Mr. Compson

Quentin's father, referred to throughout the novel simply as "father," is the single most dominant voice in Absalom!. Although it is unclear which members of the Sutpen family he ever saw himself, he is the source for much of the narrative, including much of what his father, General Compson, supposedly learned directly from Sutpen. Both Quentin and Shreve, hundreds of miles away in Massachusetts, note how they each sound "just like Father" (147, 210). As a character, his biography is extremely slight: he is the son of a Confederate general and the father of a young man who goes to Harvard. The only physical description of him describes the hand in which he holds Bon's letter "looking almost as dark as a negro's against his linen leg" (71). But although he exists almost entirely as a storyteller, as a voice, readers can and should determine his character from the ways in which he himself interprets the characters and events in the Sutpen story. His representation of Rosa, or of Bon (the character, he admits, who is "the curious one to me," 74), or his account of the trip than Bon and Henry take to New Orleans - all these and the other passages he narrates may tell us at least as much if not more about Mr. Compson as about the other people or the past. Readers familiar with The Sound and the Fury, in which Mr. Compson first appears and in which "Father said" is also a dominant motif, can and should also decide how much that earlier novel helps to understand his treatment of the Sutpen material.