Of all the storytellers in Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield is the one with the most firsthand knowledge of the Sutpen family. She is Ellen's sister, Judith and Henry's aunt, and was even, for a few weeks right after the Civil War, Thomas' fiancee - until he spoke the words that caused her to begin wearing the "eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years" when the novel opens (3). And it is her version of the story, of Sutpen in particular, that is expressed first.
The first Compson in Yoknapatawpha, already an established planter in Jefferson when Thomas Sutpen arrives there in 1833, and the man who is Sutpen's "only friend" (220) before and during the Civil War, this character is referred to throughout the novel either as "General Compson" or Quentin's "Grandfather" - even though he did not become a general until 1865 (221) or a grandfather until 1890.
The child of Thomas Sutpen's first marriage and the fiance of Sutpen's daughter Judith whose murder in 1865 is still an unsolved mystery in 1910. He is first mentioned by name in Chapter 3, where Mr. Compson introduces him into the narrative as "Charles Bon of New Orleans," an older friend of Henry Sutpen's and fellow student at the University of Mississippi; "a young man of a worldly elegance and assurance beyond his years, handsome, apparently wealthy and with for background the shadowy figure of a legal guardian" (58).
Judith Sutpen, Thomas and Ellen's daughter, is described by Mr. Compson as "the hoyden who could - and did - outrun and outclimb, and ride and fight both with and beside her brother" (52). Mr. Compson also refers to the "curious and unusual relationship" between these siblings (79), calling them "that single personality with two bodies" (73), but on the whole the narrative emphasizes the differences in their character and their fates. Stronger than her brother, Judith is nonetheless left at home while he rides away twice - first with her fiance and next after killing her fiance.
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).
Quentin's father, referred to throughout the novel simply as "father," is the single most dominant voice in Absalom!. Although it is unclear which members of the Sutpen family he ever saw himself, he is the source for much of the narrative, including much of what his father, General Compson, supposedly learned directly from Sutpen. Both Quentin and Shreve, hundreds of miles away in Massachusetts, note how they each sound "just like Father" (147, 210).
Rosa Coldfield's "papa," and Thomas Sutpen's father-in-law, is "a Methodist steward, [and] a merchant" (11). He arrived in Jefferson from Tennessee half a decade before Sutpen, with a single wagonload of merchandise as the basis for his business. Mr. Compson calls him a "queer silent man whose only companion and friend seems to have been his conscience" (47), though apparently he compromises that when he and Sutpen work a mysterious deal that provides the rich furnishings for Sutpen's mansion. When he acquires two slaves "though a debt . . .
Shreve is Quentin's roommate at Harvard, where the two of them are freshmen. He is a "few months younger than Quentin" (236). Throughout Chapters 5-9 these two students work together deep into a winter's night to try to reconstruct the story of Sutpen and Bon. He spends part of this time shirtless - "his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless, the twin moons of his spectacles glinting against his moonlike rubicund face" (147); in the bathrobe and overcoat he later puts on, he "looks huge and shapeless like a disheveled bear" (235).
Ellen Sutpen, Sutpen's second wife, is the older daughter of Goodhue Coldfield. She is described as "small-boned" but also "what is known as fullbodied" (51). According to the storytellers, Sutpen marries her to gain respectability.
