“New Technique in Novel Introduced”

This chapter is an essay which considers William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, the story of demonic Thomas Sutpen's rise from poor white to opulent planter. Faulkner's narrates Sutpen's matrimonial experiments with whites and Negroes, his desire for a son and a perpetuated name, and the final dissolution of that dream in a flaming house haunted by the whimperings of a half-wit mulatto who is the only survivor of the Sutpen blood. The story is presented through the mouths of seven different people, in what Bernard De Voto calls a “series of approximations.” Absalom, Absalom! cannot be dismissed as 400 pages of turgid and invertebrate sentences about psychopathic ghosts. The text argues that the mere technique of Absalom, Absalom! may prove to be a significant contribution to the theory of the art of fiction, and that the novel will not be the last, or the best, to approach its materials in this way.