sooo much more to say about this than I could venture to know. would love to hear a real scholar of Faulkner, the South, Modernism, and whatnot really go off about this one. But even with my limited knowledge, it's easy to see why this is considered by some to be the greatest work of Southern literature. It really does encapsulate in so many ways the story of not just the South, but of America as a whole, since after all America as we know it today was truly started in and was built by the South through the exploitation of slaves. And this book really gets at the insanity of that. The guilt and shame and pride and sadness and mourning that Southerners like Quentin feel having been born into the beginning of the 20th century and sent off to Harvard, so much of their family and heritage sacrificed and laid barren behind them in order to allow them to do so. The character of Thomas Sutpen is a major focal point for these themes as well in a lot of ways but one is that he has savage and wild traits that would typically be associated with the Native Peoples and slaves whom were fucked over for the sake of creating America as we know it. This can represent that the transformation, the “domestication”, of wild, pre-colonization America was a very savage and wild process. It wasn’t so much the taming of a wild country as it was the process of making that country even more wild, through conquering, fighting, bloodshed, and toil. Sutpen himself is also representative of the story of the American south, its rise (plantations) and fall (Civil War), a story which is essential to understanding the America that we have today, and how its history is imbued in our everyday lives.