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The Four Narrative Perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Lynn Gartrell Levins
Lynn Gartrell Levins*
Affiliation:
University or North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Abstract

In Absalom, Absalom!, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's concern is with the individual's subjective apprehension of the palpable world of experience. In the latter novels he distinguishes one character's point of view from another's by means of significant variations in language and style in those sections which present a different individual consciousness. The distinction among the four narrative perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!, however, is not stylistic, but formal. Faulkner differentiates the viewpoints in the novel by shaping each perspective after a different literary genre. It is a skillful adaptation of form to meaning, for the selection of these particular genres expresses, structurally, the imagination's subjective act of re-creating history, engaged in by four narrators emotionally involved in either Thomas Sutpen or the Southern myth: Rosa Coldfield, haunted by the moral “outrage” inflicted by the “demonic” Sutpen, shapes her narrative to the Gothic mystery; Mr. Compson, convinced of the epical proportions of the South, relates his narrative as a Greek tragedy; Quentin, obsessed by Henry's relationship with Judith because of his own involvement with Caddy, presented in The Sound and the Fury, expresses his narrative in the framework of the chivalric romance; and Shreve, the detached, intellectual Northerner, relieves the intensity of the preceding viewpoints by means of the ludicrous humor of the tall tale.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , January 1970 , pp. 35 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 Absalom, Absalom! (New York, 1951), p. 101. Subsequent references are to this edition and are placed in the text.

2 “The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!” PMLA, 'lxx“ (Dec. 1955), 887–912.

3 “The Epic Design of Absalom, Absalom!” Texas Studies in Lit. and Lang., iv (Summer 1962), 175. Justus is quoting from Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), p. 226. For the critical interpretation that the employment, in the four perspectives, of an identical highly strained rhetorical language minimizes the variety achieved by means of the contrasted attitudes of the narrators toward Sutpen, see Arthur L. Scott, “The Myriad Perspectives of Absalom, Absalom!” AQ, 'vi“ (Autumn 1954), 210–220.

4 It is to emphasize this distortion that Faulkner includes yet another “version” of Thomas Sutpen which he intends should be weighed against Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve's respective re-creations of the owner of Sutpen's Hundred. This is that figure—mortal, limited, incapable of self-knowledge and thereby incapable of conscious villainy—which emerges from Sutpen's story of himself, told to General Compson and presented in the seventh chapter of the novel.

5 Walter Sullivan, “The Tragic Design of Absalom, Absalom!” South Atlantic Quarterly, 'l“ (Oct. 1951), 560.

6 Aristotle, “Poetics,” trans. Ingram Bywater, in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1947), p. 641.

7 William Faulkner: The Y oknapatawpha Country (New Haven, Conn., 1963), p. 313.

8 Andreas Capellanus makes frequent mention of the Paradise and Purgatory of lovers in his writing. Similarly, in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin desires an eternal union with Caddy in that “clean flame” of Hell: “if it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me” (New York, 1946), p. 135.

9 William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 274.

10 “The Epic Design of Absalom, Absalom!” pp. 157–176.