When people hear a particular story that occurred in the past, there’s something not quite right about all the things or events that are recounted. The truth is that everyone is entitled to his or her own version of history. When people interpret evidence and construct tentative versions of what has happened, they tend to select what they focus on because they cannot possibly tell the whole and entirely factual story about the past. Like the Thomas Sutpen story that has been dispatched by different narrators in William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom, the past becomes a burden in the present for Quentin and Shreve because he sensed an impermeable connection about how he should live his life in the modern world by understanding the past and uncovering the nitty-gritty details about the said story.
In Faulkner’s novel, readers become listeners to one story interpreted by different narrators. It is quite a feat to closely scrutinize the variations of the Thomas Sutpen story because Rosa Coldfield, Jason Compson III, and Quentin himself have something to do with their versions of events and the characters involved. Another source of the deviations in the Thomas Sutpen story as recounted by narrators is that they belong to different generations, and this affected their interpretations because they related their own experiences with this particular story.
The first narrator is Rosa Coldfield, the oldest among those who narrated the Thomas Sutpen story. She was, in fact, present when the character of Thomas Sutpen sprouted in Jefferson, Mississippi. When Thomas arrived, the social fabric in Jefferson was entirely changed because of him. Obviously, her narration of the Thomas Sutpen story was driven by her hatred towards the man. Rosa thought that all the miseries her family had experienced were triggered when her older sister Ellen married Thomas Sutpen. For her, Thomas Sutpen was a “demon,” and after more than 40 years, Rosa thought that the way “her life has turned out — what she has become and has not become — as a result of Sutpen’s story” (Bussey, 2002).
Compared to Rosa, Quentin and Shreve as narrators have been born far out from witnessing the real events that transpired in the Thomas Sutpen story. Quentin’s grandfather, General Compson, was a close friend of Sutpen. Feeling the close affinity to this story, Quentin began to gather different versions of this story from Rosa, his father, and his grandfather as well. When he goes to Harvard, he met his roommate Shreve who helped him understand the man behind Thomas Sutpen. In their version, Quentin and Shreve realized that the past will always remain, at some level, a mystery. However, if we hope to understand it, we must enter into it and project ourselves imaginatively into the attitudes and emotions of the historical figures. In this regard, Quentin and Shreve went into projecting the past in their modern lives. As Quentin can easily relate to this Thomas Sutpen story, Shreve had to enter into the reconstruction of the past with his roommate. Shreve found it like a fascinating game by saying, “Let me play now.” On the other hand, Quentin is too much involved that he felt he grew impatient into the reconstructing of what the story is all about. Bussey (2002) thought that:
For Quentin, his view of himself in the world is at stake in Sutpen’s story. If he cannot find guidance in the story, he has nowhere else to turn. The chronology at the end of the book indicates that Quentin committed suicide just after the events of Absalom, Absalom!, which suggests that he either did not find the answers he was seeking or found answers that left him hopeless.
With this novel, readers will learn that history is a socially constructed, debated, and revised phenomenon. This means that interpretations of history are constantly changing, with no fixed version of history written in stone. As Mr. Compson described the limitations of history:
It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain, and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see people dimly, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable…
(p. 80).
Thus, what is known about history today is not the same as what was known fifty years ago, and what we will know in another fifty years, since new research and new perspectives, will continue to change the interpretations of history. In order to understand the past, we need to connect ourselves in the present and our relation to it.
Works Cited
Bussey, Jennifer. “Critical Essay on ‘Absalom, Absalom!’.” In Thomason, Elizabeth (Ed.), Novels for Students, vol. 13. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Web.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!