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In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori Feathers and Dr. Larry Allums delve into Chapter 7 of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!—one of the novel’s most intricate and revealing sections.

They trace Thomas Sutpen’s backstory from his rugged Appalachian boyhood to the life-altering moment that shapes his “design.” What begins as a story of social humiliation—being told to “use the back door”—unfolds into a meditation on innocence, ambition, race, and the American faith in self-invention.

Lori and Larry discuss Sutpen’s fatal pursuit of a perfect plan, the symbolism of the front door, and Faulkner’s devastating irony: the man who vowed never again to reject a child as he had been rejected ends by repeating the same cruelty.

Together they explore how Faulkner layers fate and free will, class and color, guilt and innocence—linking Sutpen’s vision to larger American myths of reinvention and control, from The Great Gatsby to The American Adam.

Chapters & Highlights
0:00 — Opening reflections on Chapter 7
4:30 — The twin taboos: race and kinship
10:15 — The front-door incident and the birth of “the design”
20:00 — Innocence, ambition, and moral blindness
30:00 — Haiti, revelation, and the seeds of tragedy
40:00 — Charles Bon’s return and the great irony
50:00 — Wash Jones and the novel’s most brutal reckoning
58:00 — Faulkner and the myth of the self-made man

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