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Absalom, Absalom! is the story of a legend and the people who tell
it over and over again. In September 1909, 20-year-old Quentin Compson
goes to visit Rosa Coldfield, an older woman in his hometown of
Jefferson, Mississippi. Miss Rosa has summoned him to listen to her
version of the legend of Thomas Sutpen. That same night, Quentin goes
over the story again with his father, Mr. Compson, who tells the story
from a different perspective. Five months later, when he goes to
Harvard, he reinvents the story with his roommate, Shreve.
In 1833, Thomas Sutpen came to Jefferson and built, without any help
but his own wild, superhuman will, an enormous mansion on 100 acres
that he swindled from an Indian tribe. With a band of foreign slaves
and a French architect, he raises the house and cultivates a
plantation. Within a few years he is one of the richest single planters
in the county, and he marries the daughter of a local merchant (Rosa's
older sister) and has a son and daughter, Henry and Judith. The two
children grow up with privilege yet the knowledge that the town resents
and despises their father. Henry goes to the University of Mississippi
in 1859, and becomes friends with a worldly older student named Charles
Bon. He brings Bon home for Christmas and holidays, and soon it is
assumed that Bon will marry Judith. But Sutpen recognizes Bon as his
own son--the son he abandoned when he discovered that his first wife
had black blood. He follows Bon to New Orleans to be sure of this fact,
then tells Henry that they cannot be married because Bon is actually
Judith's half-brother. Henry refuses to believe his father and will not
abandon his friend. They quarrel; Henry repudiates his birthright and
leaves. For four years, while the Civil War rages, Henry tries to
convince himself that Charles Bon and Judith can be married even if it
means incest. He has almost justified it to himself when Sutpen (a
colonel for the Confederate Army) calls his son to his tent and tells
him that Charles Bon must not marry Judith. Not only is he Judith and
Henry's half-brother, but Charles Bon also has black blood.
This information repulses Henry in a way that even incest does not.
When Charles Bon insists on marrying Judith anyway, goading Henry to do
something about it, Henry shoots Charles Bon as they walk up to the
gates of Sutpen's Hundred. Then he disappears. Sutpen returns home
after the war to a ruined dynasty and a devastated plantation.
Determined to start over again, he first tries to marry Rosa Coldfield,
then takes up with Milly, the 15-year-old granddaughter of a poor white
squatter on his property. Increasingly impoverished and alcoholic,
Sutpen insults Milly after she bears his child. Furious, her
grandfather kills Sutpen that very day in 1869.
After she tells Quentin her version of the story, Rosa asks him to
accompany her to Sutpen's Hundred, where Clytie (Sutpen's daughter with
a slave woman; she is now in her late 60s) still lives. Clytie has been
hiding Henry Sutpen there for four years while he waits to die. Quentin
and Rosa discover this when they go to the estate after midnight. Rosa
returns to the house three months later with an ambulance for Henry,
and Clytie sets fire to the house, killing herself and Henry. No one
remains of Sutpen's dynasty but Jim Bond, a mentally-impaired man of
mixed blood.
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