Henry Sutpen

Henry Sutpen is the son whom Thomas Sutpen expects to inherit the Yoknapatawpha dynasty he tries to create. Instead, on the eve of the Civil War he "adjures his father and renounces his birthright and the roof under which he had been born" (62) - and even so cannot escape his father's legacy, or, in the end, that house. Mr. Compson describes him as both a "humorless yokel" (86) and a "romantic" (97), and refers more than once to Henry's "curious relationship" with his sister Judith (62, 79). At college he meets Charles Bon, for whose sake he renounces his patrimony and with whom he serves throughout the Civil War, before killing him at the gate to Sutpen's Hundred during the war's last days. That murder provides the narrative with the question that haunts it from beginning to end.