My sense of the relationship between Faulkner, Freud, and Nietzsche is that they were writers who addressed themselves to many of the same questions, and that at numerous point their works form imaginative analogues to one another. (pp. 2-3)

It is precisely because I understand Faulkner, Freud, and Nietzsche to be related specifically as writers that I treat the works of all three as literary texts whose implications are ultimately philosophical. (p. 3)

The figure of Quentin Compson—the narrator locked in an incestuous, suicidal struggle with his dark twin, the story—is the shadow that falls in one form or another across the works of most postwar American novelists; it is a presence, a pervasive influence that the novelist who aspires to major status must come to terms with. (p. 20)

Of the many levels of meaning in [Absalom, Absalom!], the deepest level is to be found in the symbolic identification of incest and miscegenation and in the relationship of this symbolic identification both to Quentin Compson's personal history in The Sound and the Fury and to the story that Quentin narrates in Absalom; Absalom! (pp. 25-6)

One reason that the voices of the different narrators sound so much alike is that we hear those voices filtered through the mind of a single listener: Quentin's consciousness is the fixed point of view from which the reader overhears the various narrators, Quentin included. Since Quentin is the principal narrative consciousness in Absalom, and since the story of the Sutpens contains numerous gaps that must be filled by conjecture on the part of the narrators, it is not surprising that the narrative bears a striking resemblance to Quentin's own personal history and that of his family…. This is not to imply that the factual similarities between the stories of the Sutpen and Compson families are a product of Quentin's imagination, but to point out that, given these similarities of fact, Quentin as creative narrator could easily presume similarity of motivation. It is a mutual process in which what Quentin knows of the motivations in his own family life illuminates the story of the Sutpens and, in turn, the events in the Sutpens' story help Quentin to understand his own experiences. (pp. 26-7)

Faulkner did not need to make Quentin Compson a narrator of Absalom, nor did he need to involve the Compson family in the story of the Sutpens. The fact that he did both indicates that what we know of Quentin Compson and his family from The Sound and the Fury is somehow material to the meaning of Sutpen's story…. [For] Quentin the objectification of subjective contents is an effort to give a personal obsession a more than personal significance.

To what extent, then, does the story that Quentin tells in Absalom resemble his own life story in The Sound and the Fury? We noted first of all that Quentin's failure to kill Candace's seducer and thus fulfill the role of protective brother has its reverse image in Henry's murder of Bon to safeguard the honor of their sister. Also, Quentin's incestuous love for Candace is mirrored by Bon's love for Judith. That Quentin identifies with both Henry, the brother as protector, and Bon, the brother as seducer, is not extraordinary, for in Quentin's narrative they are not so much two separate figures as two aspects of the same figure. Quentin projects onto the characters of Bon and Henry opposing elements in his own personality…. This separation of the unacceptable elements from the acceptable elements in the self, this splitting of Quentin's personality into a bad half and a good half, with the subsequent tormenting of the good half by the bad and the punishment of the bad half by the good, involves a kind of narrative bipolarity typical of both compulsion neurosis and schizophrenia. The split is the result of the self's inability to handle ambivalence, in this case, Quentin's failure to reconcile his simultaneous attraction to and repulsion by the incestuous desire for his sister. The solution is primitive and effective: one simply splits the good-bad self into two separate people…. If at points during the narrative Quentin divides his personality between the characters of Bon and Henry, at other points Henry and Bon merge into one figure by exchanging roles. (pp. 27-9)

Clearly, the relationship between Henry and Bon is a form of doubling: the hero-worshiping Henry imitates Bon's manners, speech, and dress, while Bon … looks at Henry and thinks "not there but for the intervening leaven of that blood which we do not have in common is my skull, my brow, sockets, shape and angle of jaw and chin and some of my thinking behind it, and which he could see in my face in his turn if he but knew to look as I know but there, just behind a little, obscured a little by that alien blood whose admixing was necessary in order that he exist is the face of the man who shaped us both out of that blind chancy darkness which we call the future; there—there—at any moment, second, I shall penetrate by something of will and intensity and dreadful need, and strip that alien leavening from it and look not on my brother's face whom I did not know I possessed and hence never missed, but my father's, out of the shadow of whose absence my spirit's posthumeity has never escaped."… (pp. 29-30)

In the doubling between Bon and Henry, Bon plays the role of the shadow—the dark self that is made to bear the consciously unacceptable desires repudiated by the bright half of the mind. Throughout the novel, Bon is identified with the image of the shadow. (p. 30)

As Otto Rank has pointed out in his classic study of doubling [The Double], the brother and the shadow are two of the most common forms that the figure of the double assumes. Rank locates the origin of doubling in narcissism, specifically in that guilt which the narcissistic ego feels at "the distance between the ego-ideal and the attained reality."… Rank points out that in myth and literature the appearance of the double is often a harbinger of death and that just as often the ego attempts to protect itself by killing the double, only to find that this is "really a suicidal act."… It is in the mechanism of narcissistic self-love that Rank finds the explanation for that "denouement of madness, almost regularly leading to suicide, which is so frequently linked with pursuit by the double …"…. (pp. 33-4)

Both the narcissistic origin of doubling and the scenario of madness leading to the suicidal murder of the double help to illuminate the internal narrative of Quentin Compson's last day given in The Sound and the Fury and in turn to illuminate the story he tells in Absalom…. [It] is only when we see in the murder of Bon by Henry what Quentin saw in it—that Quentin's own situation appears to be a repetition of the earlier story—that we begin to understand the reason for Quentin's suicide. And this whole repetitive structure is made even more problematic by the fact that the explanation which Quentin gives for Bon's murder (that Bon is black, i.e., the shadow self) may well be simply the return of the repressed—simply an unconscious projection of Quentin's own psychic history. (p. 35)

Like Narcissus, Quentin drowns himself, and the internal narrative of his last day, clearly the narrative of someone who has gone insane, is dominated by Quentin's obsessive attempts to escape from his shadow, to "trick his shadow," as he says. (pp. 35-6)

Quentin's narcissism is necessarily linked with his incestuous desire for his sister, for as Otto Rank points out, brother-sister incest is a substitute for child-parent incest—what the brother seeks in his sister is his mother…. Quentin's drowning of his shadow, then, is not only the punishment, upon his own person, of the brother seducer by the brother avenger, it is as well the union of the brother seducer with the sister, the union of Quentin's shadow with his mirror image in the water, the mirror image of himself that evokes his sister lying on her back in the stream. The punishment of the brother seducer by the brother avenger is death, but the union of the brother seducer and the sister is also death, for the attempt to merge the shadow and the mirror image results in the total immersion of both in the water on which they are reflected, the immersion of the masculine ego consciousness in the waters of its birth, in the womb of the feminine unconscious from which it was originally differentiated. By drowning his shadow, Quentin is able simultaneously to satisfy his incestuous desire and to punish it, and … it is precisely this simultaneous satisfaction and punishment of a repressed desire that is at the core of doubling. For Quentin, the incestuous union and the punishment of that union upon his own person can be accomplished by a single act because both the union and its punishment are a liebestod, a dying of the ego into the other. (pp. 43-4)

Quentin's incestuous desire for his sister and the disabling fear of castration that she embodies for him have made Quentin in effect Candace's eunuch—impotent with his sister and yet obsessed with preventing her from making love to other men…. Quentin's brother Benjy is in certain respects a double of Quentin—in his arrested, infantile state, in his obsessive attachment to Candace, in his efforts to keep Candace from becoming involved with anyone outside the family, Benjy is a copy of Quentin, and when their brother Jason has Benjy gelded for attempting to molest a little girl, Benjy's physical condition doubles Quentin's psychological impotence, acting out the fate of the brother seducer at the hands of the brother avenger. Jason is, of course, named after his and Quentin's father. (pp. 51-2)

As Quentin's suicide is associated in his mind with the image of the general resurrection, so the dating of the other sections in the novel associates Quentin's death with Christ's death and resurrection, establishing for Quentin's suicidal murder of the brother seducer by the father-surrogate a religious context in which the archetypal son sacrifices his life to appease the anger of the archetypal father. (pp. 52-3)

[The] sense of a cyclic repetition within whose grip individual free will is helpless presents itself in Faulkner's novels as the image of the fate or doom that lies upon a family. Certainly, it would be difficult to think of two words used more often in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom than "fate" and "doom." (p. 60)

[The] feeling that an ancestor's actions can determine the actions of his descendants for generations to come by compelling them periodically to repeat his deeds is the form that the fate or doom of a family takes in Faulkner. Often in his novels the actions of a grandparent preempt the life of a grandchild. One thinks immediately of Light in August …, where the three principal characters … have had their destinies determined by the lives of their grandfathers. (p. 61)

Rank notes that for primitive man the earliest image of the immortal self was his shadow—the shadow which departs with the death of the grandfather but returns with the birth of the grandson. It would seem, then, that in the reversal fantasy we have the archetypal form of the temporal aspect of doubling. (p. 66)

[The crux] of Quentin's problem is repetition, the temporal form of doubling, for it is those inevitable repetitions inherent in the cyclic nature of time that seem to rob the individual will of all potency. Yet it is not just repetition that is involved here, it is recollection as well—the awareness of repetition…. (p. 69)

Surely, there can be no question that Quentin reconstructs the story of Bon, Henry, and Judith in light of his own experiences with Candace and Dalton Ames…. Quentin's recollection or reconstruction of the events in the story of the Sutpens turns out to be a reincorporation or reliving of [earlier] events. (p. 74)

[The] most striking example of the way in which Quentin's narrative act becomes a reincorporation of the lives of the people in that narrative is to be found in Quentin and Shreve's identification with Henry and Bon. Indeed, that identification becomes so complete that Quentin and Shreve supply the missing information in the story with the authority of participants and not simply narrators…. [The] interchangeability of the persons with whom [Quentin and Shreve] identify springs from the interchangeability of the roles of brother seducer and brother avenger, for in Quentin's case they are, of course, simply two aspects of a single personality. Since the relationship between the brother avenger and the brother seducer is a substitute for the father-son relationship in the Oedipal triangle, it is not surprising that when Quentin and Shreve identify with Henry and Bon, the narration turns into a father-son dialogue…. This basic interchangeability of the roles of father and son is present in both the reversal fantasy and the incest complex, and it is internalized in the father-son relationship of the roles of the superego and the ego within the self. (pp. 76-7)

[The] latent homoerotic content in the story of Bon and Henry may well be simply a projection of Quentin's own state made in the act of narration. (p. 78)

What Quentin must face … is that in terms of the content of an event no actual repetition in time is possible…. It can only be the internal compulsion to repeat, that compulsion to repeat which is rooted in the unconscious and thus operates without or in spite of the conscious will, that compulsion to repeat which … is always frustrated, a frustration that is experienced by the conscious mind, paradoxically, as a failure of will. (p. 80)

[There] is a clear connection between the repetition compulsion and doubling, a connection which Freud discusses at length in his essay on the uncanny. He points out that doubling is one of those structures that commonly evoke the feeling of the uncanny…. (p. 82)

[According to Freud] it is not every repetition that evokes the feeling of the uncanny, it is only certain events whose repetition reminds us of that inner compulsion to repeat, and the specific character of those events, according to Freud, is that they all represent the recurrence of something that has been repressed. Freud points out that every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety, and that that class of morbid anxiety that is associated with the return of the repressed is what we refer to as the feeling of the uncanny, irrespective of whether the original event aroused dread or some other affect…. (p. 83)

One can, I believe, construct a model showing the structural links between the repetition compulsion, the regressive character of the instincts, and the morbid anxiety evoked by the return of the repressed through the involuntary repetition involved in doubling, and this model will serve as an imaginative analogue to Faulkner's texts, shedding light on the structure of Quentin's personal history and the story he narrates. (p. 88)

If the involuntary repetition experienced in doubling recalls the helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams, it is because the double as the return of the repressed evokes by both its form and its content that primal threat of the son's being rendered permanently helpless by the castrating father—an overruling of the will from outside that has as its analogue the internal overruling of the will by the unconscious through the return of the repressed, the same overruling by the unconscious that we meet in dreams.

This sense of helplessness, of impotence, is, of course, the very core of Quentin's dilemma, for when Quentin tries to play an active, masculine role, his will is always frustrated and overruled and he is shifted into a passive, feminine role…. [It] is not just within the scenarios of brother avenger and brother seducer that Quentin's will is frustrated and Quentin rendered helpless, it is also by the very unwilled recurrence of those scenarios within the story that he narrates and in the events with the Italian girl and Gerald Bland that he is again rendered passive in the grip of fate. (p. 97)

In his interviews at the University of Virginia, Faulkner repeatedly pointed out that Absalom is a revenge story—indeed, a double revenge story: Sutpen's revenge for the affront that he suffered as a boy and Bon's revenge for the affront that he and his mother suffered at Sutpen's hands during Sutpen's quest for revenge…. Sutpen wants revenge not against the injustice of that mastery which the powerful have over the powerless, but against those "artificial standards or circumstances" that determine who are the powerful and who the powerless, against the artificial standard of inherited wealth and the circumstances of one's birth. Faulkner says that Sutpen in his quest for revenge violated all the rules of decency and honor and pity and compassion. But there is one rule that Sutpen does not violate, and that is the rule of power. For the rule that Sutpen follows is that real power springs not from the external, artificial advantages of birth and inherited wealth but from something internal: for Sutpen the source of real power is the force of the individual will…. [The] central paradox of Sutpen's quest [is] that he seeks revenge on the artificial standards of birth and inherited wealth as the determinants of power by setting out to establish a dynasty—that is, by trying to confer those very same artificial advantages on his son. Faulkner gives us the key to this paradox when he says that Sutpen "wanted revenge as he saw it, but also he wanted to establish the fact that man is immortal, that man, if he is man, cannot be inferior to another man through artificial standards or circumstances." (pp. 99-100)

[What] is at work in Quentin's struggle to bring the story of the Sutpens under control is the question of whether narration itself constitutes a space in which one can be original, whether an "author" possesses "authority," whether that repetition which in life Quentin has experienced as a compulsive fate can be transformed in narration, through an act of the will, into a power, a mastery of time…. At the beginning of the novel, Quentin is a passive narrator. The story seems to choose him…. But in the second half, when he and Shreve begin their imaginative reconstruction of the story, Quentin seems to move from a passive role to an active role in the narrative repetition of the past. (pp. 113-14)

[In the novel the] primal affront that the son suffers at the hands of the father and for which the son seeks revenge throughout his life is the very fact of being a son—of being the generated in relation to the generator, the passive in relation to the active, the effect in relation to the cause…. [But] the son can never really effect that reversal by which he would become his father's father. The son's only alternative is to take revenge on a substitute—that is, to become a father himself and thus repeat the generative situation as a reversal in which he now inflicts [revenge] on his own son, who is a substitute for the grandfather….

When Sutpen takes revenge on a substitute for the affront that he received as a boy, he takes revenge not just on Charles Bon but on Henry as well. (p. 117)

Keeping in mind this notion of revenge on a substitute, we can now understand how Quentin's act of narration in Absalom is an attempt to seize his father's authority by gaining temporal priority. In the struggle with his father, Quentin will prove that he is a better man by being a better narrator—he will assume the authority of an author because his father does not know the whole story, does not know the true reason for Bon's murder, while Quentin does. Instead of listening passively while his father talks, Quentin will assume the active role, and his father will listen while Quentin talks. (p. 119)

As Quentin had to listen to his father tell the story in the first half of the novel, so in the second half Shreve must listen while Quentin tells the story. But what begins as Shreve listening to Quentin talk soon turns into a struggle between them for control of the narration with Shreve frequently interrupting Quentin to say, "Let me tell it now." That struggle, which is a repetition in reverse of the struggle between Mr. Compson and Quentin, makes Quentin realize the truth of his father's argument in The Sound and the Fury—that priority is not necessarily originality, that to come before is not necessarily to come first. For Quentin realizes that … Shreve will [in turn] try to take revenge on him by seizing "authority," by taking control of the narrative. What Quentin realizes is that generation as revenge on a substitute is an endless cycle of reversibility in which revenge only means passing on the affront to another who, seeking revenge in turn, passes on the affront, so that the affront and the revenge are self-perpetuating. (p. 120)

[If] for Quentin the act of narration is an analogue of … revenge on a substitute, then narration does not achieve mastery over time; rather, it traps the narrator more surely within the coils of time. What Quentin realizes is that the solution he seeks must be one that frees him alike from time and generation, from fate and revenge: he must die childless, he must free himself from time without having passed on the self-perpetuating affront of sonship. What Quentin seeks is a once-and-for-all solution, a nontemporal, an eternal solution. (pp. 122-23)

As the central enigmatic event in Absalom is Henry's murder of Bon, so its equivalent in The Sound and the Fury is Quentin's suicide, and the structures of both books, with their multiple perspectives in narration, point up the fact that the significance of these events is irreducibly ambiguous…. Certainly, by putting Quentin's suicide in the context of Christ's death, Faulkner makes the significance of Quentin's act more ambiguous, but this strategy works in two directions, for it also points up the irreducible ambiguities in the significance of Christ's death itself. With characters like Quentin and Joe Christmas, Faulkner uses the context of Christ's death to raise questions about the actions of these characters, and he uses their actions to question the meaning of the Christ role. His most explicit questioning of the ambiguous significance of Christ's redemptive act occurs in A Fable (1954), where Christ's passion and death are reenacted during the First World War in that struggle between the old general and the corporal, between the father who has supreme authority and the illegitimate son who is under a sentence of death. (pp. 124-25)

[In the structure that is central to Faulkner's work], the struggle between the father and the son in the incest complex is played out again and again in a series of spatial and temporal repetitions, a series of substitutive doublings and reversals in which generation in time becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of revenge on a substitute, the passing on from father to son of a fated repetition as a positive or a negative inheritance…. [Religious] sacrifice as an institutionalized substitute for those impulses is also a conscious, communal preserver and transmitter of those impulses…. (p. 157)

[Since this] structure is created by means of an interplay between texts, it must be approached through a critical process that, like the solving of a simultaneous equation, oscillates between two or more texts at once. The key to the critical oscillation that I have attempted between Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, is, of course, the figure of Quentin Compson—Quentin, whose own oscillation constantly transforms action into narration and narration into action. (pp. 157-58)

John T. Irwin, in his Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (copyright © 1975 by The Johns Hopkins University Press), The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, 183 p.