details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the dual aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch.

The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard College, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises.

Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's.

The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen's story.

All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man's daughter, Ellen Coldfield.

Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets fellow student Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior.

However, Thomas Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop the proposed union.

They then return to Mississippi to enlist in their University company, joining the Confederate Army to fight in the Civil War.

Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside, telling them that they are not worthy of sleeping in the stables with his horse, who had just sired a male.

Rigidly committed to his "design", Sutpen proves unwilling to honor his marriage to a part-black woman, setting in motion his own destruction.

[5] By using various narrators expressing their interpretations, the novel alludes to the historical cultural zeitgeist of Faulkner's South, where the past is always present and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time; it thus also explores the process of myth-making and the questioning of truth.

juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation—with the implication that reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable and therefore imaginative.

The final lyric of "Distant Early Warning", a single released by the Canadian rock band Rush, is the word 'Absalom' repeated three times.