Absalom, Absalom!: Chapters 7–9

by William Faulkner
Considered by many to be William Faulker's masterpiece, this novel uses multiple viewpoints to recount the rise and ruin of a Southern plantation.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–3, Chapters 4–6, Chapters 7–9

Here are links to our lists for other works by William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. opaque
    not transmitting or reflecting light or radiant energy
    But he had not done so yet, and now the moment, the thought, was an hour past and the pipe lay smoked out and overturned and cold, with a light sprinkling of ashes about it, on the table before Shreve’s crossed pink bright-haired arms while he watched Quentin from behind the two opaque and lamp-glared moons of his spectacles.
  2. paradoxical
    seemingly contradictory but nonetheless possibly true
    He sat quite still, facing the table, his hands lying on either side of the open textbook on which the letter rested: the rectangle of paper folded across the middle and now open, three quarters open, whose bulk had raised half itself by the leverage of the old crease in weightless and paradoxical levitation, lying at such an angle that he could not possibly have read it, deciphered it, even without this added distortion.
  3. repressed
    characterized by the suppression of impulses or emotions
    Quentin did not answer this either; again he might not have heard, talking in that curious repressed calm voice as though to the table before him or the book upon it or the letter upon the book or his hands lying on either side of the book.
  4. oblivious
    lacking conscious awareness of
    his father began the practice of accomplishing that part of the translation devoted to motion flat on his back in the cart, oblivious among the quilts and lanterns and well buckets and bundles of clothing and child'en, snoring with alcohol.
  5. discern
    perceive, recognize, or detect
    He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room. That is, he had begun to discern that without being aware of it yet.
  6. aura
    distinctive but intangible quality around a person or thing
    Maybe he even realised, understood the pleasure it would have given his sisters for their neighbors (other whites like them, who lived in other cabins not quite as well built and not at all as well kept and preserved as the ones the nigger slaves lived in but still nimbused with freedom’s bright aura, which the slave quarters were not for all their sound roofs and white wash) to see them being waited on.
  7. poised
    marked by balance or equilibrium and readiness for action
    Maybe the nigger’s hands would be tied or held but that would be all right because they were not the hands with which the balloon face would struggle and writhe for freedom, not the balloon face: it was just poised among them, levitative and slick with paper-thin distension.
  8. tradition
    a specific practice of long standing
    He was just thinking, because he knew that something would have to be done about it; he would have to do something about it in order to live with himself for the rest of his life and he could not decide what it was because of that innocence which he had just discovered he had, which (the innocence, not the man, the tradition) he would have to compete with.
  9. analogy
    drawing a comparison in order to show a similarity
    He had nothing to compare and gauge it by but the rifle analogy, and it would not make sense by that.
  10. transverse
    extending or lying across, in a crosswise direction
    Quentin had not moved, not even to raise his head from its attitude of brooding bemusement upon the open letter which lay on the open textbook, his hands lying on the table before him on either side of the book and the letter, one half of which slanted upward from the transverse crease without support, as if it had learned half the secret of levitation.
  11. expediency
    the quality of being suited to the end in view
    I had had some schooling during a part of one winter, enough to have learned something about them, to realise that they would be most suitable to the expediency of my requirements.
  12. intractability
    the trait of being hard to influence or control
    It would not be intractability and maybe you couldn’t call it pride either, but maybe just the self-reliance of mountains and solitude, since some of his blood at least (his mother was a mountain woman, a Scottish woman who, so he told Grandfather, never did quite learn to speak English) had been bred in mountains, but which, whatever it was, was that which forbade him to condescend to memorise dry sums and such but which did permit him to listen when the teacher read aloud.
  13. resort
    have recourse to
    I realise now that on most of these occasions he resorted to reading aloud only when he saw that the moment had come when his entire school was on the point of rising and leaving the room.
  14. endeavor
    a purposeful or industrious undertaking
    What I learned was that there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich, it didn’t matter how, so long as that man was clever and courageous: the latter of which I believed that I possessed, the former of which I believed that, if it were to be learned by energy and will in the school of endeavor and experience, I should learn.
  15. waylay
    wait in hiding to attack
    I remember how I remained one afternoon when school was out and waited for the teacher, waylaid him (he was a smallish man who always looked dusty, as if he had been born and lived all his life in attics and store rooms) and stepped out.
  16. irrevocable
    incapable of being retracted
    Perhaps a man builds for his future in more ways than one, builds not only toward the body which will be his tomorrow or next year, but toward actions and the subsequent irrevocable courses of resultant action which his weak senses and intellect cannot foresee but which ten or twenty or thirty years from now he will take, will have to take in order to survive the act.
  17. considerable
    large in number, amount, extent, or degree
    So when the time came when I realised that to accomplish my design I should need first of all and above all things money in considerable quantities and in the quite immediate future, I remembered what he had read to us and I went to the West Indies.
  18. recount
    narrate or give a detailed account of
    He still was not recounting to Grandfather the career of somebody named Thomas Sutpen.
  19. erudite
    having or showing profound knowledge
    He spoke still in that curious, that almost sullen flat tone which had caused Shreve to watch him from the beginning with intent detached speculation and curiosity, to watch him still from behind his (Shreve’s) expression of cherubic and erudite amazement which the spectacles intensified or perhaps actually created.
  20. expiation
    the act of atoning for sin or wrongdoing
    Father said it was because Mr Coldfield did not believe it would work, that they would get away with it, only he couldn’t quit thinking about it, and so when they tried it and it failed he (Mr Coldfield) would be able to get it out of his mind then; and that when it did fail and they were caught, Mr Coldfield would insist on taking his share of the blame as penance and expiation for having sinned in his mind all those years.
  21. seraph
    an angel of the first order
    Yes, the two children, the son and the daughter by sex and age so glib to the design that he might have planned that too, by character mental and physical so glib to it that he might have culled them out of the celestial herd of seraphs and cherubim like he chose his twenty niggers out of whatever swapping there must have been when he repudiated that first wife and that child when he discovered that they would not be adjunctive to the forwarding of the design.
  22. rectify
    make right or correct
    And yet, and after more than thirty years, more than thirty years after my conscience had finally assured me that if I had done an injustice, I had done what I could to rectify it and Grandfather not saying Wait now but saying, hollering maybe even: ‘Conscience? Conscience? Good God, man, what else did you expect?
  23. retribution
    a justly deserved penalty
    And he not calling it retribution, no sins of the father come home to roost; not even calling it bad luck, but just a mistake: that mistake which he could not discover himself and which he came to Grandfather, not to excuse but just to review the facts for an impartial (and Grandfather said he believed, a legally trained) mind to examine and find and point out to him.
  24. traduce
    speak unfavorably about
    that morality which would not permit him to malign or traduce the memory of his first wife, or at least the memory of the marriage even though he felt that he had been tricked by it, not even to an acquaintance in whose confidence and discretion he trusted enough to wish to justify himself, not even to his son by another marriage in order to preserve the status of his life’s attainment and desire, except as a last resort.
  25. atonement
    the act of making amends for sin or wrongdoing
    I chose, and I made to the fullest what atonement lay in my power for whatever injury I might have done in choosing, paying even more for the privilege of choosing as I chose than I might have been expected to, or even (by law) required.
  26. admonition
    a firm rebuke
    The heat was almost gone out of the radiators: the cold iron fluting stern signal and admonition for sleeping, the little death, the renewal.
  27. incorrigible
    impervious to correction by punishment
    It was born (if from any source) of that incorrigible unsentimental sentimentality of the young which takes the form of hard and often crass levity—to which, by the way, Quentin paid no attention whatever, resuming as if he had never been interrupted, his face still lowered, still brooding apparently on the open letter upon the open book between his hands.
  28. sufficient
    of a quantity that can fulfill a need or requirement
    All that he was concerned about was the possibility that he might not have time sufficient to do it in, regain his lost ground in.
  29. indignation
    a feeling of righteous anger
    Hence the proposal, the outrage and unbelief; the tide, the blast of indignation and anger upon which Miss Rosa vanished from Sutpen’s Hundred, her air-ballooned skirts spread upon the flood, chip-light, her bonnet (possibly one of Ellen’s which she had prowled out of the attic) clapped fast onto her head rigid and precarious with rage.
  30. ignorant
    uneducated in general; lacking knowledge or sophistication
    And I know that whatever your hands tech, whether hit’s a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right.
  31. querulous
    habitually complaining
    They just heard him moving inside the dark house, then they heard the granddaughter’s voice, fretful and querulous: ‘Who is it?
  32. profoundly
    to a great depth psychologically
    There was something curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and profoundly intent, not at all as two young men might look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself—a sort of hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth’s immemorial obsession not with time’s dragging weight which the old live with but with its fluidity, the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen.
  33. proffer
    present for acceptance or rejection
    and maybe somebody looking at him would have seen on his face an expression a good deal like the one—that proffering with humility yet with pride too, of complete surrender
  34. moribund
    being on the point of death
    The room was indeed tomblike: a quality stale and static and moribund beyond any mere vivid and living cold.
  35. attenuated
    reduced in strength
    Bayard attenuated forty miles (it was forty miles, wasn’t it?)
  36. aloof
    distant, cold, or detached in manner
    He could smell the horse; he could hear the dry plaint of the light wheels in the weightless permeant dust and he seemed to feel the dust itself move sluggish and dry across his sweating flesh just as he seemed to hear the single profound suspiration of the parched earth’s agony rising toward the imponderable and aloof stars.
  37. diffident
    lacking self-confidence
    He could hear her panting now, her voice almost a wail of diffident yet iron determination: “I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.”
  38. intermittent
    stopping and starting at irregular intervals
    So he mounted the stairs, the worn bare treads, the cracked and scaling wall on one side, the balustrade with its intermittent missing spindles on the other.
  39. insubstantial
    lacking material form
    And the deputy and the driver would spring out and Miss Coldfield would stumble out and follow them, running too, onto the gallery too, where the creature which bellowed followed them, wraith-like and insubstantial, looking at them out of the smoke, whereupon the deputy even turned and ran at him, whereupon he retreated, fled, though the howling did not diminish nor even seem to get any further away.
  40. censure
    harsh criticism or disapproval
    So let it be hope—that the one cannot escape the censure which no doubt he deserves, that the other no longer lack the commiseration which let us hope (while we are hoping) that they have longed for, if only for the reason that they are about to receive it whether they will or no.
Created on Wed Jan 22 11:49:43 EST 2014 (updated Wed Aug 15 18:06:22 EDT 2018)

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