What could have been in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Emerging and dwelling in a devouring lament, the characters of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! they envelop themselves in a world of pain in which they cannot or will not release the past. Everyone comes to know the tragic consequences of remaining in an ever-present past as the here and now fades beneath the restless shadows of days gone by. As the narrative progresses. the main players in this installment of Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County become increasingly obsessed with the alternative courses of action that different circumstances might have offered. Trapped in their own notions of "what might have been" (115), Miss Rosa Coldfield's wistful yet indignant exhortation, the historicized characters of Thomas Sutpen and Miss Rosa remain fixated by pre-war illusions - he desperate to achieve what he couldn't, she in the bitter memory of what had never happened, but could have happened... in that bare room with its bare staircase... climbing into the dark upper corridor where an echo that wasn't mine spoke but rather that of the irrevocable lost power that haunts all houses, all closed walls erected by human hands, not for shelter, not for warmth, but to hide from the curious gazes of the world and see the dark turns that the ancient and young disappointments of pride and hope and ambition (yes, and even love) take. - Miss Rosa p. 109, Absalom, Absalom!, William FaulknerThe novel's effective narrative technique of expansion and contraction through a series of interconnected but increasingly distanced memories and retellings. and speculative reconstructions of Sutpen-Coldfield-Yoknapatawpha County's past offer various perspectives in his chronicle of what might...middle of paper...this brilliant glimmer of illusion" (59). From his place there he sees the " it may have been that it is truer than the truth" (115), as "the only rock to which we cling above the vortex of unbearable reality" (120). And so it is... if only... Works Cited Edenfield, Olivia Carr. "'To Endure and Then Resist': Rosa Coldfield's Search for a Role in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" (Fall 1999): 57-68 November 1990). Ryan!", Heberden W. "Behind Closed Doors: The Unknowable and the Unknowable in Absalom, Absalom Mississippi Quarterly 45.3 (Summer 1992): 295-312.