The Work
William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! was published by Random House in October 1936 and is widely regarded as his masterpiece and one of the supreme achievements of American fiction. It tells the story of Thomas Sutpen - a poor white man from the mountains of what would become West Virginia - who arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1833 with twenty slaves and a French architect, builds a plantation he calls Sutpen's Hundred out of the wilderness, marries a respectable Southern woman (Ellen Coldfield), has two children by her (Henry and Judith), and then sees his entire 'design' collapse through the return of his son Charles Bon - who is also his son by a previous relationship with a woman of partial Black ancestry in Haiti. Henry kills Charles to prevent the incest of Charles's intended marriage to Judith (who does not know Charles is her half-brother); Sutpen is eventually killed by the grandfather of the woman he has rejected as not good enough to bear his heir; and the last survivor of the dynasty, the idiot Jim Bond (Charles Bon's grandson), is left howling in the ruins of the burned mansion.
The novel is narrated by four separate voices - Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quentin Compson, and (in the final chapter) the exchange between Quentin and his Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon - each of whom reconstructs the Sutpen story from fragments of evidence, rumor, and imagination. The resulting narrative is deliberately incomplete and contradictory, reflecting Faulkner's conviction that the past is not dead but not even past - that history is something that must be endlessly reconstructed and can never be fully known.
Biblical Engagement
2 Samuel 18:33 ('And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!') is the governing emotional and structural image of the novel. David's lament over Absalom - killed by Joab despite David's explicit command that he be treated gently - is the biblical counterpart to Sutpen's inability to prevent the destruction of what he has built. Like David, Sutpen has created the conditions of his own dynasty's destruction through his failure to acknowledge one of his sons; like David, he ends his life having seen his design collapse around him.
2 Samuel 13:28-29 (Absalom's murder of his brother Amnon, who had raped Absalom's sister Tamar) provides the pattern of fratricidal violence that underlies Henry's murder of Charles Bon. In the biblical narrative, Absalom kills his brother to avenge his sister's honor; in Faulkner's novel, Henry kills his half-brother to prevent what he sees as an honor violation (though the reader, like the narrator, is uncertain what exactly motivates Henry - is it incest? is it Charles's Black ancestry?). The parallel is not exact but the structural similarity - a son killing a son to protect an honor conceived in terms of blood purity - is clearly intentional.
2 Samuel 15:14 (David's flight from Jerusalem during Absalom's rebellion: 'And David said unto all his servants that were with him at Jerusalem, Arise, and let us flee; for we shall not else escape from Absalom: make speed to depart, lest he overtake us suddenly, and bring evil upon us, and smite the city with the edge of the sword') provides the image of the patriarch in flight before the consequences of his own actions. Sutpen, like David, builds a dynasty that turns against him; both are fled by those who should protect them, and both die seeing the collapse of everything they built.
The novel's engagement with the biblical narrative of David and Absalom is not simply a set of structural parallels but a theological argument: the God of the biblical narrative punishes David through his own son because of the sins David committed in acquiring and consolidating his power (the murder of Uriah, the taking of Bathsheba). Faulkner's parallel argument is that Sutpen's 'design' - his vision of creating a dynasty that would give him the social standing he was denied as a poor white child - is built on the original sin of American slavery, and the collapse of that design through the return of his unacknowledged mixed-race son is the inescapable consequence of that founding sin.
Genesis 3 (the Fall and its consequences) is implicitly present throughout the novel as the theological background for the idea that the sins of the founding generation ramify through subsequent generations. Sutpen's original sin - his denial of his first wife and son because of their partial Black ancestry - is the act of violence at the origin of his 'design,' and everything that follows is the working out of its consequences.
Author and Context
William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962) was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi. He was the great-grandson of Colonel William Cuthbert Falkner (the original spelling), a Civil War veteran and novelist whose life provided some of the material for the Sutpen story. Faulkner's Nobel Prize lecture (1950) - which explicitly addressed the question of what serious fiction is for in the nuclear age - articulated his conviction that the purpose of fiction is to remind human beings of 'the old verities and truths of the heart' including 'love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.'
Faulkner was raised in a culture saturated with the Bible, and his prose is deeply shaped by the rhythms and imagery of the King James Version. The Yoknapatawpha County novels - The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! - constitute a sustained mythological exploration of the American South as a fallen world haunted by the original sin of slavery, and the biblical framework is never far from the surface.
Absalom, Absalom! was written during the years (1934-1936) when Faulkner was at the height of his creative powers, following the Nobel-worthy achievements of The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932). The Sutpen story had been in his mind for several years before he found the David-and-Absalom frame that gave it its fullest expression.
Narrative Method
The novel's narrative method - the reconstruction of an incomplete and partly unknowable story through multiple contradictory voices - is itself a theological statement about the nature of historical knowledge and the limits of human understanding. No single narrator has access to the whole truth; each reconstructs from fragments shaped by their own investments, wounds, and obsessions. This epistemological humility is consistent with the biblical wisdom tradition's recognition that 'the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?' (Jeremiah 17:9).
The famous final exchange between Quentin and Shreve - 'Why do you hate the South?' / 'I don't hate it. I don't hate it! I don't hate it!' - is Faulkner's most direct engagement with the theological problem of historical guilt: the impossibility of simply leaving behind a past that has formed you, especially when that past is built on injustice.
Critical Reception
The novel's initial reception was respectful but puzzled: the narrative difficulty discouraged casual readers. The novel's rise to canonical status was gradual, achieved through academic study rather than popular success. Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner (1946) was the first major critical reintroduction; Faulkner's Nobel Prize (1949) established his international reputation; and the subsequent decades of academic criticism have produced a vast body of scholarly literature on the novel.
Theological Significance
The novel's theological significance lies in its sustained argument - conducted through the parallel with the David-Absalom narrative - that the sins of the founding generation do not remain in the past but work themselves out through subsequent generations. This is the biblical understanding of corporate sin and historical guilt: the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children (Exodus 20:5). Applied to American slavery, this is not merely a sociological observation but a theological claim: the South's racial ideology was a theological sin as well as a political and economic one, and the Civil War and its aftermath were its divine consequences.
Legacy
Faulkner's influence on American and international fiction has been enormous: García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and Marilynne Robinson all acknowledge their debt to him. The biblical dimension of his work has been analyzed by scholars including Cleanth Brooks, André Bleikasten, and Philip Weinstein.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should work with 2 Samuel 11-18 (David, Bathsheba, Absalom), Genesis 3 (the Fall), Exodus 20:5 (sins of the fathers), Jeremiah 31:29-30 (the new covenant and personal responsibility), Romans 5:12-21 (sin and grace), and Lamentations (the ruins of a destroyed civilization). Psalm 51 (David's penitential psalm) provides the spiritual response to the Davidic sin that Faulkner's Sutpen cannot make.
Further Reading
- Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) - the foundational critical study, with essential treatment of the biblical and theological dimensions. - Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) - a transformative engagement with the racial theology implicit in Faulkner's work. - André Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August (1990) - a psychoanalytic-theological reading.