Two Quentins: Dialogue between Self and Other in Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!is a novel that shows how thetruth of a story is created through a collaborative effort of narrators. Thenovel is layered with two levels. There is a story of Thomas Sutpenwhose innocence and ignorance makes him face the black butler’s rejec-tion at the door of a plantation house, of which pattern is repeated byother characters, most importantly his son, Charles Bon. As DoreenFowler indicates, Bon is the object of desire, objet petit a, for all charac-ters that would complete Sutpen’s design and his identity only ifacknowledged. The motif of rejection and lack of communication resur-faces among characters throughout the novel by Faulkner’s metaphoricuse of words such as “face,” “door,” and “touch” representing a fixedego(face) or border-crossings(door and touch). However, the novel’score, Sutpens’ tragedy, is wrapped by another level where QuentinCompson’s narration and his conversation with other narrators reveals a