Article: "Listen to them being ghosts": Rosa's words of madness that Quentin can't hear. (states of mind of narrators of William Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!' and 'The Sound and The Fury')

In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), two of the story's narrators become tangled in their attempts to understand the past. Both Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield are described as ghosts, and both are eventually destroyed by their inability to function in the present: Quentin's life ending in suicide and Rosa's ending in a coma which finally silences her outrage. Most readers have struggled to explain Quentin's suicide, often seeing him as an emblem of a decaying southern society or as a sensitive youth psychologically damaged by a dysfunctional family (see Butery 1989, Warren 1988, and Weinstein 1992). To explain Rosa's death, however, we accept Quentin's and ...

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