Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner it is a labyrinth; it's a labyrinth with countless detours and dead ends, paths that lead to an ending, and obstacles to overcome along the way. One such obstacle is the triangular relationship between Henry Sutpen, Judith Sutpen, and Charles Bon. Not equally balanced is this triangle and the parties involved, each desperately seeking a means to achieve a different end, clinging to each other with proportionally strong grips. They see in each other, or rather, they see in the position each other occupies, possibilities that will satiate the needs they have as individuals. However, they are always interconnected and, ultimately, no one's needs are met or motivations are not exercised. Henry and Judith Sutpen allow themselves to be manipulated and drawn into the fantastical aura that is Charles Bon, knowing full well that it could lead to disaster, but still needing to be part of it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Henry Sutpen, a walking cauldron of seething emotions, does not know how to regulate, it seems, how to minister his actions to suit his emotions, so he is thus caught in a torrid torment of frustrating compulsive behaviors. “Henry, the provincial, almost the clown, given to instinctive and violent action rather than thought,” (76) is guided by a conscience that has no conscience. An inner core imbued with conceivable motivations or intentions does not seem to exist in his person and he is consequently subject to the whims of his feelings, wild and visceral as they are. It is from this emotional guidance that Henry is sucked into Carlo Bon's kingdom. “This handsome, elegant man. . . and too old to be where [he is]. . . with some tangible whiff of knowledge” (76) contracts Henry’s loyalty, causing him to surrender his life to a cause that, in his (Henry’s) case, is effectively self-destructive. But Henry does not turn to logic and forethought as guides in this relationship; it relies on its powerful confidant ready for action: emotion. “Yes, [he loves] Bon, who [seduces] the same as surely as he [seduces] Judith” (76). He becomes “a follower and dependent of the rejected suitor for four years” (79) not living with and through him, but through and in him, dictating his actions to imitate Bon's, trusting in the hope that Bon will renounce his marriage and face your father. Henry's feelings, Henry's love, for Charles Bon become a black hole into which Henry quickly falls and from which he seems to have no desire to escape. He is consumed by this man, by this situation that might give him something his life before had never offered him: purpose. Conforming to the template of his father's design gives Henry no outlet for personal beliefs or decisions. Wrapping and warping in this strange and twisted detour of existence, the engaged child, once trapped, is able to be, in and of itself. No matter how painful, how ruinous such a path may prove to be, he has chosen it and can act not as a puppet-son, reading lines previously written for him, but as an individual-man-son whose “violent repudiation of his father ” and his birthright,” (76), having to “kill Bon to prevent [him and Judith] from getting married,” the fact that it was he “who seduced Judith” (79) are actions that see if themselves undertake as seditiously powerful means of asserting one's individual being, while not freeing oneself from already formed patterns. Especially with murder bon: Henry knows that his father wants this to happen, so he considers it almost bordering on torture, but at that. point got so entangledin the various networks of other people's projects that even he will never know according to whom and according to which he would have killed his brother. Judith Sutpen plays almost a non-role in the triangle, she simply seems to maintain a position, a third point on which geometry can resolve itself. She, of course, is a person, trapped in the Sutpen design landmarks, but more like her father, she lives more through a calm state of observation, letting the world kneel around her in contrast to barbaric action like that of his brother. "Mrs. Sutpen had Judith and Bon already engaged from the moment she saw Bon's name on Henry's first letter," (215) a circumstance involving her, thus requiring some sort of reaction and her reacting in contrast to that or him to whom one reacts, obliges. She falls in love with him (216). Being in love with an idea is not a concept foreign to humanity, but Judith's affection or submission seems more tied to a twisted conception of Charles Bon and the possibilities it represents than any general notion. associated with a single individual. “There doesn't even appear to have been any courtship” (78) between her and Bon, seeing each other “on average an hour a day for twelve days. . . for a period of a year and a half” (79). That she would fall in love with him, that she would sit and wait for him, that she would mourn his death for the rest of her life, are pretty sure signs that she worked her whole life around the idea of ​​Charles Bon, a sophisticated friend of her brother's, another abstract who could erase whatever had been foreseen as her future and build for her a bridge through which to escape from the Hundred of Sutpen and its constraints. “The fact that [perhaps he kisses her] the first time as [his] brother would” and that she responds only with “a sort of peaceful and empty surprise” (264) demonstrates her willingness to succumb, to submit herself , his person, to the other and his ability to distance himself. “They [separate] without even saying goodbye” (79). It is docile; it is docile in reaching a hidden motive. He will wait, he will love, he will refuse to cry in an effort to achieve the impossible. Without the power or desire to initiate any intentions, however, he becomes the supreme member of this triumvirate of doomed innocents. Judith was not the object of Bon's love or Henry's solicitude. She was only an empty form, the empty vessel in which each of them strove to preserve, not the illusion of himself nor the illusion of the other, but what each imagined the other believed himself to be: the man and the young man, seducer and seduced, who had met, seduced and been seduced, victimized by each other, winners defeated by their own weakness, before Judith entered their lives together even just for the girl's name . (95) She is the means, the means to Henry's desired end of somehow uniting with Bon, the means to achieving Bon's retaliation against a father who disowned him all those years ago. She seems not to be notable, or rather, considered by the other actors in certain aspects of this play, and yet, in effect, if she did not exist, no play would exist. The triangle would be unattainable and perhaps no lines would even form, just dots floating in the sea of ​​tragic circumstances without a way, violent or otherwise, to reach the shore. Henry does not despise Judith as a non-entity - quite the opposite. In certain aspects of his life, of their relationship, this brother and sister are implicitly linked "as if by means of a telepathy with which as children they sometimes seemed to anticipate the other's actions, like two birds leave a branch at the same time ” (79). Henry finds himself, not surprisingly, in a positionconfused. If you think explicitly about Bon, you are deceived and everything else fades into the background. Thinking of Bon marrying his sister is torn between the allowance due to love and loyalty to his soulmate. He becomes obsessed with his sister's virginity and that state's connection to Bon. He is also in love with his sister. Bon's fantasy as a suitor involves “pure and perfect incest: the brother who realizes that his sister's virginity must be destroyed in order to exist, takes on that virginity in the person of his brother-in-law, the man who he would be if he could become. . . the lover” (77). As a lover - a lover of Judith, - he is concerned not so much with Bon's morality as with the well-being of the people involved in Bon's intentions; he is concerned “not [with] the fact that Bon's intention [is] to commit bigamy but that [it] is apparently to make his (Henry's) sister a sort of junior partner in a harem” (94). She begs Bon to think of their sister (272). He is caught between love and respect, between purpose and duty, but to and for whom is unclear. He moves to please as well as to tear down, and his final actions would tend to indicate which side he is more loyal to. Or would they? Judith “is determined to marry [Bon] to the point of forcing her brother into murder as a last resort. . . to prevent it" (79). Is it to Judith that he shows loyalty by killing her love and erasing any small chance she might have of happiness? Is it to Bon that he swears allegiance by taking his own life and destroying his opportunity to savor the revenge he plotted against his former father? Is it with himself that he remains faithful by breaking the bonds that seem so strong but prove delicate with the two most significant people in his life and ensuring a future of anguish and loneliness? Henry revels in the twisted nature of his state of mind and, perhaps, relishes the fact that he does not know to whom he should remain faithful, thus renouncing potentially justifiable guilt. Judith could take a stand, formulate a decipherable reason, propose an action, but she doesn't and since these two, who in some cases delight in the ability to intrinsically understand the other, languish in a web of incommunicability, the lines that connect they dissipate and fray. Although all three points of a triangle are equally important, Charles Bon is the apex, the point towards which all connecting sides flow. He involves himself in Henry and Judith's lives with only a limited amount of action on his part, wandering around campus to be noticed and admired by his brother, to be mentioned in letters home, to be tied up in marriage talk with his sister. His ideal situation involves being recognized by his father, but as four years pass, Bon, the man who knows and embodies collected passivity, "[doesn't] know what [he'll do] and [has] to say, pretend, he [ does]” (273). Bon lives those four years hoping to hear from Thomas Sutpen, therefore, seeing Henry and Judith and everything else as secondary to his existence. Bon) may not have even realized it existed (78), he (Bon) thinks, “I haven't heard of a young girl, virgin; what I will have to do is sow the seeds” (261). Henry is not a person that Bon listens to, he (Bon) only processes the words that are said to him and synthesizes them to suit his intentions. Giuditta is not a person, it would seem. towards which he directs his love. However “he always [knows] that love will take care of itself. Maybe [that's] why he [shouldn't] think about her” (260). In his letter he tells her that he believes the two of them will be among those "sentenced to.