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Charles Etienne’s Wife
Doors and Gates
Gates and doors symbolize the act of confronting and understanding difficult truths. Throughout the novel, characters have important revelations or achieve closure when they pass through—or fail to pass through—doors or gates. When Sutpen is…
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Sutpen’s Design
Sutpen’s “design” symbolizes the limits of ambition and the inability of any person to exist outside the broader human story. Sutpen’s design—the term he and others use to describe his great ambition to achieve…
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Ghosts and the Supernatural
In Absalom, Absalom! characters’ references to ghosts and the supernatural symbolize the weight of inherited historical trauma that haunts the South and its inhabitants in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Throughout the novel…
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