UNDERSTANDING OF Absalom, Absalom! must begin with recognition of the fact that, for Faulkner, Thomas Sutpen is, in his basic intentions and in the fundamental characteristics of his methods, an image of the pre-Civil War Southern plantation owner.' While Sutpen may frequently exhibit primitive brutality, Faulkner is quick to indicate the basic brutality in the whole plantation system. If Sutpen horrifies the community, it is largely because he is a pure, naked version of its own deepest principles, the incarnation of those values and attitudes that enable a slave system to survive. The dismay which Jefferson feels regarding him does not alter the fact that it is the community itself that has created that code of conduct which he follows obsessively; Sutpen's face is the community's own, compounded to larger-than-life-size proportions. Granted there is an ambivalence of both acceptance and fear of Sutpen by the townspeople, which prevents his complete integration into the Jefferson community, but surely Sutpen's code is not essentially different from that of the other Southern plantation owners, the white masters who lie in their hammocks during the day being fanned by Negro slaves, and whose servants are instructed to send poor white trash (as Sutpen and his family are in the beginning of his career) around to the back door; who have the right to order an overseer in the fields to Send me Juno or Missy-