Thomas Sutpen, the main character of Faulkner's novel Absalom Absalom!, embodies the conflict of nature and humanity with the superficial world and prejudices of the south. The fate and ultimate disintegration of the old south are revealed indirectly through the Sutpen family legend. Sutpen, growing up in Western Virginia in a society at one with nature and his subsequent desire to change and conform to the unnatural beliefs of the south, represents the South's attempt to dominate and shape nature to achieve power and possessions at the expense of others. Such societal practices of domination, exclusion, and subjugation doom southern society from the beginning of its creation. Nature cannot be controlled or overcome, and in the end the Southern society fails, just as Sutpen, a boy of nature who tries to conform to the man-made laws of southern society, ultimately fails.

From the time of one's birth, certain elements of one's fate have already been established. Parental identity, living situation, and physical appearance are preconceived and beyond one's control. A society where family situation, ownership of material goods, and the possession of certain physical traits are unimportant is a society free of all preconceived laws except those dictated by nature. No social roles or prejudices are fated to be suffered by any people, and all people are created of equal worth, and although some may be luckier than others it is by pure chance, and should be recognized as such. Such a society is the one in which Thomas Sutpen was born. In his hometown located in Western Virginia, "the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your riffle sights" (Faulkner 179), and "as for objects, nobody had any more of them than you did because everybody had just what he was strong enough or energetic enough to take and keep" (179). Such a society enables people to freely live out the destiny of their birthright-they cannot be controlled by another person, under any situation. This is life outside of the South. A life lived by the guidelines of nature, opposed to the southern practices of using innate characteristics to degrade and dehumanize individuals and to control the lives and destinies of those whom they deem their subordinates.

Living this life of innocence and unrealized ignorance and moving to the South, Thomas Sutpen represents the stark contrast of a natural West Virginian life to the structured and inflexible ideals of southern society. This juxtaposition serves to show just how unnatural and synthesized Southern society is, and therefore the inevitability of its ultimate failure. Before the move, "[Sutpen] didn't even know there was a country all divided and fixed and neat with a people living on it all divided and fixed and neat because of what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own" (179-180), elements attained by either chance or destiny. These elements should have nothing to do with one's actual worth as they are entirely out of one's control, and therefore the concept confuses Sutpen, since "it had never once occurred to him that any man should take any such blind accident as that as authority or warrant to look down at others, any others" (180). Being born into wealth or a certain ethnic group is not an achievement and says nothing about an individual's capabilities. However, these are the measures of worth and importance in the south. Through his experiences while traveling from his hometown, Sutpen "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" (183). It is unnatural to attribute power or superiority to people based on elements of chance as opposed to accomplishment, and such concepts make no sense to Sutpen, as they likewise would make no sense in a natural world free of superficiality.

Such a point is brought home when Sutpen visits the wealthy plantation owner his father works for with a message to deliver, and is told by a black slave to enter by the back door-never the front. He runs away, shocked by the concept that "he had been told to go around to the back door even before he could state his errand, who had sprung from a people whose houses didn't have back doors" (188). The need to define social class even upon entering a household is at first lost on the boy, who came from a place where equality was assumed and inequality was not something to be enforced and brought to attention at every opportunity-and the creation of such an opportunity was nonexistant. In his innocence, Sutpen doesn't understand why he should be discriminated against because of his lack of wealth, and believes that there should be a unifying respect and need to communicate concerning matters such as business-a matter that links all men, of every class, to work together towards the shared goal of profit. He believes that such a unified matter as business would transcend the petty topic of status: "he had actually come on business, in the good faith of business which he had believed that all men accepted" (188). However, societal issues are of such exaggerated importance in the South that all other matters are secondary. No one is free to act and do as they please in any given situation, but must adhere to the strict guidelines of society, created by men for men and entirely against nature.

This exposure to society at last enables Sutpen to realize his innocence-and how to go about changing the present so he will be treated differently in the future: "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 [...] he would have to compete with" (189). He was determined not to live the rest of his life with other men, like the plantation owner, looking down upon people like himself "as cattle, creatures, heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity, populate, double treble and compound, fill space and earth" (190). Sutpen sees himself as being a mere brute in the eyes of the plantation owner and his slaves, and cannot bear to be treated in such a fashion.

By the plantation owner-who represents southern white society--dehumanizing Sutpen and viewing him as an animal, the society is itself dehumanized. Sutpen begins to change at this point, and adopting the prejudicial views of the rich white society, he begins to adopt their beliefs, later thinking of his own sister as "broad in the beam as a cow, the very labor she was doing brutish and stupidly out of all proportion to its reward: the very primary essence of labor, toil, reduced to its crude absolute which only a beast could and would endure" (191), dehumanizing himself in the process. His current thought process is no longer the natural state of mind as it was previously, but is now beginning to become distorted and controlled by prejudice. Thinking again about being turned away from the front door, Sutpen said there was "an explosion-a bright glare that vanished and left nothing, no ashes nor refuse: just a limitless flat plain with the severe shape of his intact innocence rising from it like a monument; that innocence instructing him as calm as the others had ever spoken" (192). Sutpen uses this innocence and decides what he will do to succeed: "To combat them you got to have what they have that made them do what he did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with" (192).

This goal is innocent, because although Sutpen tried to adapt to ultimately embrace the ideals of the South, he never truly lost his innocence, and as it is later described, he still possesses: "that innocence which he had never lost because after it finally told him what to do that night he forgot about it and didn't know that he still had it" (194). At first it appears he has succeeded in his transformation, when in his goal to meet the white southern ideal of a white dynasty enables him to abandon his first wife when it is revealed she may have black blood. Sutpen states, "'I found that she was not and could never be, through no fault of her own, adjunctive or incremental to the design which I had in mind, so I provided for her and put her aside'" (194), an attitude which appears shrewd and would be supported by white southerners, yet an attitude which mirrors his former thoughts of equality among people transcending circumstance and luck-through no fault of his wife's own she had black blood, and upon realizing it he does not react appropriately by southern expectations in acknowledging she is still an individual of fate and by providing for her.

He similarly goes against southern ideals and retains his innocent nature when it comes to his mixed children: "Yes, Clytie was his daughter too: Clytemnestra. He named her for himself. He named them all himself: all his own get and all the get of his wild niggers after the country began to assimilate them" (48). By giving the children a name he is acknowledging them and giving them an identity, and he even allows Clytie to share a bed with his all-white daughter, which would definitely be a taboo according to society. Similarly he befriends an impoverished squatter named Wash Jones, and allows him to live in a shack on his property. Such instances prove that although he aspired to fit in with southern society and to succeed where he was born to fail, Sutpen never truly changes his thinking or conquers his innocence. As a result, he also fails to succeed in his goal of producing a lucrative and successful white dynasty.

His enduring innocence causes Sutpen to make decisions conflicting with southern practices-he, although unwittingly, marries a woman of mixed blood, and then goes about ensuring her survival and the survival of their son, Charles Bon. He does not turn Wash Jones away, but gives him a place to live on his land, also a concept which would unsettle most white southerners. These deeds are done because by the influence of his innocence-and these deeds come back to destroy the Sutpen plantation. Charles Bon, Sutpen's abandoned son by his first marriage, causes Henry, the heir of Sutpen's dynasty, to renounce his name: "Henry and Bon had ridden away in the dark and Henry had formally abjured his home and birthright" (84), leaving none to carry on the Sutpen name. Likewise, when Sutpen makes one last fruitless attempt at continuing his legacy by having a child with Wash Jones' granddaughter, he insults the granddaughter and Wash kills him wish a scythe, and then "sat there all that day in the little window where he could watch the road; probably laid the scythe down and went straight into the house where maybe the graddaughter on the pallet asked querulously what it was" (121-2).

Sutpen was the victim of his own innocence. I was his own innocence that told him he could become a white southerner and integrate fully into society, while it was also his innocence which held him back and disabled him from ever being able to completely conform. This same innocence destroyed his dynasty, as his rejection of ultimate prejudice allowed him to acknowledge persisting underlying beliefs of equality. He is killed by a poor white man, a man who was in the same social status as he first was upon entering the south, a man who lived the destiny he sought to avoid, but in the end met a yet darker fate.