![]() ![]() Karl, "links all the great American themes." The novel, wrote Faulkner scholar Frederick R. "Absalom" draws these together in a narrative in which the driving force is race. McDermott, a William James scholar and authority on American thought. ![]() Sutpen is more definitely American than either Ahab or Gatsby by virtue of his pioneer innocence, his failure to see, as Faulkner scholar Gary Lee Stonum put it, that "the land is not a tabula rasa." These notions of the land as "subject to human fabrication" and of time as "option, rather than as the measure of our entropic situation" are deeply rooted in American character, wrote John J. It is Bon's grandson, Jim Bond, who howls in despair outside the burning mansion. ![]() But the past returns to haunt Sutpen in the person of Charles Bon, a son Sutpen rejected years before when he discovered his mother was part black. Sutpen pursues his design with the monomania of Ahab and the hubris of Gatsby, who also believed in his power to eradicate the past. He will erase a mark of his own history and take revenge on nothing short of time itself. He will set right this cosmic injustice, this denial of his humanity. At that moment, the course of Sutpen's life is determined. On an errand to a grand plantation house, the boy Sutpen had been met at the front door by a black servant in formal clothes and ordered to go around to the back door. His plan is to father male heirs, establish a dynasty and avenge an insult he suffered years before as a poor boy in Virginia. ![]()
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