still had some hold on him, even after it had destroyed him. He didn’t come to make peace with it. He came to let it finish its work.

Somewhere nearby, beneath the ash and ruin, there is Clytie. She was always there. Watching. Waiting. Serving. She isn’t a marginal character, though Faulkner makes her seem like one. She is Sutpen’s daughter by an enslaved woman, his blood as much as Henry and Judith...and Charles Bon for that matter. But her role is to serve, to preserve, to remain voiceless. Until the end, when she sets the fire that ends it all. She burns Henry alive. Burns the house. Burns herself along with all the rest. What an inglorious blaze! Maybe she finally saw it couldn’t go on. Or maybe it was her only act of authorship in a story that had always used her.

Her silence is not passivity. It is survival. And then, finally, refusal. That fire isn’t just destruction. It’s burial. It’s ceremony. She chooses how the story ends, even if no one asked her to. Especially because no one asked her to.

A few steps further and I find (or rather hear) Jim Bond (Bon). If he’s still alive, he’s howling in the distance somewhere, feral and incomprehensible. The last Sutpen. Not Bon. Not Henry. Not Judith. Not some noble heir. The last link in the chain is a child of mixed race, of mental impairment, a boy described in terms so grotesque it’s hard not to wince. He is the final proof that Sutpen’s design failed. The heir who was never supposed to exist. And Faulkner leaves him there, barely human, a loose end the story refuses to tie up. Because it can’t.

Jim Bond is the future no one wants. The result of the Sutpen lineage and its denial of everything it couldn’t control. Faulkner doesn’t imagine a future for Jim Bond because the South couldn’t. He is not just the last Sutpen. He is what’s left when the myths collapse and only the flesh survives. And like so many others in this novel, he has no mother. She is never named, never seen, never mentioned. She is simply absent—another ghost the story leaves behind. In this family saga full of patriarchs, failed sons, and haunted daughters, mothers are almost an afterthought, a silence so vast it becomes part of the design itself.

Then there’s the ghost that haunts the whole novel: the “octoroon” woman. She is one-eighth of something forbidden. “We even made laws which declare the one eighth of a specific kind of blood shall outweigh seven eighths of another kind,” as Compson says to Quentin in Chapter 4. And I have to admit—on this reread, she surprised me. I had forgotten her. She had slipped beneath the surface of my memory, just as she slips beneath the narrative itself. But there she was again, cropping up repeatedly in the middle portion of the novel, hovering just long enough to unsettle everything, and then vanishing again.

She is never named. She once visited the graves at Sutpen Hundred but Faulkner does not reveal her to us in spite of several paragraphs about the visit.  We know she wept and sniffed a fragrance for comfort, for example, but she is to remain a mystery, a Gothic spirit with no voice, no interiority. She is referred to in terms of race only—"the octoroon woman" or some version thereof—and that tells you everything about the design she was expelled from. Her body mattered. Her ancestry mattered. Her personhood did not. Faulkner doesn’t forget her; he erases her with precision because that is what Sutpen did. The design required it.

She is the mother of Charles Bon. The origin of the entire moral fracture in the novel. Her existence undoes everything. Her racial ambiguity makes Sutpen’s dream of a dynasty untenable. And rather than deal with that, Sutpen simply abandons her and the child. And that act of abandonment—that violent forgetting—becomes the seed of the novel’s entire tragedy.

That she goes unnamed is not just a detail. It is the point. The South’s aristocratic fantasy was built on women like her. Silenced. Used. Forgotten. Necessary, but invisible. And in this novel, she comes back in the form of her son, and later in her grandson, and in the bloodline that will not be cleansed. The woman herself never reappears. But the story keeps turning around her absence, orbiting the place where her name should be.

Charles Bon and Clytie, then, are motherless in the most absolute sense. They are born into the story without origin, without maternal anchor, almost as if they were made—not born. Brought into being by narrative necessity or ancestral karma, but without the normal bond to lineage or nurture. Their mothers have been erased so fully they become mythic figures themselves—ghosts of possibility. And in that way, they echo Sutpen himself: a man who seems to spring fully formed out of some primordial backwoods wilderness, with no real past and no roots. His children mirror this origin-by-force rather than by family.

Even characters who technically have mothers—Judith, Henry, Quentin—function in a motherless atmosphere. Ellen Coldfield exists, but fades quickly, ineffectual and ill, absorbed into the background like a piece of furniture. Quentin's own mother is completely absent from Absalom, Absalom! despite being prominent in The Sound and the Fury. The maternal voice is marginalized, then deleted.

It’s tempting to take that one step further and say the entire South in Faulkner’s imagination is motherless. Built not on continuity but rupture. Not born but assembled—designed, declared, and doomed. That might be going too far. But so does Faulkner. And like Quentin, we are left trying to carry what can’t be borne.

Even Quentin, the listener, the absorber, the one who carries all these voices in his head, doesn’t survive the story. Not really. He becomes a casualty in The Sound and the Fury, but the seeds of his collapse are planted here. He doesn't narrate this novel so much as host it. It invades him. By the end, he’s repeating, "I dont hate it!" over and over, as if he knows that he’s already lost. Not just to history, but to myth. To memory. To all the unburied dead.

Quentin carries the design in his psyche. The fire may consume the house, but the story remains in his bloodstream. He can’t disown it. He can’t explain it. He can only inherit it, and let it devour him. It is a fascinating progression of generational trauma.

Faulkner didn’t forget these characters. He didn’t tie them off because he knew they couldn’t be. They are the novel’s debt. Its moral remainder. Absalom, Absalom! is a novel full of echoes and silences, stories told through gaps and absences, through characters who linger not because they matter to the plot but because they refuse to disappear from the minds of others. They are truly living memories, which, I suppose, Quentin couldn't take. I have empathy for him more so than almost any other Faulkner character. Poor guy.

This isn’t just a novel about a family that failed. It’s about the people that family tried to forget—and who, by surviving, testify to the collapse of the entire design.

I admire this novel deeply. It is a complex story, told in a sophisticated, sometimes maddening fashion. You have to work for it. You have to be willing to get lost, to reread pages, to piece the chronology together like Quentin himself. And the mystery of it—that slow revelation of horror—keeps you turning pages. Then the murders hit. Bon at the gate. Wash Jones with the scythe. The sudden violence stuns you. And finally comes the collapse. The ash. The howl. The ruins.

It is the anti-quest. The epic fail. A generational suicide. 1 out of 10 southern white males who served died in battle. Many more died of disease. Almost everyone was wounded.  And yet, somehow, it is all marvelous to behold. What writing!

Unlike The Sound and the Fury, which offers difficult, though brilliant, storytelling in service of a comparatively thin narrative, Absalom, Absalom! gives us a dense, sophisticated tale told in a form that matches its subject. It is not difficulty for its own sake. It is mystery as method, complexity as a way of experiencing historical trauma. You’re piecing the collapse back together, living through it, absorbing it the way Quentin does.

And when you take all of it in, when you finally see the whole design, such as it is (or was), you’re left with a story that rewards your effort in full. It devastates, but it allures you as well. It earns your attentiveness. It’s not only worth the effort. Realization through the effort may very well be the point.

(Assisted by Claude and ChatGPT.)