The narrative of Thomas Sutpen, an intriguing stranger who arrived in Jefferson township in the early 1830s, is told in Absalom, Absalom! He pulled a beautiful estate out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness with the help of a French architect and a gang of wild Haitians.
"He wanted sons, and the sons devastated him," Faulker observed of Sutpen. Sutpen's ruthlessness and single-minded disregard for the human community haunted not only his contemporaries but also men who came after him, men like Quentin Compson, who were haunted even into the twentieth century by Sutpen's legacy of ruthlessness and single-minded disregard for the human community.
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