SutpensInAA

In Absalom! Faulkner undertakes his most ambitious imaginative reconstruction of the rise and fall of the Old South, along with the vexed legacy that history bequeaths to the modern South. He organizes that larger story around the history of the Sutpens across six generations - especially the two generations who go through the experience of the Civil War. The novel includes two earlier generations, including the first Sutpen to arrive in colonial America, and two later generations, including the last of the Sutpens, who disappears into the Yoknapatawpha landscape ten years into the 20th century. At the heart of the story is Thomas Sutpen, and the five children he has with four different women - only two of whom he acknowledges as his, though that does not enable even them to escape the tragic way in which the "family" in this novel serves as the site in which the South's racial, socio-economic and cultural tensions and taboos collide.