ABSTRACT
William Faulkner's work resonates with the Bible in a variety of complex ways that are captured most evocatively in a Gothic metaphor he invoked repeatedly: the Bible haunts his fiction, both formally and thematically. Absalom helps illustrate why an understanding of Faulkner's uses of Gothic conventions can help one better understand even those of his stories that are less obviously Gothic. Faulkner's narrative voices are often metaphorically haunted, not only by Southern history but also by the Bible—both stylistically and ideologically. This ghostly intertext creates not a sense of disjunction from the premodern past but a sense of urgent connection between past and present, speaking to the present with uncanny ethical relevance. In typical ghost stories, the first convincing sign that an actual ghost might be present creates a transformation: it takes an otherwise familiar world and makes it unnervingly and catalytically strange.
