Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

The novel fails like it should be a drama with a great musical score. The novel straddles the civil war, with Thomas Sutpen coming to Mississippi and building up a great plantation. He has strict racial views and disowns a wife and child after he learns that she has some black blood. He desperately wants a true heir. His next son seems good, but he flees after murdering his half-brother with white blood. Another woman births him a daughter. He is upset with this, which eventually leads to the woman's grandfather murdering Sutpen. The runaway heir later returns in tatters and dies in a fire. The dynasty is officially gone. The story is told from the view of people with connections to the Sutpen in the early 1900s. The strict southern beliefs end up leading to a similar downfall for a man. The narrator (now at Harvard in the early 1900s) ends by saying he does not hate the south. The book has great pageantry, though it is difficult to grasp the plot.