Ghosts, Spirits, and the Supernatural

Faulkner not only describes the South as inhabited by “ghosts” and “dead people” but goes further and specifically describes living, present characters as ghosts, such as Rosa Coldfield, whom he refers to as “the ghost [who] mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.” This description not only addresses Rosa, but also Thomas Sutpen. Faulkner says that he inhabits Rosa’s voice to this day, giving presence and agency to a dead character. He not only describes Rosa as a ghost, but gives a living trait, speech, to a character that is in fact dead. The purpose of supernatural imagery in this passage is to show how strongly the past lingers into the present in the novel. In class we spoke about Faulkner’s commentary on human memory through his writing. Perhaps describing Rosa as a ghost and granting Sutpen so much presence was an attempt to show how strong Rosa’s memory of him is.

            In chapter 1, Faulkner wrote, "his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn, back-looking ghosts..." In this passage, he quite clearly states that Quentin is “not a being.” Quentin’s obsession with the past, his deep and undying fascination with the Sutpen story weighs on him. The ghosts that fill his mind are the characters in the story, whose names “were interchangeable.” This is consistent with the idea that the entire South is “inhabited by ghosts,” because the crimes of the South and the memory associated with it linger, giving the novel a sense of timelessness and underscoring the sense of cyclicality that we discussed in class.