Wash

Wash made little to no sense to me on the first reading. I suspected (and was later found right) that we were jumping into the middle of a longer tale and thus lacked helpful back-story. Although the ending of Wash could likely have stood as the ending of the entire work, titled Absalom, Absalom!, I later learned that the story stretched even beyond the slash and burn incident.

Both characteristically and metaphorically, Sutpen resembles the Emily of A Rose For Emily. In his action and by the significance Wash Jones (heretofore referred to as "Wash") attributes to it, Sutpen stands as an enduring memory of a proud and aristocratic South - a South that is increasingly historic and fading. Despite his central role in the story, Sutpen failed to motivate much interest in me. Instead, the character of Wash I found much more interesting. This passage - the bulk of which is one majestic 151-word sentence - is illuminative:

"Meanwhile on weekdays he would see the fine figure of the man...on the fine figure of the black stallion, galloping about the plantation. For that moment his heart would be quiet and proud. It would seem to him that that world in which Negroes, whom the Bible told him had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better found and housed and even clothed than he and his; that world in which he sensed always about him mocking echoes of black laughter was but a dream and an illusion, and that the actual world was this one across which his own lonely apotheosis seemed to gallop on the black thoroughbred, thinking how the Book said also that all men were created in the image of God and hence all men made the same image in God's eyes at least; so that he could say, as though speaking of himself, 'A fine proud man. If God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like.'"

This passage gets at the "point" while also raising some questions. Faulkner considered slavery an integral part of the story of the War and the South. Juxtaposing a poor white in the metamorphosing environment of the Civil War South provides an interesting contrast. Beyond the issue of race and supremacy lies the greater question of what Wash symbolizes in this story. If Sutpen himself fills the role of the grey-bearded Amish man trying to cross the street in Times Square, then what is Wash? Clearly Wash and Sutpen are too different degrees of Southern authenticity. We dare not forget that Sutpen has his letter from General Lee.

Where, then, do we place Wash in the Southern metaphorical landscape? Is he also an outdated extension of Southern aristocratic culture, him an envious immitation rather than an authentic, Lee-certified Southerner? What significance is it that, rather than reaching his own destruction in whatever way fate would have, he instead went mad and slaughtered and burned those around him?

More than anything I am driven to explore 1) the significance of Wash's idolization of Sutpen and 2) why Faulkner saw it fit to sadisticize Wash, and how that contributed to the larger message.