When I started Absalom Absalom!, I was unsure as to why Faulkner needed to return to the Comspson family to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen. Why not bring back the Bundrens, have this be a story told by Hightower to Byron Bunch, or introduce a new set of characters? However, as I progressed in the story, I began to see why the Compsons are such a useful vessel through which Faulkner could tell not only the story but variations of the same story of Thomas Sutpen and the history of his property.
    At a basic level, Quentin and his father Jason Comson Sr are of enough education to understand and relay the story without a significant amount of dialectical play. Should the Sutpen story have been told by someone like Anse Bundren or Dilsey, Faulkner’s extremely complex prose and diction which with he writes the voices of Quentin and Jason Sr would seem out of place. Their high level of speech thus blends with Faulkner’s own third person narration, allowing the story of Sutpen to blend a bit more seamlessly with the events of the present in the book. Although it is not entirely necessary to read The Sound and the Fury before Absalom, Absalom!, it certainly makes the reader familiar with both the intellectual speech (or pseudo-intellectual drunken ramblings) of Jason Compson Sr and the literary, Ivy League educated mind of his son.
    The history of the Compson family in Jefferson also allows this novel to be told well from their perspective. The Compsons have a long history in Jefferson, and Quentin’s grandfather was actually present for the events of the story. This historical grounding in the town allows Quentin’s grandfather to tell Jason who would later tell Quentin the story of Sutpen’s arrival in Jefferson from the experience not only of being there but of being an already established family in Jefferson. The story of Sutpen and his deeds can then be told from the point of view of a Southern aristocratic family, a point of view that would create a greater sense of difference between the long term residents of Jefferson and the strange arrival of Sutpen and would magnify the strangeness of his growth in reputation and amassing of an enormous amount of land  in a community where the same families have been powerful and relevant for some time. Also, there are some connections between the Sutpen family history and the Compson family as seen in The Sound and the Fury. “It’s going to turn and destroy us all someday, whether our name happens to be Sutpen or Coldfield or not” remarks Quentin when he questions Coldfield’s motivations in telling him the story (7).  This connects the Sutpen house with the eventual collapse of the Compson household in The Sound and the Fury as they are two works that detail a fall from greatness for a Southern family. Here, Faulkner links the history of the Sutpens and Compsons by even more than a connection through the grandfather; they are both families who collapse inwards.
    Although Absalom, Absalom! is not narrated internally as his section in The Sound and the Fury is, the novel, in the present, is centered on Quentin Compson and his hearing and eventual telling of the story of Sutpen’s Hundred and its founder. Quentin is obviously younger here than he is in his The Sound and the Fury chapter and is about to head up north to study at Harvard. Quentin here suits the overarching narrative of Absalom, Absalom!: a story told by people who were not there or not as involved to people who also were not there. Quentin is too young to have remembered or been alive during the events of the story told to him, which allows Faulkner to present him better as a blank slate to receive the variations of the Sutpen story from a temporal distance far enough away where the differences in story would not conflict with his own memory of the actual events. He only can know what he is told. This also creates one of the issues of the novel that have already arisen in the first two chapters: which version of the story is more correct? As Quentin is now two generations behind, he, like the reader is unable to discern what is true about Sutpen and unable to object to what is false, as the whole story to the young Quentin is essentially just that, a story.