Content Warning: This guide contains references to slavery, racial violence, rape, incest, and suicide. The source text uses racial slurs including the n-word, which is reproduced and obscured in quotations in this guide.

The novel opens with Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield together in Rosa’s home. Although the narrative in this chapter is from a third-person omniscient perspective, it is particularly close to Quentin’s point of view and therefore privy to his internal musings as Rosa begins to narrate her family history. Earlier that day, Quentin received a handwritten note from a “small negro boy” (5), asking him to come see Rosa, which he obeys. As Quentin sits in her home, she begins to tell him the history of Thomas Sutpen (also called Colonel Sutpen), “Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange n****** and built a plantation” (5). As Quentin listens, it becomes increasingly clear that Rosa views Sutpen with contempt and fury. He muses about why, of out anyone, Rosa chose him to be the person to whom she would relay her familial history.