Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Published 1936 · 343 pages · 132,404 words · about 18 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Absalom, Absalom! to read?

Absalom, Absalom! scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
Dense Faulknerian vocabulary mixing high literary language with Southern vernacular and archaic biblical phrasing. Words like 'impotent yet indomitable frustration,' 'outraged recapitulation,' and 'hyperdistilled' appear alongside colloquial speech. Specialized historical and plantation terminology demands period knowledge.
Sentence structure: 85 out of 100
Faulkner's most extreme syntax: single sentences run over 1,000 words with nested clauses, parentheticals within parentheticals, and multiple narrators embedded within one another. The opening sentence is 100+ words. Readers must hold suspended grammatical structures across pages while tracking who is speaking about what.
Abstraction: 72 out of 100
The concrete story of Sutpen's rise and fall carries immense abstract weight about Southern history, racial identity, and the nature of truth. Events serve as meditation on guilt, inheritance, and whether the past can ever be known. Philosophy emerges through obsessive retelling rather than direct statement.
Information density: 82 out of 100
Extraordinarily dense: each telling adds details, contradicts previous versions, and demands readers track who knows what when. Genealogy, chronology, and motivation shift with each narrator. The fragmented structure means information arrives out of sequence, requiring constant mental reconstruction of events and relationships.
Narrative indirection: 88 out of 100
Nothing is stated directly—everything comes through layers of narration, speculation, and reconstruction. Rosa tells Quentin what she heard; Quentin tells Shreve what he thinks happened; they invent scenes neither witnessed. The key revelation about Charles Bon's racial identity is implied rather than confirmed. Readers must actively construct meaning from competing, unreliable accounts.
Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
Sutpen's design becomes symbol for the South's entire doomed project. The mansion represents antebellum aspirations. The mixed-race son embodies the racial contradictions that destroy the system. The locked door, the rotting house, the idiot heir—every element accumulates symbolic meaning about Southern history, race, and the impossibility of building dynasties on human bondage.
Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
Faulkner maintains tragic seriousness while revealing the absurdity of Sutpen's grand design and the South's racial logic. The narrators' obsessive need to explain creates irony—they can't stop talking about what they can't understand. Rosa's melodrama contrasts with the horror she describes. Shreve's outsider questions expose Southern rationalizations.
Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100
The central facts remain uncertain even at the novel's end. Did Henry kill Bon because he was Black, or because of incest, or both? What exactly did Sutpen tell Henry in the tent? The narrators speculate endlessly but admit their ignorance. The house burns, the line ends, but the meaning of it all remains perpetually open to interpretation.
Structural complexity: 85 out of 100
Radically fragmented narrative structure with multiple nested narrators telling the same events from different perspectives across different time periods. Chronology is scrambled—we learn effects before causes. The novel moves from Rosa's 1909 monologue to Mr. Compson's 1909 account to Quentin and Shreve's 1910 reconstruction, with flashbacks within flashbacks creating a hall of mirrors where no version is authoritative.

How Absalom, Absalom! is regarded

Absalom, Absalom! holds a literary regard score of 89 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Absalom, Absalom! sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (254 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Absalom, Absalom! scores 82 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic (with high mimetic residue)
Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
naming with his own mouth his own ironic fecundity of dragon's teeth.
Mythos: Irony iv (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
But they couldn't catch him. They could hear him; he didn't seem to ever get any further away but they couldn't get any nearer
Genre: Romance + Anatomy
the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere

Where the story of Absalom, Absalom! takes place

  • Mississippi, the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, 1833-1871 (1833 to 1871), the main setting
  • West Virginia mountains and Tidewater Virginia, 1807-1823 (1807 to 1823)
  • Haiti plantation and the sugar-field siege, 1820s (1823 to 1831)
  • Sutpen's Hundred and Jefferson, Mississippi, 1833-1870 (1833 to 1870)
  • University of Mississippi and New Orleans, 1859-1860 (1859 to 1860)
  • Civil War: Shiloh, the Carolinas retreat, Sutpen's Hundred under siege (1861 to 1865)
  • Sutpen's Hundred under Clytie and Judith, Charles Etienne Bon, 1870-1884 (1870 to 1884)
  • Jefferson, Mississippi, September 1909 (Rosa's office, the drive to Sutpen's Hundred)
  • Harvard, Cambridge, January 1910 (Quentin and Shreve's cold room)

5 things that are true of Absalom, Absalom!, with the passage for each

  1. Rosa Coldfield has worn black for forty-three years when she summons Quentin.

    Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now

  2. Bon's letter to Judith was written in stove polish taken from captured Union supply wagons.

    Stove polish. Gallons and gallons and gallons of the best stove polish, not a box of it a year old yet

  3. During the war Sutpen had two marble tombstones shipped from Italy and hauled with his regiment, which called them 'Colonel' and 'Mrs Colonel'.

    speaking of the two stones as 'Colonel' and 'Mrs Colonel'

  4. Wash Jones kills Sutpen with a scythe and then charges the sheriff's posse with it raised.

    they could see the scythe raised above his head

  5. The book ends with Quentin, in bed at Harvard, insisting over and over that he does not hate the South.

    I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark

Scenes in Absalom, Absalom! that Frye would name

34 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Displacement, untitled
Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous Sutpen's arrival is a demonic myth of creation ('the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light') showing through a realistic planter.
Hamartia, untitled
Sutpen's trouble was innocence. Quentin names the fatal flaw: an unexamined innocence that built a design around the memory of a closed door.
Hamartia, untitled
the question is, Where did I make the mistake in it, what did I do or misdo in it Sutpen treats his moral catastrophe as a technical error in a design, the tragic flaw spoken aloud.
Anagnorisis, untitled
So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear. Bon learns the real objection to the marriage, which Henry could bear in the incest but not in the race, and so what his father withheld.
Alazon, untitled
He wasn't a gentleman. He wasn't even a gentleman. He came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before Rosa charges Sutpen with being a braggart impostor of gentility who hides behind borrowed respectability.
Displacement, untitled
naming with his own mouth his own ironic fecundity of dragon's teeth. Sutpen's naming of Clytemnestra (and nearly Cassandra) lets Greek tragic myth show through plantation realism.

Books that share these scenes with Absalom, Absalom!

About the author

William Faulkner