After reading Absalom!, Absalom! and discussing it, I can't help but feel that the story of Col. Thomas Sutpen is little more than Quentin (and Shreve to an extent) projecting his own psychological torment onto the inhabitants of Sutpen's Hundred. Tabling Quentin's own internal issues for the moment, I think there is something more universal being played out in Absalom!, Absalom!: the overwhelming power of the subjective over the objective and the mind's need to create something where nothing existed.
When I worked as a private investigator, my boss would send me out to interview witnesses and involved parties in order to determine liability in a particular accident. The task seemed innocuous enough: if ten people see a car accident involving two vehicles each carrying two passengers, it would seem logical to assume that fourteen people would have fourteen similar stories describing the accident, all of which should line up neatly with the police report. However, the more people that got involved, the greater the disparity between events became. The stories varied as widely as the backgrounds and culpability of the witnesses: some people didn't see anything yet made details up that they couldn't have known or simply didn't happen, others recanted to adjust their version of events as time went on, and some simply lied to save their own or their buddy's / lover's / kid's ass. Motive, education, age, and sometimes even caprice drastically affected the sequence of events. And this was a car wreck: a recent event that was thoroughly documented and had physical evidence to weigh against testimony.
By contrast, the Sutpen tale, by virtue of Clytie (at least we assume), had no physical evidence: just the testimony of a bitter old hag and the son of a man with limited contact to the central character. Not only that, we cannot discount the effect time had on Rosa's and Compson's memories. Ironically, the more detailed the story became, the more enigmatic it became. No longer was the tale of Col. Thomas Sutpen an objective spreadsheet of dates and events; instead, he (and his family) became a reflection of whoever was telling the tale, and even the town of Jefferson itself. In fact, so much of the story was built of the preponderance of "maybe", "might have", and "I like to think" that the Sutpen family ceased being real people and instead were molded by storytellers and listeners simultaneously to suit contradictory and at times conflicting values. Absalom!, Absalom! is not just a story about man and his family's misfortune, but more importantly it is a lesson in how history is perverted to suit the needs of the both speaker and listener and how these perversions become perverted themselves as the story gains a wider audience.
If Faulkner was trying to get to the heart of Southern legacy, then Absalom!, Absalom! was undoubtedly an attempt to unravel to subjective mechanism of storytelling to reveal the universal truth that there is no objective truth. Instead, like a good PI, we must wade through the psyches of several characters as well as the story itself in order to find something closer to truth, but also admitting that we cannot ever truly come to a succinct, objective truth.
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