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Satire
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis:
Like other works by Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! is primarily set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a fictional region of Faulkner’s own invention that is largely based on the real Lafayette County in Mississippi, where Faulkner was raised. The novel, which depicts multiple generations of the Sutpen, Coldfield, and Compton families, takes place before, during, and after the American Civil War, an event that profoundly marks the lives of many characters, including those born after the war.
While speaking to Miss Rosa, Quentin reflects on the character of the "deep South," which he feels has never truly recovered from the war:
[He] would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now—the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South [...]
As Quentin listens to Miss Rosa's story, he feels that there are "two separate" versions of himself, one that is preparing to leave a region that has been "dead since 1865" and is "peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts" that insist upon "telling him about old ghost-times," and another version of himself who is "still too young to be a ghost" but is forced to be one due to his heritage. Here and throughout the novel, Faulkner imagines the South as a region that continues to live on after its own death, haunted by its history of slavery and defeat in the American Civil War, and populated by those who have been unable to move on from the war that took place 50 years earlier.
Related Themes:
