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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Absalom, Absalom!, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling, Perspective, and Truth
The South
The Limits of Ambition
Social Taboos, Racism, and Inherited Trauma
Summary
Analysis
The narrative picks up in 1910 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Quentin and his roommate Shreve, a Canadian, are sitting in their dorm room at Harvard. An opened letter sits on the table—it’s from Quentin’s father, announcing Miss Rosa’s recent death and burial. She had been in a coma for weeks before her death and died painlessly in her sleep. The letter’s arrival has necessitated Quentin’s catching Shreve up to speed about who Miss Rosa was to him and his family. Quentin describes her as “an old lady that died young of outrage in 1866 one summer,” which only increases Shreve’s curiosity. It prompts Shreve to make a request that he (and so many others at Harvard) have requested of Quentin before: “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
Chapter 6 introduces a new narrative perspective: that of Quentin’s Canadian roommate, Shreve. Shreve’s perspective shines new light on the Sutpen story. As a Northerner, he considers Sutpen through the lens of an outsider and doesn’t have Quentin’s personal attachment to the region and people the story is about. This could supply his perspective with an objectivity that other characters’ versions have lacked. The detail of Rosa’s death is shocking and sudden; given its juxtaposition with Rosa’s shocking admission about the person hiding inside Sutpen’s old house that concluded the previous chapter, one can’t help but wonder whether this mystery is related to her death in any way. Finally, the detail of Quentin’s classmates at Harvard pestering him with questions about the South—many of which are insulting (“Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”) emphasizes how alien the region is to people who don’t live there. Outsiders’ dismissal of the South also shows how the South has remained in the past, having failed to recover—economically or culturally—from the devastation of the Confederacy’s loss of the Civil War.
Themes
Quentin has been telling Shreve what happened after Miss Rosa told him that someone was hiding in the old house on Sutpen’s Hundred. Shreve is shocked that Miss Rosa, who apparently hadn’t left her house in 43 years, could know that someone was hiding out in Sutpen’s Hundred and then would leave in a buggy at midnight to confirm her suspicion. As they talk, Shreve keeps calling Miss Rosa “Aunt Rosa,” and Quentin repeatedly corrects him. Quentin assures Shreve that he’s got it right—this is exactly what Miss Rosa did. Throughout the rest of their conversation, he continues confirming or correcting Shreve as Shreve relates the stories that Quentin has already told him.
As an outsider, Shreve expresses skepticism toward elements of the story Quentin takes for granted—he reasonably questions how a shut-in like Miss Rosa could possibly know that somebody is hiding in Sutpen’s Hundred when she hasn’t left her house in decades. Shreve’s error in calling Miss Rosa “Aunt Rosa” reflects his unfamiliarity with—and lack of respect for—the Southern customs that shaped Quentin’s upbringing. To Shreve, the people in Quentin’s story are merely quirky characters—they aren’t real people, and their suffering has no bearing on his personal experience as it does Quentin’s.
Themes
Shreve repeats back the basic arc of Rosa’s life, starting with the childhood she spent “in a household like an overpopulated mausoleum” and describing the lifetime she spent hating everyone. He speaks of Mr. Coldfield’s shutting himself inside the attic to avoid “being drafted in the Rebel army,” and how Rosa’s being left a penniless orphan following Mr. Coldfield’s death led her to Thomas Sutpen for security.
Shreve’s narration and abundant clarifying questions explicitly present the Sutpen saga as a frame story. In previous chapters, where characters tell their version of Sutpen’s story with fewer interruptions, it’s easier for the reader to forget that they are hearing about Sutpen through a third party’s incomplete, subjective account of his life.
Themes
Shreve’s account also sheds light on the insult that caused Rosa to leave Sutpen’s Hundred: Sutpen suggested he and Rosa have sex before marrying, and if Rosa became pregnant with a male heir, then they’d marry. After Rosa left (in Shreve’s summary), Sutpen turned to a “successor,” which ultimately led to his death by a “scythe.” Shreve refers to Sutpen as “Faustus,” a “demon,” and “Beelzebub” in his retelling. Quentin affirms that everything Shreve has repeated back to him is correct.
This is apparently the detail Rosa was too ashamed or unwilling to convey firsthand—it’s unclear how Quentin learned this detail (for it was Quentin who passed it along to Shreve), but it’s likely that Mr. Compson filled in the blanks that Rosa couldn’t. Of course, how truthful Mr. Compson’s version of events is can’t be known.
Themes
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Shreve continues to clarify points of the story Quentin has told him. After turning Henry against Bon, prohibiting Bon’s marriage to Judith, poisoning Henry against Bon, and “doom[ing Judith] to spinsterhood” by manipulating Henry into murdering. Bon, Sutpen comes back from the war and decides to try to rebuild his dynasty. To do this, he sets to work finding a new wife to give him new children to replace the old, doomed ones. Then he hopes to return his plantation to what it was before the war.
This elaborate list of people whose lives Sutpen has impacted (if not outright destroyed) shows what little regard he has for others. He’s not cruel or evil—he simply believes he exists outside the broader human story and can exploit or disregard others if it’ll get him closer to achieving his great ambition—his “design.” People are replaceable and interchangeable to him: he selects Rosa to be his new wife as strategically—and as emotionlessly—as he chose Ellen before her.
Themes
As Shreve talks, Quentin thinks to himself, “He sounds just like Father.” Quentin observes Shreve, “naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless.” Of course, Shreve, unlike Mr. Compson, knows about what happened after Quentin “came back” from Sutpen’s Hundred that night.
Shreve “sounds just like” Mr. Compson not because of how he sounds but because of what he says—he’s repeating Mr. Compson’s words (which he heard via Quentin) and so bringing Mr. Compson and his story to life, just as stories take on a life of their own and thus may seem closer to the truth than they really are. Another important detail here is Quentin’s focus on Shreve’s youth, of which his “pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless” belly is clear evidence. Quentin and Shreve are around the same age—they’re both college students—yet Shreve seems younger to Quentin because he doesn’t carry the unresolved trauma of history that Quentin, as a Southerner, does.
Themes
At this point, the story shifts to a different perspective (it isn’t clear whose), picking up after Rosa’s departure from Sutpen’s Hundred. Sutpen, at some point, begins a sexual relationship with Milly, the granddaughter of Wash Jones. (Wash Jones is the white man whom Sutpen gave permission to squat in the abandoned fishing house on the property. He looked after Sutpen’s property while Sutpen was serving in the military).
Sutpen continues to use people indiscriminately to realize his ambition—he’s apparently forgotten all about Rosa following her departure from Sutpen’s Hundred and found a new woman (a girl in this case) to give him an heir—Wash Jones’s granddaughter, Milly.
Themes
Milly becomes pregnant. After she gives birth in the stable, Sutpen insults her, proclaiming, “Well, Milly, too bad you’re not a mare like Penelope. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.” Afterward, Wash Jones, who overheard Sutpen’s insult of his granddaughter, kills Sutpen with a scythe. The body is found later that night and returned to Judith, who decides he should be buried in a cedar grove at the Methodist church where he married Ellen all those years ago. Judith doesn’t cry, perhaps because she’s too busy (she ran Sutpen’s general store by herself until she found someone to buy it). Jones is dead now too.
The implication here is that Sutpen is insulting Milly because she’s given birth to a girl instead of a boy, which doesn’t bring Sutpen any closer to realizing his ambition. Sutpen needs an heir to bring his plan to fruition; Milly has failed to produce an heir and therefore has proven herself useless to Sutpen. When Wash Jones overhears the insult and murders Sutpen in retaliation, it symbolizes the impossibility of living outside of the broader human story. Sutpen thought he could exist outside of society, interacting with others with the sole purpose of furthering his ambition. When Wash Jones kills him, it shows that Sutpen’s behavior toward others does have consequences—that he can only act upon and harm and insult others for so long before they act upon him in return. His blind ambition and asocial personality are his undoing.
Themes
In the present, Shreve halts his retelling of the Sutpen saga to ask about a story Quentin told him about hunting quail with Mr. Compson. The narrative shifts away from the ambiguous narrator and back to Quentin’s perspective as he describes a Black boy named Luster who led Quentin and Mr. Compson around a ditch as it started to rain. In his story, Quentin looks up and sees a grove of cedars ahead of him, and beyond them a grove of oak.
Shreve’s interjections are a regular occurrence throughout this chapter—they serve to remind the reader of the novel’s frame-story structure. Another thing to note: it’s characteristic of Faulkner’s work for characters to recur across different novels—Luster, Quentin, Mr. Compson, and Shreve all appear in Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, though Shreve has a far more major role in Absalom, Absalom! than in The Sound and the Fury.
Themes
Mr. Compson leads Luster and Quentin into the cedars, and it’s there that Quentin sees the gravestones of Ellen Coldfield Sutpen and Thomas Sutpen. Mr. Compson explains that Sutpen bought them when Judith informed him of Ellen’s death. He ordered them from Italy, wanting only the finest quality. He left his own headstone with a blank date of death, despite serving with an army that had the highest mortality rate in history.
The South’s past and its dead continue to haunt the region’s present, a fact that the gravestones Mr. Compson, Luster, and Quentin visit make clear. It reinforces Sutpen’s single-minded focus on so-called “respectability” and appearances that he bought a wife whom he all but disregarded in life such a grand, showy gravestone.
Themes
As Mr. Compson speaks, Quentin can imagine Sutpen leading his suffering troops into Pennsylvania. Then he led them through the Cumberland Gap, the Tennessee mountains, and finally into Mississippi in late 1964, evading Yankee troops all along the way. Quentin, in the story’s present, imagines Miss Rosa at Sutpen’s Hundred following Ellen’s death, gazing at the gravestone Sutpen prematurely ordered for himself with romantic longing, as though it were a beloved’s portrait.
Upon seeing these gravestones—gravestones Miss Rosa would likely have seen on a regular basis when she was living at Sutpen’s Hundred—Quentin here calls Miss Rosa’s telling of events into question. It strikes him as odd that she wouldn’t mention the gravestones when she was telling him her story, and he thinks that she might have failed to mention them to minimize the romantic feelings she had for Sutpen as a young woman—feelings that adult Rosa is too ashamed to admit to aloud.
Themes
Quentin asks Mr. Compson about the other three gravestones, which belong to Charles Bon, Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, and Judith Sutpen. Mr. Compson urges Quentin to think about it: “Who would have paid for them?” Quentin replies, “She did it,” and deduces that “she” paid for the gravestones with money she earned from the store’s sale. Mr. Compson confirms that Quentin’s guess is correct. Quentin notes that Charles Etienne’s year of death, 1884, is the same as Judith’s.
The phrasing of Mr. Compson’s question to Quentin—“Who would have paid for them?”—subtly betrays just how much of what Mr. Compson says is speculation. At first, it seems like he’s suggesting that “she” (meaning Judith) paid for the gravestones as a matter of fact. In reality, though, he’s actually only speculating that Judith paid for the gravestones since that’s the scenario that makes most sense to him. “Would have” is a phrase that reappears throughout sections that Mr. Compson narrates, and it serves to remind readers that his story is not an authoritative account of Sutpen’s life—it’s based on details his father (General Compson) has told him and speculations he’s made based on that information.
Themes
Mr. Compson next describes an afternoon in the summer of 1870—the summer Judith sold the store. In Mr. Compson’s telling, Quentin’s grandfather witnesses the arrival of Bon’s mistress—whom he assumes has come in response to Judith writing her in New Orleans to inform her of Bon’s death. The woman arrives with an 11-year-old boy, Charles Etienne. She’s dressed in an elaborate gown rather than mourning clothing. Charles Bon’s widow and son visit his grave, then they return to the house. They stay for one week, spending the entire time in the only room in the house that still has linen sheets. Clytie delivers coarse cornbread and coarse molasses to Charles Etienne but treats him coldly.
The story introduces readers—albeit indirectly, through Quentin’s retelling of Mr. Compson’s retelling of General Compson’s account—to Charles Bon’s other family in New Orleans. Similar to his portrayal of Bon as opportunistic, Mr. Compson notes Bon’s mixed-race mistress’s elaborate gown, seemingly to depict her as materialistic and shallow, perhaps as a consequence of her association with Bon. Meanwhile, Clytie treats Bon’s son with the woman coldly, perhaps out of loyalty to Judith, her half-sister.
Themes
After Bon’s widow and her child, Charles Etienne, return to New Orleans, Clytie (or maybe Judith) keeps tabs on them and goes to New Orleans to fetch Charles Etienne after Bon’s widow dies. She brings him back to Sutpen’s Hundred. Charles Etienne is 12 now. He speaks no English, and the others can’t speak French. Judith cares for him but is not affectionate toward him, regarding him only “with a cold unbending detached gentleness.” He sleeps in her room, and she washes him in water that’s either too hot or too cold, scrubbing as though to “wash the smooth faint olive tinge from his skin.”
The uncertainty about who kept tabs on Charles Bon’s son reminds readers that most of this story is based on speculation—Mr. Compson is only repeating what his father told him (and editorializing with his own opinions where he sees fit to do so)—he didn’t live this experience himself. From the start, Charles Etienne’s future seems grim: he is orphaned at a young age and goes on to live a lonely, loveless childhood. Judith’s efforts to “wash the smooth faint olive tinge from his skin” could suggest her racism—it’s as though she wants to rid him of his Black ancestry. A more generous reading is that she wishes to extinguish the half of him that comes from the woman who came between her and Bon—his mixed-race mother’s half.
Themes
Quentin’s grandfather isn’t sure who—Judith or Clytie—tells Charles Etienne he must be Black. Before this, the concept of race was alien to him, for Clytie has watched him like a hawk, intervening whenever anyone—Black or white—crossed paths with him. Judith, meanwhile, never prevented him from sleeping in the white child’s bed in her room. The town knows of Charles Etienne’s arrival and thinks they now understand why Henry murdered Bon, though Quentin’s grandfather doesn’t quite connect the young boy with Bon’s widow, the mixed-race woman he saw at Bon’s graveside years before.
Again, the narration draws attention to just how much of this story is based on speculation. Even Quentin’s grandfather (who at least was alive during the time the events of the story take place and knew the story’s characters personally) doesn’t know all the facts and so must make guesses here and there. For instance, he doesn’t even realize that Charles Etienne is the mixed-race woman and Bon’s son at first. This passage also marks the first time the book has focused on race or racial identity in a serious capacity. Here, the narration shows how Charles Etienne’s uncertainty about his racial background leads to confusion, frustration, and unhappiness.
Themes
Five years later, Judith, now in her forties, goes to the courthouse to retrieve Charles Etienne, who is handcuffed to an officer and in poor shape after getting into a fight. Apparently, he attended a “negro” ball at a cabin a few miles away from Sutpen’s Hundred and got into a fight there. But Charles Etienne won’t say anything in his own defense at the courtroom. The justice, Jim Hamblett, is making an indictment when Quentin’s grandfather enters and interrupts Hamblett’s speech. He pays Charles Etienne’s fine and takes Charles Etienne back to his office to talk.
Charles Etienne’s grief-stricken, lonely, and loveless childhood has made him into a flailing and troubled adult. It seems that he’s regularly involved in fights and in trouble with the law. Symbolically, Charles Etienne’s inability to move forward and live a good life is the result of his inability to make peace with his identity and find his place in society. As a mixed-race person of uncertain ancestry, it’s unclear where he should fit in in the new, struggling, post-war South.
Themes
Judith waits outside Quentin’s grandfather’s office while Charles Etienne and Quentin’s grandfather speak. Quentin’s grandfather asks if Charles Etienne is Charles Bon’s son, and Charles Etienne curtly replies that he doesn’t know. Quentin’s grandfather tells Charles Etienne that he can be whatever he wants to be once he’s among strangers. If Charles Etienne leaves town, Quentin’s grandfather will tell Judith that he’s gone but won’t specify where.
Quentin’s grandfather suggests that it’s possible for Charles Etienne to do what Sutpen did before him—start somewhere fresh, unburdened by the baggage of his past. In reality, as Sutpen’s demise has shown, it's not possible to exist outside of the society into which one was born.
Themes
Not long after this, Charles Etienne leaves town for a time and returns with a dark-skinned Black woman he married while he was away. She comes from a “two dimensional backwater” place and is apparently simple minded. The woman later gives birth to her and Charles Etienne’s son in the old slave cabin on land that Charles Etienne rents from Judith. He fixes up the cabin and lives there with his family, flaunting his wife’s dark skin in front of Judith and around town. He passes as white among white men, who see his wife as an indication of “sexual perversion.”
Charles Etienne’s marrying a dark-skinned Black woman (i.e., a woman who cannot “pass” as white, as Charles Etienne can) serves as an act of rebellion against the South’s racist social hierarchy. His choice to live in the old slave cabin also seems to be an act of rebellion—it’s as though he’s trying to force Judith and the other southerners to acknowledge the legacy of institutionalized racism (i.e., slavery) upon which the South’s culture and economy was built, living out the life he would have lived in the pre-war South as an enslaved Black man to suggest that while laws have changed (slavery has been abolished), the South’s attitude has not.
Themes
Judith pleads with Charles Etienne to renounce his wife and child (Jim Bond) and go to the North, where he can start fresh and pass as white. She even offers to take care of the woman and child—after all, her own father “begot one.” She says General Compson can sell some of the land to give Charles Etienne money to fund his journey. She says she’ll tell people around town that he is Henry’s son. But Charles Etienne refuses. When he calls her Miss Sutpen, she asks him to call her Aunt Judith.
Charles Etienne’s stubborn refusal to leave for the North contrasts sharply with Sutpen’s arc. Sutpen arrived in Mississippi, seemingly without a past: nobody knew who he was or where he came from. He subsequently tried to build a dynasty from the ground up, maintaining his detachment form the wider world. Charles Etienne, by contrast, remains tied to his roots: to the South and to his past, however fraught it may be. On the other hand, his refusal to call Judith “Aunt Judith” indicates an asocial personality that’s similar to Sutpen’s.
Themes
But nobody really knows what words Judith and Charles Etienne exchanged that day; certainly, Quentin’s grandfather doesn’t know. He only knows the story town gossip has settled on. After speaking with Judith, Charles Etienne returns to his cabin where his wife and child are waiting for him. He continues to live there and farm the land. He associates with neither white people nor Black people. Occasionally he gets drunk and starts fights, and after each altercation, Quentin’s grandfather pays his bond to get him out of jail.
This passage reveals that, yet again, the story has tried to pass off speculation as fact. In reality, Quentin’s grandfather doesn’t know what Charles Etienne’s relationship with Judith was like or whether he refused her offer to help him move North. All he—and by extension, all Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve—have to go off of are educated guesses and pure speculation. Another important detail to note here is that Quentin’s grandfather’s treatment of Charles Etienne mirrors his treatment of Sutpen many years before—it’s as though history is repeating itself, though it’s not clear why Quentin’s grandfather feels responsible to look after Charles Etienne.
Themes
Charles Etienne later falls ill with yellow fever. Judith moves him into the house and cares for him, and eventually she catches the disease herself. Judith dies first, and Charles dies not long after. Clytie raises Charles Etienne’s son after Charles Etienne’s passing.
It’s unclear what motivates Judith to care for the child her late fiancé had with his mistress. But she seems to feel responsible for him for some reason, whether out of love for Bon—or for some other reason that has yet to come to light.
Themes
The narrative shifts back to Quentin’s perspective as he, Mr. Compson, and Luster look on the gravestones while Mr. Compson tells the story of Charles Etienne. Quentin isn’t really listening to the story anymore, since he knows it all already. The rain is coming down harder now, and Mr. Compson urges them to seek shelter in the old slave cabin where Charles Etienne lived. Luster refuses, making up excuses for why he can’t go inside. Mr. Compson laughs at Luster, but Quentin doesn’t.
The novel’s frame-story structure can make it difficult to remember whose perspective the narrative comes from and when in time everything is taking place. Recall that this scene between Quentin, Mr. Compson, and Luster is a memory that Quentin is recounting to Shreve in the story’s present as the two young men hash out the story of Sutpen from their dorm room at Harvard.
Themes
The narrative shifts to Quentin’s memory of himself, Luster, and some other boys their age approaching the old cabin and seeing Charles Etienne’s son, Jim Bond, who is just a few years older than they are. Bond is wearing unwashed, ill-fitting clothes. The boys don’t even notice the woman sitting on the porch at first. She’s old, small, and wrinkled, with a “coffee-colored face.” When she asks the boys what they want, they reply, “Nothing,” and then run away, scared but not knowing why.
The narration consistently describes Clytie as having “coffee-colored” skin, so the reader may infer that the old woman sitting on the porch is Clytie. This memory also helps to establish when Quentin’s adolescence occurs relative to the rest of the timeline: he’s around the same age as Jim Bond, Charles Bon’s son. The boys’ fear suggests that Clytie has unsettled them in some deep, perhaps unconscious way that they’re not fully able to understand. Their disturbed reaction to seeing Clytie, a symbolic ghost of the pre-war South, reinforces an allegorical reading of the novel. In such a reading, the boys’ fear of Clytie, a former enslaved woman, symbolizes the South’s inability to acknowledge the legacy of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Themes
“Yes,” Quentin says, as the story shifts forward in time to 1910. He and Shreve are at Cambridge, and Shreve is repeating back to Quentin the story of the South that Quentin has told him, confirming that he’s gotten all the unbelievable details of the story correct. Shreve verifies that Jim Bond and “the old woman”—Clytie—lived in the cabin for 26 years. Quentin confirms that this is true. Shreve then expresses disbelief that “Aunt Rosa” could think that there was someone else living there—after all, Judith and Bon are both dead, and Henry is still on the run. Was there really someone else living in the cabin when Quentin traveled to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa to see for themselves? Quentin replies, “Yes.” “Wait then,” Shreve replies, in disbelief.
Shreve’s skepticism reinforces his outsider’s perspective: he has never been to the South and regards it with more detachment and morbid curiosity than Quentin. He enjoys hearing about it as one might enjoy hearing a ghost story—for him, it’s entertainment. But for Quentin, the ghosts of the South are very real and affect his character and perspective in a real way. This chapter ends with another shocking revelation: Quentin went to Sutpen’s Hundred with Miss Rosa and confirmed that her outlandish claim that a third person is hiding there was in fact correct. It’s unclear who this person could be, but given that Judith, Bon, and most everyone else are all dead, the only real possibility (of the characters the novel has introduced thus far) is Henry. Certainly, it’s not implausible to think Clytie would be willing to hide her fugitive half-brother—law enforcement would hang him for Bon’s murder if they ever found him.
Themes
