ough he is engaged to Judith, has an octoroon mistress. Faulkners strong condemnation of the South comes from the Actual story, which Quentin tells in response to Shrieves question, What is the South like? As a Southerner, trying to learn northern ideas, Quentin has no choice but to list all the failures of the south from the northern point of view, so he tells us about Thomas Sutpen. Thomas Sutpen stands for all the great qualities of the South and at the same time represents the failures. Sutpen strongly believed that he could build a system of morals in the same way he could build anything else. In doing so he overlooks certain humanitarian values. Sutpen, just like the South, built his entire fortune on the work of others. He never comes to any ethical or moral conclusion about slavery and neither does the South. The slavery issue in the book is also addressed by Toni Morisson in Playing in the Dark. She states that one of the major flaws of the American society is the lack of its identity, which is taken from the enslaved blacks. Similarly, Sutpens whole identity is built on his plantation and his wild Negro slaves. Careful attention must be also paid to the way Faulkner structured the narration. This is primarily to show the relationship between people and time and get people interested in the story. He gives us the basic outline in the first chapter, but we still dont get the full picture. The narrator in the first chapter is Rosa Coldfield, who portrays Sutpen as a demon or a djin. Her hate for the man impedes her from providing us with an objective description. While her view of Sutpen is correct, her reasons for saying that he is evil are a result of her disillusionment. However, she provides us with the example of how destructive it can be to cling to past. She has hated one man for over forty years, clinging to a period in her life when Sutpen appeared. She is also the first narrator because her story can be expanded ...
