Rosa Coldfield summons Quentin Compson to her home and begins recounting the history of Thomas Sutpen and his doomed plantation.

Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson with enslaved workers and a French architect, seizes Indigenous land, and begins building Sutpen's Hundred.

Sutpen marries Ellen Coldfield despite public scandal and widespread community suspicion about his mysterious and unknown origins.

Henry Sutpen meets Charles Bon at university and brings him home to Sutpen's Hundred for Christmas.

Henry disavows his inheritance and abandons Sutpen's Hundred alongside Charles Bon after a confrontation with Thomas Sutpen.

Ellen Coldfield dies alone and in isolation after Henry's departure fractures what remains of the Sutpen family.

Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon both enlist in the Confederate army when the Civil War begins.

Judith receives a letter from Charles Bon declaring his intention to come home and marry her.

Henry shoots and kills Charles Bon at the gate of Sutpen's Hundred just as Bon prepares to propose to Judith.

Wash Jones rides to Miss Rosa's home to deliver the news that Henry has killed Charles Bon.

Thomas Sutpen returns from the war to find Sutpen's Hundred in ruins and his surviving family scattered.

Sutpen proposes to Rosa Coldfield but delivers a humiliating insult that causes her to leave Sutpen's Hundred permanently.

Wash Jones kills Thomas Sutpen with a scythe after Sutpen contemptuously dismisses Milly and their newborn daughter.

Rosa brings Quentin to Sutpen's Hundred at night, driven by her conviction that something living is hidden inside.

Clytie sets Sutpen's Hundred ablaze to protect Henry, killing them both inside the burning house as Jim Bond vanishes.

Pool 1 follows the central arc of Absalom, Absalom!, from Miss Rosa summoning Quentin to hear the Sutpen family history through the fiery destruction of Sutpen's Hundred. It traces Thomas Sutpen's mysterious arrival in Jefferson, his construction of a grand plantation through enslaved labor, and his calculated marriage into the Coldfield family. The story's crisis unfolds as Henry renounces his birthright, Charles Bon is murdered at the plantation gate, and the Civil War completes the ruin of everything Sutpen built. After the war, Sutpen's failed attempts to rebuild end in his own violent death at the hands of Wash Jones. Decades later, Rosa's obsession draws Quentin to the ruined house, where Henry is discovered hiding and Clytie's final act of fire destroys the last remnant of the dynasty.

The rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen's plantation dynasty.

Mr. Compson explains to Quentin that his grandfather's friendship with Sutpen connects the Compson family directly to the Sutpen story.

Sutpen stages brutal fights between enslaved men for the entertainment of guests invited to Sutpen's Hundred.

Sutpen returns to Jefferson with expensive furnishings, prompting a vigilance party confrontation and a brief arrest.

Rosa Coldfield grows up largely alone — her mother dies in childbirth, her father resents her, and her aunt abandons the family.

Ellen Sutpen revels in her status as the county's most prominent wife, buying wedding trousseau for Judith's expected marriage to Charles Bon.

Rosa's father Mr. Coldfield locks himself in his attic to avoid the Confederate war effort and slowly starves to death.

Henry and Charles Bon travel to New Orleans, where Bon reveals he has a part-Black mistress and an existing family.

Judith and Clytie sew a wedding dress at Sutpen's Hundred while awaiting Charles Bon's return from the war.

Rosa rushes to Sutpen's Hundred after learning of the murder and confronts Clytie in a racially charged altercation at the entrance.

Judith holds a significant photograph found on Charles Bon's body and oversees his burial at Sutpen's Hundred.

Charles Bon's mixed-race son Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon is brought to Sutpen's Hundred and raised by Clytie and Judith.

Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon and Judith both die of yellow fever, leaving Clytie and Jim Bond as the final occupants.

Quentin receives word of Rosa Coldfield's death while at Harvard and begins recounting the Sutpen story to his roommate Shreve.

Shreve speculates that Charles Bon replaced Judith's photograph in his metal case with his mistress's image before his death.

After the story concludes, Shreve asks Quentin why he hates the South, and Quentin insistently denies the accusation.

Pool 2 fills in the human texture surrounding the Sutpen family's collapse, following characters whose lives are shaped and ruined by Thomas Sutpen's ambitions. It includes the social world Sutpen entered — his scandalous early behavior in Jefferson, his wife Ellen's fleeting social triumph, and the isolated tragedy of Rosa's upbringing without parents. The war years bring their own losses, including Rosa's father's solitary starvation in his attic and the makeshift preparations at Sutpen's Hundred as Judith and Clytie await a marriage that will never happen. After the murder, these events trace a long, slow aftermath of death and decay, from the burial of Charles Bon to the arrival and loss of the next generation through yellow fever. The pool closes at Harvard, where Quentin completes his retelling and Shreve's final question forces a confrontation with what the South has meant to Quentin all along.

The supporting lives and secondary revelations surrounding the Sutpen saga.

Young Henry Sutpen watches enslaved men fight for his father's entertainment and breaks down crying in his mother's arms.

Henry Sutpen becomes intensely and inexplicably drawn to Charles Bon at university, fixated on his companion's elegance and self-assurance.

After Henry abandons the family, Mississippi secedes from the Union and Yoknapatawpha County is pulled into the Civil War.

Thomas Sutpen privately tells Henry on Christmas Eve that Charles Bon maintains a part-Black mistress and an existing family elsewhere.

The enslaved people of Sutpen's Hundred escape the plantation during the war and join the Union forces fighting the Confederacy.

After her father's death, Rosa moves into Sutpen's Hundred to live with Judith and Clytie during the war's final years.

Rosa discloses to Quentin that something living and hidden exists inside Sutpen's Hundred beyond just Clytie and Jim Bond.

When Sutpen returns from the war, he immediately attempts to rebuild his ruined plantation with the same relentless ambition as before.

Sutpen begins an affair with Milly Jones, Wash Jones's teenage granddaughter, in a desperate bid to produce another male heir.

Milly Jones gives birth to a daughter, and Sutpen contemptuously dismisses both mother and child as failures to his ambition.

As a poor boy, Thomas Sutpen was turned away from a plantation's front door, an encounter that ignited his obsession with status.

Sutpen abandoned his first wife and their son Charles Bon in the West Indies after discovering the wife had Black ancestry.

Shreve and Quentin reconstruct the moment Sutpen revealed to Henry that Charles Bon carries Black ancestry — the true motive for the murder.

Quentin enters Sutpen's Hundred alone through a window and finds Henry Sutpen aged and dying in an upstairs bedroom.

Shreve and Quentin imagine the final confrontation on the road to Sutpen's Hundred, where Bon calmly acknowledges his identity and dares Henry to shoot.

Pool 3 focuses on the pivotal decisions and buried truths that gave shape to every catastrophe in the Sutpen story. It begins not with Sutpen's arrival in Jefferson but with the formative events that made him — his childhood humiliation at a plantation door and his racial betrayal of his first wife and son in the West Indies. Moving through the narrative, it tracks the concealed tensions beneath the surface: Henry's unexplained fixation on Bon, Sutpen's Christmas Eve disclosure, the escape of his enslaved workers, and his desperate postwar bid for another heir. The pool then enters the speculative territory of Chapters 7 through 9, where Quentin and Shreve reconstruct the truths that earlier narrators missed, including the full racial revelation Sutpen made to Henry. It ends with the imagined final confrontation between Henry and Bon on the road to Sutpen's Hundred, where the entire dynasty's tragedy converges into a single moment.