Absalom, Absalom! is a blurring of reality and imagination both in the form and content of the story. Faulkner hints at this theme throughout, interspersing an occasional “I imagine” or “it must have been…” in the long-winded monologues of Miss Rosa, Jason, Quentin, and Shreve. In addition to the admittedly speculative (rather than authoritative) meta-narrations of the Sutpen family history, the characters themselves are quite fixated on proving the reality of events by associating important moments with actions or physical markings. Their efforts are a reflection of South’s efforts to preserve their perspective reality of the Civil War. The heroes of Miss Rosa’s time that fought for the Confederate Army are vulnerable to being forgotten after defeat by the Union, and as such, monuments and markers become extremely important to the South in order to represent the noble Confederate effort. Miss Rosa, Judith, and Quentin (among others) demonstrate this concept in relation to their personal lives and histories, and Quentin’s suicide is a metaphor representing the unfortunate result of strong sentiments without successful action or proof of one’s effort to succeed.

            Jason interprets Judith’s giving her letter from Bon to Mrs. Compson to reflect Judith’s desire for proof of their correspondence. By giving the letter to someone else, she not only has a witness but the artifact takes on a life of its own by simply entering the hands and thoughts of another person: “And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something – a scrap of paper – something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday” (101). This sentiment repeats itself with Miss Rosa’s desire to somehow prove that Charles Bon was a real man rather than just a story or a figment of the family’s imagination. In order to know he is real, she seeks tangibility:  by touching him, seeing him, or feeling his weight after his death, she would have one real moment attached to this person that could give him life in her mind: “I tried to take the full weight of the coffin to prove to myself that he was really in it […] For all I was allowed to know, we had no corpse; we even had no murderer […] he was absent, and he was; he returned, and he was not; three women put something tin the earth and covered it, and he had never been” (122-123). These moments are the foundation for the entire novel, as the only substantive elements of the Sutpen-Bon story that Jason, Shreve, and Quentin have to speculate on are the letter Judith leaves in the Compsons’ care, the gravestones of the Bon family, and the uncertain memories that Miss Rosa shares with Quentin. Thus, these monuments and moments are necessary for the Compsons and Shreve to even speculate a history of an otherwise legacy-less family whose line will end with Miss Rosa. In passing her story onto Quentin, Miss Rosa is keeping her family’s legacy alive, or at the very least she is making her perspective official in the act of the telling: “It’s because she wants it told he thought so that people whom she will never see and whose names wshe will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at least why God let us lose the War” (6).

            Quentin, on the other hand, tries desperately to associate a proof of action with his negative feelings towards Caddy’s lovers in TSAF, but he is incapable of taking (and later proving) action when the moments present themselves. To defend his sister’s honor, Quentin tries to dual Dalton Ames to the death, but never actually manages to hit or even be hit by his nemesis. These facts are very important to Quentin, who follows up the fight (or lack there of) by asking Dalton Ames “did you hit me”, and later coming to the tragic realization that, contrary to Dalton’s assertion, he never actually left a mark on Quentin: “I was trying to sleep even when after a while I knew that he hadnt hit me that he had lied about that for her sake too and that I had just passed out like a girl but even that didnt matter anymore” (TSAF 62). A similar event occurs with a classmate at Harvard, whom Quentin tries to hit when hallucinating that he is Dalton Ames. Again, Quentin asks twice “did I hurt him any?” (TSAF 164), interested if he was able to leave a mark on his mistaken target. Despite the fact that he has lost the fight, what counts for Quentin is that he might have left some kind of visible impact to account for his position in their altercation. Unfortunately Quentin fails to hit Dalton, it is implied that he fails to hit Gerald (the college classmate), he fails to preserve Caddy’s innocence, and he even fails to attend class which renders his presence at Harvard utterly forgettable. Without any physical marks (or monuments) of his efforts despite the fact that he persistently fails, there is really no proof that Quentin made any effort at all. His chapter is concluded by Quentin’s giving in to his own lack of reality (or lack of proof of existence) when he commits suicide.