The Pervasive Inertia in a Faulknerian Novel

Abstract

William Faulkner’s works are much studied with regard to details of fall of southern families after the Civil War. The falling conditions of families are elucidated in the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury and the Bundrens in As I Lay Dying. But the Sutpens in Absalom, Absalom! is noticeable in that the family strives to rebuild the myth of the South but the activeness of the family for the reconstruction of the house is quite helpless and deficient in energy. One of the greatest Faulknerian novels, Absalom, Absalom! carries fatalistic implication to a tragic vision in the Sutpen story. Characters are quite active in mental speculation but in fact they are lack of physical action and energetic movement. They rather seem to be the characters towed by the power of fate not by their own action and will of lives. As the story unfolds, events are seen not as the results of chance but of predestination of characters. This sense of foreshadowing created fatalistic implication compounded by the profound internal stasis of the novel. The lack of motion or initiative on the part of the characters, in conjunction with the sense that events occur as foregone conclusions, appears to be the characters’ resignation to a force greater than their own willed movement. The lives of the characters in Absalom, Absalom! seem to be entirely controlled by fate which imbues them with lethargy, immobility, and inertia.