Compson Place in Absalom, Absalom! (Location)

From The Sound and the Fury and several other texts, readers know that the Compson house was, like Sutpen's mansion, built as the big house of an antebellum slave plantation. Only one detail about the house, however, appears in this novel: the "single globe stained and bug-fouled from the long summer and which even when clean gave off but little light" (71) - that is, the light bulb that hangs over the house's "front gallery" or porch (23). But at least three of the novel's nine chapters (2, 3, 4) are formally set here, as Mr. Compson and Quentin sit on that porch and talk through the story of Thomas Sutpen and the other lives - Rosa Coldfield's and Henry and Judith Sutpen's and Charles Bon's - that are entangled with his. Chapter 5 may take place here as well, if it is read as Quentin's recollections in the evening of what Rosa said to him in the afternoon.