قصة الكتاب :
Absalom, Absalom! is a novel written by William Faulkner in 1936. The story is about families in the South and takes place during the American Civil War. It traces the rise and fall of its protagonist Thomas Sutpen. Narrated in a series of flashbacks by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard University, Shreve as he explains to him what life in the South is like; it unfurls into a bit-by-bit revelation of the true story of Sutpen. Although the pieces of the story being revealed centre around Sutpen, the final effect of the entire narration provides more certainty to the reader about the attitudes of the characters than the facts of Sutpen’s tale.
\r\nThomas Stupen, a poor white boy from West Virginia, first gets a glimpse of social hierarchy as a kid, when he faces an insult from a black help. The experience leaves a searing impression upon his consciousness and drives him to plot his grand plan of becoming a man of great wealth and power, at any cost. During his tenure at Haiti, he meets his first wife, the daughter of a plantation owner and even has a son with her, Charles Bon. When he stumbles upon the fact that his wife is half-black, he abandons her. In 1833 he moves to Jefferson, Mississippi with a good number of Haitian slaves, cheats an Indian of his land and maintains his own slave-driven empire, Sutpen’s Hundred. He soon acquires a second wife and has a son and daughter with her, Henry and Judith but the past comes back to haunt him as Henry ends up befriending Charles at university. Charles and Judith fall in love, and the discovery of Charles’ identity does not derail Henry’s support of his union with his sister. They even serve in the war together, but everything changes when Henry discovers details of Charles’ ancestry. Racism makes Henry revolt in a way incest did not and he ends up murdering his friend on the day he arrives to marry Judith.
\r\nThe title itself is an allusion to the wayward son fighting the empire his father built, very much like the biblical story of King David and his son Absalom. The story of Sutpen is a peek into the rise and fall of the South plantation culture. Committed to his grand design, Stupen’s failure to honour his marriage to a part-black woman sets into motion the tale of his own destruction. The book implies that the reconstruction of the past is an exercise in imagination and although none of the narrators seem to get all the facts right, there remains a truth that makes itself clear to the reader. The central theme that would repeat itself in similar stories from the region – the Indian removal, the hunger for land, class resentment and the racial hatred that co-exists with racial intimacy. Absalom, Absalom! is the most serious attempt by a white author to confront the problem of racism in America. As one writer put it “the South escaped itself in this book and became universal”.\r\n