There is a second ghost haunting Rider in Pantaloon in Black. While Mannie’s specter appears briefly only to fade away, the grim reality of economic inequality begins to emerge all around Rider. Marriage, domesticity, productive labor, and even religion seemed to serve as a check to nihilistic cynicism, a sort of fantasy of empowerment in which Rider had a space that was indeed his, but as he returns to his cabin after burying his wife the illusion vanishes in an instant.

But when he put his hand on the gate is seemed to him suddenly that there was nothing beyond it. The house had never been his anyway, but now even the new planks and sills and shingles, the hearth and stove and bed, were all a part of the memory of somebody else, so that he stopped in the half open gate and said aloud, as though he had gone to sleep in one place and then waked suddenly to find himself in another: “Whut’s Ah doin hyar?”   (133)

With Mannie’s death, all that which was constitutive of his identity became vacant of personal signification. That which “had been his” is realized to be only rented property from a white landowner. The labor he invested into repairing and developing the home seems at this point fruitless and misdirected, inevitably only increasing the value of a property owned by someone else. “Whut’s Ah doin hyar,” is a question that begs an answer to no only what is his purpose in a space defined by loss, but even on a grander scale, what is his function in the social hierarchy writ large? If that which was meaningful before could be rendered so empty so easily with the death of a loved one, then how fragile and absurd must his own place  be within a social and even spiritual system?

The world begins to close in around him much like the prison cell he eventually ends up in. The oppressiveness of this constriction has a very particular hue to it:

…between the close walls of impenetrable cane-stalks which gave a sort of blondness to the twilight and possessed something of that oppression, that lack of room to breathe in, which the walls of his house had had. (141)

This coloration of objects of labor again appears later:

The jug was still in his hand when he entered the clearing and paused among the mute soaring of the moon-blond lumber-stacks. He stood now of the unimpeded shadow which he was treading again as he had trod it last night, swaying a little, blinking about at the stacked lumber, the skidway, the piled logs waiting for tomorrow, the boiler shed all quiet and blanched in the moon. (144)

The very specific coloring of the sugar cane fields and lumber yards as “blond” culminating in the terminus description of the moon’s blanching (read bleaching) effect suggests an underlying white power structure dominating and coloring economy in racial oppression. That Rider’s occupation of logging would be linked through the descriptor of blondness to the sugarcane fields suggests a persistent link in the organizing principles behind both contemporary and past forms of black labor. Logging, codified with modernity, made possible by advanced machinery and modern technical apparatus is nonetheless linked through its blond hue with the cane fields, one of the primary crops cultivated by slavery in the American south and one of (if not the primary) crop that began the instantiation of slavery in the Caribbean.  It is against the backdrop of this silent economic history of oppression that Rider feels the “constriction” of his breath, the limiting factors beyond which he cannot expand. All the fruits of his labor are to be inevitably reaped by the silent white specter of racial inequity.

Thus the salience of the rigged poker game. As the sheriff McAndrews later remarks after Rider’s death, “Birdsong has been running crooked dice on them mill niggers for fifteen years.” The white man cheating the black laborers in a rigged game is metonymic of the greater socio-economic structure laid bare to Rider as the pacifying structures of domesticity and even religion are vacated from his belief system.  Without the veil of “productivity” and “peace” (note the similarity between the word peace and pease soup Rider finds unpalatable (135 and 136), he can no longer eat that which is fed to him), the sham of the system appears to Rider in its totality. Birdsong’s murder in this respect does not so much seem an act of random violence from a desperate man, but rather an act of retribution upon that system which has enslaved and deluded. It is not so much that the grief of Mannie’s death caused Rider to go into a violent self-destructive spiral as that it removed the illusion of control from Rider’s perception. Rider does not choose imprisonment and death, he realizes that it was already a quality of his constricted life as a racialized other and embraces it.

“How to God,” he said, “can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he wont?”

The tone of Lucas’s question may sound theoretical, but it could also be interpreted in a literal sense. How, indeed? This is not the only example of a Faulkner character struggling to verbalize something to another person. It is more than characterization on Faulkner’s part; he is exposing a fundamental social and racial issue.

There are two problematic factors:

1. The characters are male and the issue stems from one “stealing” the other’s wife
2. One character is white and the other is black

Masculinity often implies reticence. Men take action – they don’t talk too much. This is demonstrated best (or most unfortunately) by Rider after the death of his wife. He self-destructs because he is unable to communicate with others about his grief. After Zack Edmonds takes Molly into his house, Lucas spends six months in silence. To ask Edmonds to stop would mean that Lucas would have to openly acknowledge the situation, thereby admitting some weakness on his own part. When he does confront Edmonds, he does it almost unconsciously.

“I wants my wife. I needs her at home.” Then-and he hadn’t intended to say this…shaking, unable to remember taking the bucket up even-then he said: “I reckon you thought I wouldn’t take her back, didn’t you?”

Although Molly does return home that evening it is not enough for Lucas. As a man, he still needs to take action. The subsequent scene in which Lucas shoots at Edmonds demonstrates the ways in which men are expected to communicate and interact.

Why doesn’t Lucas object sooner? Certainly, it’s also tied up in the dynamics of the plantocracy: master and slave. As Godden points out, the biggest threat to the plantocracy is revolution. We think of revolutions as action, but they begin with words. Although the black body is bound, the black voice can pose a threat if it grows in numbers and moves people to action. In this case, however, Lucas does not have anyone that would join voices with him. His conflict with Edmonds is unique to him.

Faulkner reveals the consequences of this moment in later chapters. The two sons, Roth and Henry, who are as close as brothers suddenly experience the conflict and tension of their circumstances, but they cannot talk about it. They cannot form the questions or dialogue because it has not been modeled for them by their fathers. Faulkner outlines the underlying motivations and inner conflicts that fuel the problem. He does not provide his characters with the words, but he poses the question to the reader. “How to God,” he said, “can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife?” Having the backstory and the character details, we must admit that he can’t. It is through the readers admission that Faulkner highlights the larger issues.

From the first sentences of Absalom, Absalom! we know (from The Sound and the Fury) that Quentin Compson is doomed and will be dead soon. As the narrators create their stories, Quentin, as Carolyn Porter observes, “struggles to resist a narrative pull that threatens to engulf him” (Porter 111).  As the stories from Rosa Coldfield and his father and the recounting of them by Shreve pile up, Quentin laments: “Am I going to have to hear it all again he thought I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already hearing it all over again I am listening to it all over again I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do” (222). The pull of history, the ripples in the connected pools of time, of the evils and evasions, the sins of the fathers, and the inheritance he must acknowledge- the story of himself- finally do engulf and possess Quentin in the moment he faces the dying Henry Sutpen. It is all over for him in that moment.

The two Quentin Compsons finally come together through Henry Sutpen. In the first chapter Quentin speaks of himself as two people: “the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she was—the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople and notlanguage (4-5). John T. Matthews says of Quentin that he is “one of the living in a ghostly South, or a ghostly Southerner in a living North – the difference hardly matters; Quentin’s a dead man talking” (Matthews 189). It is the talking, the storytelling of the “notpeople” and the “notlanguage” that reveals and hides for the storytellers and the reader the history/histories of a South that contaminates its fathers and sons (and everyone they touch) with the poison of (slavery and) racism. Quentin is poisoned at birth and the stories of AA bring him to the realization that the toxins have invaded his every cell.

By the final chapter, Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon have spent several hours together weaving the tale of the fall of the house of Sutpen; building out from the few actual details they have of the principals, inhabiting the characters of Henry and Bon, bonding in the “happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other” (253). Things take a dark turn, however, when Shreve tries to understand the South, the land so foreign to him, of “defeated grandfathers and freed slaves” where people live in “a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago” (289). As Shreve asks Quentin if he understands it, Quentin has become physically unable to resist the pull of the story/history and begins to “jerk all over, violently and uncontrollably” shaking the bed, as he responds “I don’t know” (289).

Quentin tells the story of going to the decaying Sutpen mansion with Miss (not Aunt) Rosa and the ominous, Edgar Allan Poe-like creepiness of the dark and the dust and the rotting house and the hatchet foreshadow the encounter with Henry Sutpen that will haunt Quentin to his death. He tells Shreve of this encounter and then says to himself, “Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore” (AA 298-9). Quentin has met his story/history and it is his mirror.

“And you are — ?

 Henry Sutpen.

And you have been here — ?

 Four years

 And you came home — ?

To die. Yes.

To die?

Yes. To die.” (298)

Quentin sees the wasted yellow face and hands of the dying Henry and strangely embodies and connects with him, saying, as if he were talking about himself and Henry as one, “waking or sleeping it was the same and would be the same forever as long as he lived” (298). “He” is the two Quentin Compsons who have now met each other and have met Henry Sutpen. Quentin, who is obsessed with Caddy/incest/father and is supposed to spend his four years at Harvard but contemplates death instead, faces his double in Henry who was obsessed with Judith/Bon/incest/father and spent four years fighting the Civil War, losing that war and the one he waged with himself over his own racism and lost, resulting in his murder of Bon and his own living death. The future for Quentin now can only be a living death. He cannot outrun the day “when the South would realise that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage” (AA 209). As he reads his father’s letter of the ambulance and the fire and the death and burial of Rosa, Quentin is transported, he has left the present world and is as hopeless as the redworm unearthed and frozen as Rosa’s grave was dug.

Shreve asks Quentin at last, “Why do you hate the South?” and in the final words of the novel, Quentin responds, “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”  Is it love or hate or both? The narrative created by the reader has engulfed her.

Works Cited

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Porter, Carolyn. William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

One aspect of the beginning parts of Go Down, Moses that stuck out to me were the animal references, and the inter-mingling between animals and humans. A “buck” is a male deer, and one of the main characters is called Uncle Buck. Faulkner’s physical description of Uncle Buck is animalistic, “Uncle Buck didn’t mount a horse like he was any sixty years old either, lean and active as a cat, with his round, close-cropped white head and his hard little gray eyes and his white-stubbled jaw, his foot in the iron and the horse already moving, already running at the open gate when Uncle Buck came into the seat” (7). Uncle Buck, Uncle Buddy, and the ambiguous narrator “Cass,” live together in a house on their land, but readers quickly see they are joined with multiple dogs and a fox who run loose in the house. When Uncle Buddy says, “‘What in damn’s hell do you mean,” he said, “turning that damn fox out with the dogs all loose in the house?’”(5), it shows the close linkage they have to their animals. The line between black and white people in the South at this time is clear, straight, and strict, it is uncrossable and there is no cohabiting between slaves and their masters.

By contrast, the line between humans and animals is blurred, they live together and so the people have animal-like characteristics while the animals are given human traits. For example, Uncle Buck’s horse is named “Black John,” and the slave they are chasing—Tomey’s Turl is on a mule named “Jake.” As Uncle Buck is chasing down Tomey’s Turl, he and Black John are morphed into other animals chasing the slave down, “Black John came out of the trees, driving, soupled out flat and level as a hawk, with Uncle Buck right up behind his ears now and yelling so that they looked exactly like a big black hawk with a sparrow riding it…” (8). When Uncle Buck and Cass lose Tomey’s Turl (TT) and head for the plantation they know TT goes to in order to see his love, they interact with the owners of the plantation, Mr. Hubert and his sister Miss Sophonsiba. The description of Miss Sophonsiba’s attire is again somewhat animalistic, as Cass views her ensemble as “…the earrings and beads clashing and jingling like little trace chains on a toy mule trotting and the perfume stronger too…” (10-11). Miss Sophonsiba compares Uncle Buck to “a bee sipping from flower to flower and not staying long anywhere and all that stored sweetness to be wasted on Uncle Buddy’s desert air…(11).

The fyce they use to help hunt down Tomey’s Turl is given human characteristics, instead of just barking he yells, shrieks, and screams (18). Finally, Miss Sophonsiba is compared somewhat to a bear hunting for a bachelor (Uncle Buck). When Uncle Buck accidentally enters her bedroom to sleep, not knowing she was there, Mr. Hubert says, “‘You come into bear-country of your own free will and accord. All right; you were a grown man and you knew it was bear-country and you knew the way back out like you knew the way in and you had your chance to take it. But no. You had to crawl into the den and lay down by the bear. And whether you did or didn’t know the bear was in it dont make any difference’”(21-22). Miss Sophonsiba is romantically interested in Uncle Buck, and she and Mr. Hubert try to use Uncle Buck’s mistake to their advantage, essentially to “capture” him and force him into marriage. These instances are all in section one of the novel, the “Was” section, and I’m curious to see what Faulkner may be saying about the relationships between black and white people, and people and animals. They are exceptionally different, and I’d like to know why.

On the surface, that’s an easy question — Rosa, Ellen, Judith, Clytie, two – three Haitian mistresses that might as well be nameless — but when you expand the question to ask what they signify as women in a novel and a time period, the thought becomes even more thought-provoking.

In considering female characters in our other novels, I can recognize many strong female personalities from the free-spirited yet determined Caddy + Quentin Jr., the stern motherly Dilsey that holds the Compsons together, the valiant Drusilla going gung-ho into the battlefield, and the stubborn yet keep-your-head-up-high type Lena Grove but in Absalom, Absalom! there is not one woman that competes with these figures in terms of some distinguishable, positive attribute.

To put it bluntly, Rosa Coldfield, though a central female character, is crabby. So was Mrs. Compson in TSAF but at least there were other female figures that offset her cynicism. Rosa’s pessimism and exorbitant view of herself spreads throughout this novel like wildfire unhindered by the shell-casings that are Ellen and Judith Coldfield or the broken down negro women present in the Sutpen household — in a final, climactic scene, an aged yet vehement Rosa yanks the hatchet from the incompetent Quentin barging down the Sutpen attic door but not before “Coldfield turned on the step and struck Clytie to the floor with a full-armed blow like a man would have” (AA 295). The contrast between Rosa and Clytie is nearly a complete role reversal from Dilsey and Candace in terms of dependency.

Simply in contrast to every other female in the book, Rosa is empowered and unstoppable spewing out ceaseless tirades against Thomas Sutpen yet all the same doesn’t put up a fight in marrying him: “because now he was all we had, all that gave us any reason for continuing to exist… Not that we would or did need him” (124). Rosa’s self-contradictions not only make her unreliable as a narrator, they also make her seem pompous and thus unlikable.

But what are these contradictions born out of? It all comes back to the root of the novel in the first place: Thomas Sutpen. In a Women’s Studies piece titled “Marriage and the Invisibility of Women in Absalom, Absalom!” author Linda Dunleavy argues that “Since he” — Sutpen — “needs women to have sons, they become the repositories of presence” (Dunleavy 458). Admittedly, Sutpen doesn’t show particular affection for the women in his life; the only time he’s noted as showing any sort of sentimentality is when he discovers that Henry kills off the man of his nightmares, Charles Bon: ” ‘Henry’s not —–?’ ‘No. He’s not here.’ — ‘Ah. And—–?’ ‘Yes. Henry killed him.’ and then burst into tears” (128).

Ostensibly, though there are women in Absalom, Absalom! they conform to patriarchal expectations of servitude and subjugation and the one woman who has any possibility of rebelling and not serving Sutpen’s “design” concedes thereby fulfilling not just Sutpen’s design but the patriarchal design of the society. In this regard, Absalom, Absalom! serves as a prime example of how women are confined by their society.

Works Cited

Dunleavy, Linda. “Marriage and the Invisibility of Women in Absalom, Absalom!.” Women’s Studies, vol. 22, no. 4, Sept. 1993.

In addition to the primary texts I am planning to cover for my final project, which include The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!, I have located the secondary sources covered below. I searched a number of locations, including OneSearch, Google Scholar, WorldCat, JSTOR, Project MUSE, and ebrary. While researching, I used strategies such as citation chaining and OneSearch’s “Browse Shelf” feature in order to find additional relevant pieces. The search terms I used included keywords such as cloister, enclosure, and seclusion in combination with Faulkner, as well as the names of the specific characters I plan on discussing. In addition, I had some success in OneSearch and WorldCat using subject headings connected to physical space and architecture, such “Architecture, Domestic, In Literature”, “Space in literature,” and so forth in combination with a search on Faulkner.

Berger, Aimee E. “Dark Houses: Navigating Space and Negotiating Silence in the Novels of Faulkner, Warren and Morrison.” Dissertation, University of North Texas, 2000.

This is an interesting dissertation that discusses, among other things, the relationship between various marginalized characters in Faulkner’s works and their spatial environment and how a physical structure such as the Sutpen house can function as a “sanctuary” of sorts for certain characters despite the darkness associated with it.

Moffitt, Anne Hirsch. “The City Specter: William Faulkner and the Threat of Urban Encroachment.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 2012, pp. 17-36,130.

This paper explores the spatial concepts I’m interested in on a larger scale. Here, the town of Jefferson itself is portrayed as desiring seclusion in the face of approaching urbanization. Light in August is the focus, so this desire is discussed in terms of its interaction with Hightower’s contradictory wishes to both cloister himself and remain in Jefferson after being the subject of scandal and gossip.

Pearson, Erin. “Faulkner’s Cryptic Closet: Forbidden Desire, Disavowal, and the “Dark House” at the Heart of Absalom, Absalom!” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3/4, 2011, pp. 341-67.

Pearson discusses the contradiction that can emerge when one cloisters oneself by exploring “the ways in which hiding requires being partially known” (341). She examines this concept in terms of various Absalom, Absalom! characters with a focus on space and queer theory.

Ruzicka, William T. Faulkner’s Fictive Architecture : The Meaning of Place in the Yoknapatawpha Novels. UMI Research, 1987.

This is a print book that I still need to pick up from Hunter’s library. While doing so, I will browse the Faulkner shelves and possibly other sections to hopefully find additional relevant sources. This work seems to be a good overview of the physical spaces featured in Faulkner’s works, but I will have to look through it in person to see how helpful it will be for my project.

Visser, Irene. “Reading Pleasure: Light in August and the Theory of the Gendered Gaze.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 1997, pp. 277-87.

This piece discusses the various characters in Light in August who “live secluded lives, wishing to evade visibility, the controlling influence of the social gaze” and operates from the framework of the male gaze, bringing to the fore the feminization of some of the cloistered male figures in this work (278).

Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is clearly peopled by an assortment of characters whose racial background, social status, gender, sexual behavior, or other characteristics relegate them to the margins of “normal” society. Some of these characters retreat even further from society by becoming cloistered individuals and thus physically isolating themselves from Jefferson’s prying eyes. I wish to explore this concept through a Yoknapedia entry on secluded figures in Faulkner’s works.

Characters who are highly cloistered in terms of their physical environment, such as Joanna Burden, Rosa Coldfield, Hightower, Mrs. Compson, and even Mrs. Hines, however minor she appears, are readily apparent in the works we’ve read. However, cloistered individuals in Faulkner’s works fall at various points on a spectrum that extends to encompass individuals such as Joe Christmas, who, despite his participation in Jefferson’s workforce and his characterization as a wanderer who travels freely from place to place, could be seen as being trapped within a mental cloister engendered by the prejudiced society in which he lives. As Hasratian notes in “The Death of Difference in Light in August,” Christmas “is inescapably self-enclosed” (57). I would like to touch on this concept of mental cloistering as well if space permits.

In particular, I wish to explore the antecedents for and results of these cloistered existences in Faulkner’s works, as well as what occurs when characters, such as Hightower and Mrs. Hines, step outside these physical boundaries that they have set for themselves. In terms of antecedents, I am interested in the interaction of individual choice and societal pressures in the decision to enshroud oneself in a cloistered environment. Additionally, Faulkner often characterizes these secluded environments as overpowering the senses of “outsiders” who enter these spaces, with their dirtiness, decay, and various smells (the ever-present smell of camphor in Mrs. Compson’s bedroom comes to mind), and I would like to cover this aspect as well. I may also narrow my general topic by discussing the gendered presentation of the phenomenon of cloistering in the three novels, as male cloistered characters such as Hightower are sometimes feminized.

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner frames an account of the American South in the late 1800’s within the novel’s present narrative conditions of Quentin’s experience in the North in the 1900’s. Through Quentin and Shreve’s recollection of the rise and fall of Sutpen’s Hundred, we get the sense that the destruction experienced in the South casts its shadow onto the North. Arguably, the destruction of which Quentin speaks can be felt across the United States. The story’s particular account of Southern ruination is passed generationally from Rosa to Quentin and from Quentin’s grandfather, to Quentin’s father and onto Quentin. However, what makes Quentin’s knowledge of Sutpen’s ruin important is the geographic mobility he grants to the history of the South.

Miss Rosa understands the importance of giving the narrative of the South legs. She chooses Quentin as the ears of her story knowing that his admittance to Harvard puts him in a position to reproduce and disseminate the story within the North. It turns out, she’s right. Quentin shares the story of Sutpen’s Hundred with Shreve. In this way it is passed rhetorically through oral histories that travel both generationally and geographically. The letter Quentin receives from his father also serves as a rhetorical representation of Southern culture. While the function of orality and language are crucial for constructing the history of the South, it becomes apparent through Quentin’s account that there are visual, or material, components to Quentin’s recollection of the South. The story constructed within his dorm room extends beyond the stories told through language. In other words, the materiality of the South penetrate Quentin’s present in the North.

As Quentin and Shreve attempt to corroborate the scraps of narrative offered by Rosa and Quentin’s father, imagery of the South fills the boys room at Harvard. Initially, this imagery of the South is produced linguistically through Quentin’s recognition of the letter from his father. Yet the “the familiar blurred mechanical Jefferson Jan 10 1910 Miss” and his father’s words “My dear son” catalyze Quentin’s experience of the physical attributes of his Southern home within his New England dorm room. Quentin’s alienated and abstract memory of the South is made material as “his father’s sloped fine hand… could lie on a strange lamplit table in Cambridge.” In spite of the snow on Shreve’s arm that indicates the unforgiving New England winter just outside their window, the letter manifests Quentin’s recollection of physical and geographical markers of the South. At once, Quentin experiences the bodily sensation  of “that dead summer twilight – the wistaria, the cigar-smell, the fireflies – attenuated up from Mississippi and into this strange room, across this strange iron New England snow.”

The Southern materiality constructed via Quentin’s recollection is important because it punctures Shreve’s imagination of the South as geographically partitioned from his Northern experience. As Quentin and Shreve quilt together the narratives of their predecessors, they create the material reality of the South within the North. This material excess challenges the Northern imagination of an alienated and ideological disparate South. Ultimately, the narrative reconstruction Quentin and Shreve enact bridges the notion of a partitioned United States and opens within Absalom, Absalom! a reading of a universally and unconsciously troubled United States.

“He was not for one moment concerned about his ability to start the third time. All that he was concerned about was the possibility that he might not have time sufficient to do it in, regain his lost ground in.”(A.A.223)

Quentin in his narration of Sutpen’s design and his redesign not only unravels Sutpen’s past which brought the bits of pieces of previous events together, but also revealed his resilient, determined and unyielding nature. Before narrating Sutpen’s third attempt to fulfill his ‘design in mind ‘(194, 212), Quentin provides Shreve with new information about Sutpen. Faulkner uses Shreve’s constant interrupting phrase of  ‘The demon, hey?'(177, 181,198, 214, 217, 224) to maintain suspense and keep us on track with Quentin’s narration of his grandfather’s narration of Sutpen’s personal narration. The cycles of narration coincide with the completion of Sutpen’s ‘design in mind’ and are finally interpreted through Shreve’s view of events and eagerness to have Quentin give him a chance to play “‘No,’ Shreve said; ‘you wait. Let me play a while now.'”(224)

In chapter 7 of A.A., Faulkner for the first time allows Sutpen to reveal his past childhood, his bitterness and realizations. ‘He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men…That is he began to discern that without being aware of it.’ (183) His character begins to develop amid comparing his family’s poverty in the log cabin and the monkey dressed nigger’s denial to allow him to enter the rich white man’s house and further degrade him by ‘ never to come to that front door again but to go round to the back.'(188) A pivotal moment which indeed sets the first line in Sutpen’s design in mind. ‘You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with…tiptoeing out of the house. He never saw any of his family again.’ ‘He went to the West Indies’.(192) Thus, his design is put into action and the first round of his design starts in search of money, land, slaves and lineage.
In his time shifts between presenting Sutpen as a child , Sutpen in his sixties and referring to Sutpen’s youthful struggle to fulfill his design, Faulkner is an embodiment of  ‘the modernist commitment to “unknowing”.When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them.'( Weinstein, Philip.Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction) Shreve’s comment on this unfamiliarity with the progression of events is clear in his words to Quentin ‘Your father seems to have an awful lot of delayed information awful quick, after having waited forty-five years.'(214) Till this chapter, Faulkner kept the others (readers and characters) unaware of the real design, its progress and the true interrelations between the characters’ movement and actions. For the first time, the main design is clear and reveals Sutpen’s relentless pursue of extreme wealth and pure power. Pure to the extent that makes him end the first round of his design, abandon his first wife of mixed blood and refuse to acknowledge his children. They are but shadows in this design and Charles is compared to ‘a little child that rushes out onto the football field to take part in the game and the players run over him.'(214)

However ironic it sounds when thrown in the light of  Sutpen’s constant obsession of fulfilling his plan and have ‘no monkey-dressed nigger anywhere under the sun to come to the door and order the child away.'(215) Sutpen has his own son ordered away because he didn’t fit in the plan. Thus, the second round has to commence with him seeking Coldfield’s partnership in business and in life by proposing to Ellen and conceiving two pure white children who could keep this gained power and respect within their Southern Society. Everything is going according to the planned design until the unacknowledged son is killed at the hands of Henry, the pure white son who makes his sister Judith a widow and forces the second round of the design to come to a halt.        ‘The result would be that that design and plan to which he had given fifty years of his life had just as well never existed at all.'(219) Here, the first information presented in Absalom, Absalom  comes only as a second round in Sutpen’s design which Faulkner skillfully unwraps through his multiple narrators.

‘If shrewdness could not extricate him this second time as it had before, he could at least depend on the courage to find him will and strength to find him a third start toward that design.'(219) Sutpen’s third round begins with an offer to Miss Rosa to end her spinster ship and that ‘ they try it first and if it was a boy and lived, they would be married.'(228) Upon her understandable refusal, Sutpen doesn’t waste any time for time might not be suffice and shifts to Walsh’s granddaughter whose delivery of her baby puts an end to the third round of Sutpen’s design as well as puts an end to Sutpen’s life at the hands of her angered aspiring grandfather. Furthermore, Faulkner refuses to smoothly end the game of ‘knowing and unknowing’ between Shreve and Quentin with the failure of Sutpen’s third round. The skillful writer has Shreve collect all the threads of the design from Quentin’s narration and suddenly present Quentin’s realization of narrating false information ‘It wasn’t a son. It was a girl.'(234) For Faulkner time might not be sufficient for Sutpen to have a new design, but it is sufficient for him to have a new cycle of narration.