정체성 추구와 거부 = Chase for Identity and Its Rejection

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

It is Thomas Sutpen’s story that the narrators are telling, but in their differing versions, they are also telling another story--their own. By using multiple narrators, Faulkner is able to incorporate two stories' Sutpen's life, and the effects of his life on the narrators. Ultimately the reader should find his own Sutpen.
The theme of Absalom, Absalom! is chase for identity and its rejection. The closer Sutpen’s family comes to civilization, the more aware the boy becomes of social castes. Sent by his father with a message for the owner, Sutpen approaches the front door of the plantation house. Being told by the Negro servant to go around to the back door is an annihilating experience because it denies his individual identity. To Sutpen, wealth and respectability are tools toward his design. His goal is the assertion of his identity in a society based upon ownership of property.
In the process of achieving his design, Sutpen rejects others’ identity and so he is isolated from everyone. By repudiating Eulalia, he denied her human identity, just as years later his suggestion to Rosa denies her existence as an equal human being with feelings and desires and a need for acceptance. The rejection of his son Charles is anticlimactic. The retribution takes the form of violent crimes by the children--revolt, incest, fratricide. Charles’ actions are an expression of an overpowering need for his individuality and identity. What Henry must accept if he sanctions the marriage is incest. His fraternal love for Bon overcomes his moral scruples. Henry could sanction an incestuous marriage but not a miscegenetic one. Finally he kills Bon. All his love could not withstand the ultimate taboo. Sutpen's last desperate attempt to make his mark on the face of oblivion by seducing Wash Jones’s adolescent granddaughter is a final revelation of his continued rejection of identity of his fellow men. The child and all the other people with whom he has dealt are nothing more than instruments. By telling Milly Jones that if she were a mare he could give her a stall, he negates her human identity and the humanity of her grandfather who kills him.
Absalom, Absalom! describes the collapse of traditional South as a metaphor. The South with the inhuman rejection could not help being collapsed like the Sutpen family. This novel also pictures a dehumanized modem world. William Faulkner shows symbolically the spiritual situation of the modem men-the tragic rejection of others identity. The modems' mind is filled with commercial values in place of humanistic ones. We should create harmonized society where we accept and respect each other’s identity.