Word: absalom
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...Absalom, Absalom...
...must sleep on a pallet on the floor. This primal wrong and first denial of equality leaves Roth in "a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit." Just how far Mississippi's troubles extend back into history is examined in Absalom, Absalom! That history is inexorably racial. The novel mercilessly strips away the romantic Southern mythology to reveal the brutal repression of slavery, the arrogance of plantation owners who could summon Negro girls to their beds as if they were ordering the carriage brought around to the door, the guilt behind...
...panting, difficult prose, the several 20th century narrators of Absalom, Absalom! pursue the story of Thomas Sutpen, who came to Mississippi with wagonloads of savage blacks in 1832 determined to change a lOO-sq.-mi. piece of virgin forest into a plantation. Sutpen is a creature of high-flown words and naked will-and perhaps the closest to a tragic hero in the classical Greek sense that U.S. literature has produced...
...cure such ignorance, yet avoid charges of proselytizing, Warshaw developed a reading course, drawn from the King James Version, that stresses literary influence rather than theological interpretation. His students soon found a new dimension in Moby Dick's Ishmael or Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, learned the origin of a doubting Thomas, a Jonah or a Judas, and got the point of Handel's Messiah or Harry Belafonte's rocking Noah. On new tests, Warshaw's pupils pushed their grades to high levels, and a couple of students named Cohen and O'Connell got perfect...
...Dryden quotation from Absalom and Achitophel goes on: Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong; Was Everything by starts, and Nothing long; But, in the course oj one revolving Moon, Was Chymist, Fidler, Statesman, and Buffoon...