Absalom, Absalom Lesson Plan

Who does the following passage refer to? What is the fever and what is the disease? How does Faulkner indicate this quality in the description of the surroundings?

"He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, form the fever which had cured the disease, waking form the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence." (Chapter 1)

The...