William Faulkner is a Southern writer who, in work after work, has gone back to the same inexhaustible source; the American South, its disturbed present and its tormenting past. In Absalom, Absalom!, his greatest and most rewarding literary work, he devotes his mature powers to a full spectrum examination of main's reliance on the past and of the extent to which man is responsible for the past. His strong condemnation of the values of the south emanates from the actual story which Quentin tells in response to a Northerner's question what is the South like. Quentin then tells the story of the Sutpen family, whose history must be seen as analogous to the history of the South, The father, Thomas Sutpen, stands for all the great and noble qualities,
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The question that inevitably arises is what or who it is form the past that has affected Rosa Coldfield so much that compulsively she has to go back to the past, in memory, in conversation, and even in her actions. To Quentin Compson, the helpless and captive listener, these recapitulated figures of the past appear to be ‘quiet inattentive harmless’ because he is the member of a later generation to whom the passions and the rages of an earlier generation do not mean anything. But for Rosa Coldfield dreamy and victorious dust of the past is very real. Thus the very first paragraph sets the scene as it were: the time is the present, the year 1909, the season summer, and there is an old virgin who describes melodramatically and with intense passion the events and persons of 1867 and of an even earlier time to a not fully comprehending Quentin Compson who is about to go to college at Harvard. Rosa speaks with impotent rage of a ‘ghost’ from the past, of Thomas Sutpen, the man who had married her elder sister and later, proposed to Rosa herself, and later imposed such an insulting condition to their marriage that even forty-three years after the death of Thomas Sutpen Rosa has neither forgotten nor forgiven him. From the angry outpourings of Rosa Coldfield there emerges a picture of Thomas Sutpen, a highly subjective picture, colored by the melodramatic memory of Ross Coldfield. From her and
The question that inevitably arises is what or who it is form the past that has affected Rosa Coldfield so much that compulsively she has to go back to the past, in memory, in conversation, and even in her actions. To Quentin Compson, the helpless and captive listener, these recapitulated figures of the past appear to be ‘quiet inattentive harmless’ because he is the member of a later generation to whom the passions and the rages of an earlier generation do not mean anything. But for Rosa Coldfield dreamy and victorious dust of the past is very real. Thus the very first paragraph sets the scene as it were: the time is the present, the year 1909, the season summer, and there is an old virgin who describes melodramatically and with intense passion the events and persons of 1867 and of an even earlier time to a not fully comprehending Quentin Compson who is about to go to college at Harvard. Rosa speaks with impotent rage of a ‘ghost’ from the past, of Thomas Sutpen, the man who had married her elder sister and later, proposed to Rosa herself, and later imposed such an insulting condition to their marriage that even forty-three years after the death of Thomas Sutpen Rosa has neither forgotten nor forgiven him. From the angry outpourings of Rosa Coldfield there emerges a picture of Thomas Sutpen, a highly subjective picture, colored by the melodramatic memory of Ross Coldfield. From her and