Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! An Overview

My 1990 paperback.

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! has historically been my favorite of his novels. Perhaps oddly, I hadn’t read it in about 30 years, I guess Faulkner just wasn't part of my mind then.  But he is now.  The novel held up powerfully on this revisit and remains one of my favorite works by the author. Faulkner, we are told, was a master of the “Southern Gothic” genre. Truth be told, this is one of his most Gothic-like novels. More so than The Sound and the Fury, for example. It takes the claustrophobic intensity of that genre and marries it to modernist formal experimentation without sacrificing either tradition.

Most writers who attempt this kind of fusion end up with something that feels like showing off, technical fireworks that distract from the story rather than serve it. Not with Faulkner. The novel opens with Rosa Coldfield’s obsessive voice and that decaying mansion, creating genuine Gothic dread that hangs over everything. Then it sustains that atmosphere through hundreds of pages of nested parentheses, italicized mental archaeology, and fragmented, unreliable voices. The experimental techniques don’t replace the Gothic mood, they amplify it.

Every formal innovation becomes another way to feel the oppressive weight of the past pressing down on the present. This is Gothic storytelling that happens to use modernist methods, not modernist experimentation dressed up in Gothic clothing. The difference matters enormously.

Faulkner builds his story like a psychological pressure cooker. Those first two chapters with Rosa and then Mr. Compson telling the tale don’t just provide exposition, they generate atmospheric dread that makes everything feel inevitable. You’re trapped in that parlor with Rosa, listening to her fevered reconstruction of events she barely witnessed, feeling the weight of her obsession. The Gothic atmosphere isn’t decoration, it’s the emotional engine of the entire novel. Then comes the formal complexity. Faulkner uses italics to blur consciousness between characters, creates thirty-page parentheses that spiral into mental labyrinths, and layers voice upon voice until you sometimes can’t tell who’s speaking. But these techniques serve the Gothic purpose. They make you feel what the characters feel: the impossibility of escaping the past, the way trauma gets inherited and amplified across generations.

Consider how Faulkner handles that extraordinary parenthesis in Chapter 6. Quentin receives Rosa’s letter, a simple piece of correspondence that should take minutes to read. Instead, it explodes into thirty pages of bracketed mental reconstruction. The letter cracks open Quentin’s mind, and the parenthesis becomes a trapdoor into his obsessive reimagining of Sutpen’s story.

The formal technique wonderfully captures psychological reality. This is how trauma works: a small trigger unleashes cascading memories and reconstructions that refuse to stay contained. “Have you ever noticed how often when we try to reconstruct the causes which lead up to the actions of men and women, how with a sort of astonishment we find ourselves now and then reduced to this belief, the only possible belief, that they stemmed from some of the old virtues?”

That question appears in Chapter 4, and it could stand as the novel’s mission statement. All those nested parentheses and italicized mental spirals are literally the process of reconstruction this quote describes. The formal techniques aren’t obstacles to understanding, they’re the path to it. This is a complex story Faulkner is telling, and he tells it extraordinarily well. The tension builds relentlessly as Quentin gradually unravels the truth, or his perceived truth, of what happened. And when the violence finally erupts, it’s overwhelming.

There are five deaths in the novel, but they mostly arrive as a singular bloodbath, the shocking end to chapter 7; devastating, connected by an inexorable logic Faulkner has been coiling through the text like a fuse. But, Henry Sutpen kills Charles Bon at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred many years before that.  Why he kills him is the very heart of the novel.  It isn’t simply because Bon has a mixed-race mistress and child tucked away. Henry pulls the trigger because he discovers that Bon himself is part Black, and possibly even his own half-brother — a revelation that threatens to turn Judith’s marriage into both a racial scandal and a near-incest. That lethal cocktail of Southern racial taboos, patriarchal codes, and twisted family loyalty is what drives Henry to kill a man that he, we are specifically told, "loved."

It’s worth pausing on just how bitterly ironic all of this is. Sutpen himself sets these forces in motion, telling Henry about Bon’s possible Black ancestry and demanding Judith be protected from marrying him, planting the fatal decision in Henry’s mind. Bon, for his part, is not some outsider — he is Henry’s comrade, a fellow Confederate soldier who even saves Henry’s life at Shiloh, and is promoted in rank while Henry is not. The most decorated Confederate in the novel, the one who embodies their battlefield valor, is precisely the man murdered for being partly Black. Faulkner holds up the absurdity of the Southern code in its starkest light: even a hero’s service means nothing if one drop of “tainted” blood stands in the way.

And the rabbit hole goes deeper and stranger. Bon is not just Henry’s friend and Confederate comrade, he is Sutpen’s own son, the living product of Sutpen’s design before he even built Sutpen’s Hundred. Sutpen himself plants the conditions for Bon’s murder, revealing Bon’s racial background and practically demanding Henry protect Judith from a “tainted” marriage. Yet it is Bon — the man who saves Henry’s life at Shiloh, who is promoted in rank while Henry is not — who is murdered because he carries Sutpen’s own blood, the “forbidden” blood. That is the ultimate absurdity: the patriarch engineers a world in which his firstborn, the most heroic Confederate in the novel, is shot dead to preserve a lie about racial purity that was broken by Sutpen himself.

Just as ironically, this murder destroys exactly what it was supposed to protect. Bon dead, Henry a fugitive, Judith unmarried — Sutpen’s carefully engineered dynasty is left with no male heir. So the old man, desperate to keep his “design” alive, turns to Milly Jones, a fifteen-year-old girl, trying to father another son on her. Then comes Wash Jones, the poor white who had practically worshiped Sutpen for decades, seeing him as something godlike. After Milly gives birth to Sutpen’s daughter and Sutpen casually tells Wash that his horse means more to him than Milly and the baby do, Wash’s reverence collapses. He brutally hacks Sutpen to death with a scythe.

It’s not just a moment of rage; it’s the moment Wash sees the idol he had devoted his life to revealed as a monster who valued no one. Wash doesn’t stop there. He kills Milly, his own granddaughter, seeing her as contaminated by her association with Sutpen, and he kills the infant because she represents the failure of everything he had served. Then he kills himself, completing the circle of destruction. That’s five deaths total. Henry kills Bon. Wash kills Sutpen, Milly, the baby, and himself in the horrific climax to Chapter 7.

The violence comes in waves, separated by years but connected by an inexorable logic Faulkner has been building throughout the novel. This is some of the most twisted, perverse, and powerful writing in all of Faulkner’s work. The violence is shocking not only in its raw brutality but in how completely it grows from one root: Sutpen’s relationship with the octoroon woman (who he might have thought was Spanish, which is just weirder), years before the main story begins. That single act unleashes a complex web of miscegenation, racism, and patriarchal fear so tangled that everyone tied to it ends up dead or ruined. Every killing is connected to that secret.

The design Sutpen tries to build is shattered by the design he had already set in motion, long before. The murders hit with tremendous force precisely because they break through all that meditative, obsessive storytelling. You’ve been floating in this stream of consciousness, following these elaborate mental reconstructions, existing in this strange, ephemeral psychological space, and suddenly you’re confronted with blood and bodies. The contrast is electrifying.

Chapter 8 then provides something approaching a straight answer. This is where the formal techniques justify themselves completely. All that withholding, all that delayed revelation, creates power. When you finally understand why Henry pulled the trigger, why Wash swung the scythe, the explanations hit like physical blows.

The pendant detail proves perfect in its devastating simplicity. Judith gives Bon the locket with her picture, but it ends up containing the photo of his other family, the “octoroon and her child.” That image is discovered only after Bon is dead, confirming what Henry had feared rather than motivating him. The token of love becomes the instrument of posthumous truth.

But the deeper tragedy lies in how this single act of violence creates a cascade of further deaths. If Henry hadn’t killed Bon, Sutpen would still have had Henry himself to carry on the line. Bon’s marriage to Judith might have offered a second branch of the dynasty, though there was no certainty of a male heir from it. But Henry’s act of violence erased both prospects at once — Bon was dead, and Henry was effectively lost to the family, leaving Sutpen scrambling to start over through Milly, only to produce a daughter instead. Everything about this is utter failure and ruin for Sutpen.

Faulkner builds this tragic logic step by step, murder by murder, until you can see how perfectly, horribly, it all fits together. The formal complexity serves this revelation. After all that fragmented reconstruction, the simple, brutal sequence of cause and effect becomes visible. Henry’s racism kills Bon. Bon’s death drives Sutpen to rape Milly. Milly’s rape and dismissal drives Wash to kill everyone within reach, including himself. The novel’s experimental techniques make this cascade of violence more shocking, not less. You work so hard to understand the connections, to follow the nested reconstructions and competing voices, that when the pattern finally emerges, it feels like a physical blow.

All that psychological archaeology leads to this: a handful of corpses and the complete destruction of Sutpen’s design.

“Because what WAS is one thing, and now it is not because it is dead, it died in 1861, and therefore what IS - […] I cannot say when to expect me. Because what IS is something else again because it was not even alive then. And since because within this sheet of paper you now hold the best of the old South which is dead, and the words you read written upon it with the best (each box said, the very best) of the new North which has conquered and which therefore, whether it likes it or not, will have to survive, I now believe that you and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live.”

That paragraph from Chapter 4 captures the novel’s central tension.  It is from a letter Bon wrote to Judith and, therefore, given in italics.  The past that supposedly died in 1861 keeps creating conditions for violence in the present. The dead past refuses to stay dead. This temporal collapse drives both the story and the formal techniques. Characters can’t separate past from present because the past hasn’t actually ended. It’s still happening, still demanding responses, still generating violence. The italicized mental reconstructions reflect this psychological reality: when the past won’t stay buried, consciousness becomes a battlefield between then and now.

Faulkner’s genius lies in making his formal innovations serve this thematic obsession. The nested parentheses mirror the way traumatic memory works, how one thought spawns another, how you can’t let anything settle. The blurred voices reflect how the past speaks through the present, how the dead infiltrate the living. The delayed revelations mirror how trauma reveals itself: not all at once, but in fragments that slowly coalesce into devastating clarity.

And it is worth pointing out that Judith, too, is more than a passive figure in the tragedy. She becomes a kind of living ghost, left to hold together the shattered design after Henry flees, after Bon dies, after her father is butchered. She is as much a symbol of the system’s failure as any of the men, a testament to how even those meant to preserve the dynasty are left in a suspended, haunted ruin.

Faulkner also uses Quentin and Shreve’s act of storytelling — reconstructing this Gothic nightmare in a Harvard dorm room decades later — to show how history itself becomes a riddle that consumes the living. Their collaborative retelling is a frame around the entire novel, a signal that the story is not just about the South but about how we tell the South, how we repeat it, re-embroider it, and try to understand what can never fully be known.

And under all of this is the unrelenting question of race, reaching far beyond Bon. Faulkner is writing about an entire society built on racial hierarchy, terrified of its own impurity, and willing to commit any atrocity to preserve a fantasy of white power. Sutpen’s “design” is rooted in a racial lie, and that lie poisons everything.

Time itself feels like a trap in this book. Faulkner’s treatment of time — as a circle, a haunting, a constant replay — is why these events feel fated. Characters cannot move forward because they cannot bury what is behind them. That sense of repetition, of inevitability, is what gives Absalom, Absalom! its crushing power. And Faulkner does not let the reader off easy. The book is deliberately difficult, forcing you to share the same confusion, dread, and obsessive circling that devours its characters. You experience the psychological conditions of their world in real time, which is why the novel is such a demanding but rewarding read.

Absalom, Absalom! succeeds because it treats Gothic atmosphere and modernist technique as complementary rather than competing approaches. The experimental form doesn’t distance you from the emotional reality, it pulls you deeper into it. You don’t just read about obsession and inherited trauma, you experience them through the text’s psychological architecture.

Most experimental fiction asks you to admire the technique. In this novel, Faulkner uses technique to make you feel what the characters feel. The formal innovations become invisible because they’re so perfectly suited to their purpose. A thirty-page parenthesis shouldn’t work, but it does because it captures exactly how a traumatized mind operates.

That is why the novel hits so hard. You’re not just learning about the violence that destroyed the Sutpen family, you’re experiencing the psychological conditions that made that violence inevitable. The Gothic atmosphere promises horror, the modernist techniques deliver it, and the story itself provides the devastating explanation. The combination creates something unique in American literature: a novel that is simultaneously avant-garde and deeply traditional, formally innovative and emotionally devastating. Faulkner powerfully demonstrates that experimental technique can serve Gothic purposes, that formal complexity can heighten rather than diminish dramatic power — that technique should always serve story, never the reverse.

That’s a lesson he could have applied to The Sound and the Fury.

(to be continued)