Mississippi River in Absalom, Absalom! (Location)

The Mississippi River figures in two different ways in the novel. It is the route followed by the steamboats on which characters travel between Yoknapatawpha and New Orleans, as would historically have been the case in the decades before railroads appeared in the region; in particular the deck of a steamboat moving on the moving river - "suspended immobile and without progress from the stars themselves" (250) provides a very resonant site for Charles Bon's musings on his identity. And as "that Continental Troth, that River which runs . . . through the physical land," it is the symbolic "geologic umbilical" that connects Quentin Compson as a southerner with Shreve McCannon as a Canadian (208). In addition, the River figures in one more way as a Digital Yoknapatawpha Location, as the generic site of the anguished wandering that Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and his unnamed wife undertake for "something like a year" (167). Among the men he provokes, racially, into beating him are "negro stevedores and deckhands on steamboats" (167).