Outraged and Amazed

This monograph focuses on how Absalom, Absalom!’s complex narrative functions as a vehicle through which social order in the South is represented, challenged and renegotiated. Exploring Quentin Compson’s attempt to understand his own identity through the complicated and incomplete story of Thomas Sutpen, Joel Peckham’s Outraged and Amazed: Transgressing the South in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! demonstrates how the poetics, structure and central conflicts of the novel derive from a combination of its characters’ intense resistance to their proscribed social limitations and their desire to wrest control of their identities through and from the act of storytelling.

Intending to present a narrative that could explain the past in a way that makes sense of their world and their place in it, these would-be authors are instead confronted with their limitations and the inadequacy of their knowledge. Outraged and Amazed explores the bewildering, tangled, dislocated, and confused story we are left with—a story of the South that is plausible but unverifiable, at once self-reflexively fictive and true.