SutpensInUV

Thomas Sutpen is first evoked in the novel as the unnamed "damn feller" who replaces John Sartoris in command of the regiment that Jefferson sent to the Civil War (52), and then named when John's son and wife, Bayard and Drusilla, compare the two colonels and their ambitions (221-23). But Sutpen's family only appears briefly, and negatively, when readers learn that Sutpen "lost everything in the War," including "all hope of descendants" after "his son killed his daughter's fiance" (222). This phrasing erases race from the story completely.