Margaret Dickie Uroff

Bio: Margaret Dickie Uroff is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 1 citations.

The fictions of absalom, absalom!

Abstract: In their attempts to identify Absalom, Absalom! as either Thomas Sutpen's story or Quentin Compson's story, critics have overlooked the obvious point that the novel is actually William Faulkner's story.1 Writ? ten by him it is also about himself as a Southerner, who creates, like his narrators, certain fictions about a past that he relaizes he cannot or will not adequately understand or interpret. The line of Southern storytellers runs from Sutpen through three generations of Compsons to Faulkner, who turns it over eventually to the non-Southerner, Shreve McCannon. The anxieties of fiction-making that are everywhere apparent in Absalom, Absalom! deserve examination because they reveal not only Faulkner's attitude toward the possibilities of fiction but also his growing skepticism about his material, concerns evident in all his experimental novels but brought to sharp focus at this crucial point in his career. When Faulkner first started to work on the novel, he planned to make Quentin the single narrator because, as he wrote to Harrison Smith, he could "use his bitterness which he has projected on the South in the form of hatred of it and its people to get more out ofthe story itself than a historical novel. To keep the hoop skirts and plug hats out, you might say."2 Faulkner worked on the novel for well over a year, rewrote it completely after this unsuccessful first start, added not only three other fictional narrators but his own voice as an occasional commentator and thinly disguised in his fictional surrogates. Still, his initial concern with how to get more out of the story itself remained in his mind even years later when, in commenting on the novel, he claimed that he had used not Quentin but Shreve as "the commentator that held the thing to something of reality," as "a solvent to keep it real, keep it believable, creditable, otherwise it would have vanished into smoke and fury" (Faulkner in the University, p. 75). Actually, as the revisions of the manuscript suggest, the use of any single narrator, even the author as implied narrator, to keep the story