Abstract
The gap between figure and person, history and myth, accrues a deeper dimension in Faulkner’s historical novel Absalom, Absalom! In Light in August Faulkner came to terms with the Jim Crow South of his own lifetime.1 The later novel is his attempt to come to terms with the history of the Old South. Yet Faulkner does two highly unexpected things. First, he sets the novel in the intermediate past of 1909, when Quentin Compson, along with his father, Rosa Coldfield and Shreve, his room mate at Harvard, all take turns at narrating events which span the years between 1817 and 1870 and end, dramatically, in the December of the year of narration. Second, the demonic hero of Faulkner’s story, Thomas Sutpen, does not embody the idea of honour which had been part of the prevalent ruling-class ideology of the Old South. Sutpen is a transgressor, his life a challenge to that ideology at every turn, and the rise and fall of his short-lived dynasty cuts the ground dramatically from under his feet.
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