The Problem of Plot in the Modernist Text:

The Example of Faulkner

Widely known and influential definitions of plot in the novel such as those offered by R.S.
Crane, E.M. Forster, and Sheldon Sacks were typically derived from and illustrated by novels of
the 18th and 19th centuries, especially novels representative of the English tradition. While
there were different emphases, these definitions all reflected basic assumptions about causality,
linear sequence, and aesthetic unity and resolution as givens in the narrative tradition extending
from Fielding and Richardson through James and Hardy. Of course, modernist experimentation
in narrative offered a forceful challenge to traditional concepts of time, character, and causation
(among other things), which complicated the idea of what constitutes plot in fiction. The diurnal
wanderings of a Leopold Bloom or a Clarissa Dalloway did not readily conform, for example, to
the conventions of the “represented action” schematized by the Neo-Aristotelian critics. It
needed a later generation of critics to refine previous definitions and develop new ones in the
attempt to account for the more radical play with fictional conventions in the modernist
narratives produced by writers like Joyce, Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. Among the critics who
extended what has b become known as narratology to accommodate modernist
experimentation were Joseph Frank (“Spatial Form Modern Literature”), A.A. Mendilow (Time
and the Novel), and Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending). Still more recently, the French
structuralist Gerard Genette has developed a comprehensive theory of narrative and a
systematic method for examining its constitutive elements in their dynamic interaction during the
process of reading. To say the least, Genette’s close study of A la Recherche du temps perdu
is an impressive achievement, authoritatively demonstrating the resourcefulness of narratology
in coming to terms with even this most immense and complex modernist novel.
In this context, the case of William Faulkner is anomalous. Faulkner’s experiments with
fictional time, point of view, and characterization are well known. Though not as overtly
participant in European avant-garde movements as his contemporaries Hemingway and Dos
Passos, and of course not generally well known until much later in his career, Faulkner
nevertheless wrote novels that today exemplify the best of American modernism: The Sound
and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom!
(1936). Yet despite this achievement, curiously the best known and most influential Faulkner

1
criticism is still predominantly theme-based. Though there are exceptions to this generalization,
I am struck by the continuing authority of Cleanth Brooks’s work on Faulkner as well as by the
tendency of recent critics to follow exceedingly well-worn paths such as Southern history and
values (Joel Williamson), biographical backgrounds (David Minter), and even the famous
humanistic pronouncements from Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize Address. Two notable attempts
to foreground the structural dynamics of Faulkner’s fictional experiments are John Irwin’s
Doubling & Incest (1975) and Joseph Reed’s Faulkner’s Narrative (1973), but though very
promising neither attempt ultimately succeeds in doing for students of Faulkner what Genette
has done for students of Proust. Irwin’s “speculative reading” brilliantly uses a psychoanalytic
approach to identify a latent structure involving complex patterns of doubling, incest, repetition,
and revenge--a substructure not embodied entirely in any single novel but in the mammoth
meta-narrative of Yoknapatawpha County generally. Though The Sound and the Fury and
Absalom, Absalom! receive the most attention, Irwin is not particularly concerned to ground his
speculations in the manifest structures of even these central novels. In this respect, Reed’s
study is more pragmatic in its attempt to understand Faulkner’s craftsmanship by offering rather
detailed descriptions of the “finite means of narrative strategy and design” (10) used in thirteen
novels and the major short fiction. Thus Reed provides, for example, appendixes in which he
graphs the narrative progression in each chapter narrated by one of the fifteen monologists in
As I Lay Dying, emphasizing the nature of the temporal transitions between the novel’s 59
chapters. He then offers a tally of the frequency with which verbs of cognition (“believe,” “know,”
“remember,” “think”) appear in Light in August, and also their distribution according to the four
centrally focalized characters. A third appendix plots the chronology of past story events and
the location of their narration in time present in Absalom, Absalom! A final chart tracks the
density of imagery by chapter and page intervals in Absalom. As this enumeration suggests, a
shortcoming of Reed’s approach is that his methods alter according to the distinguishing
features he finds in each Faulkner work, and while the patterns he identifies are often intriguing
in themselves, unfortunately Reed does not provide a consistent set of narrative features found,
mutatis mutandis, throughout the Faulkner canon. As a result, there is little basis for comparing
novels or for ascertaining their relationship to Faulkner’s work as a whole.<1>

Genette’s structuralist approach offers a far more systematic methodology, one that is

2
consistent and rigorous enough to afford a precise account of the manifest features of a

narrative text and also a secure basis for analysis of the dynamics of reader response enacted

by that text as it is experienced during the time-act of reading. Genette’s narratology, involving

such key terms as diegesis, extradiegesis, mimesis, focalization, iterative and pseudo-iterative

narration, has been usefully applied not only to Proust’s multivolume novel but also to other

complex extended narratives. Particularly useful in approaching a writer such as Faulkner, it

seems to me, is Genette’s schema for narrative temporality, comprised of three main categories:

order, frequency, and duration. Order involves the relations between the temporal sequence of

story events and the order of their actual presentation in the narrative discourse. Those

relations may be congruent, or they may entail various kinds of anachrony (analepsis, prolepsis,

syllepsis). Duration concerns the dynamic relations between the overall time span and tempo

of the story, on the one hand, and on the other the amount of textual space used to present

them. Frequency has to do with the relations between the repetitive capacities of both the story

and the discourse.

Clearly Faulkner makes ample use of all of these aspects of temporality, especially in his
experimental novels produced in the late 1920s and 1930s. Beginning with The Sound and the
Fury--with its sharply contrasting interior monologues by each of the three Compson brothers in
turn, the retarded Benjy, the death-and-incest-obsessed Quentin, and the cruelly calculating,
spiteful Jason--Faulkner entered into a series of highly original explorations of his own time and
region.<2> The more numerous and varied monologues of As I Lay Dying extended the
exploration to the comic and grotesque and strangely moving funerary odyssey of the Burdens,
a family of poor whites from the country outside of Jefferson, the county seat of Yoknapatawpha.
The noir atmosphere of Sanctuary, Faulkner’s first popular success, accompanied a more overt
“action” plot featuring Temple Drake’s abduction and rape by the nihilistic gangster Popeye,
juxtaposed with the quixotic attempts at defending the traditional order on the part of a hapless
intellectual, Horace Benbow. Faulkner used a much more extravagant contrapuntal structure in
Light in August, wherein the tragic tale of the mulatto Joe Christmas is offset by the comedy and

3
romance surrounding the pregnant naif Lena Grove as well as by the tortuous transformation
undergone by Gail Hightower, a defrocked minister. Perhaps the apex of Faulkner’s
experimentation in narrative form came in Absalom, Absalom!, the convoluted reconstruction of
the rise and fall of the domain of Thomas Sutpen, spanning more than a century, reported by
four principal narrators whose relationships to Sutpen and his family are strikingly different.<3>
Faulkner’s narrative innovations continued in such subsequent works as The Wild Palms (1939),
another contrapuntal work, and Go Down, Moses (1942), a short-story composite or episodic
novel, depending on one’s preference. Yet I would agree with those who find greatest
achievement in the four works written between 1929 and 1936. These works, above all, are
haunted by time and history, and in them Faulkner exercised the full range of narrative
resources for enacting his distinctive sense of synchronous time. “To me,” he famously said, “no
man is [only] himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because
the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman and every moment. . . . And so . . . a
character in a story at any moment is not just himself, he is all that made him. . .” (Gwynn and
Blotner 84).
The challenge that Faulkner set for himself in these works was not merely to depict his
characters’ rapt backward gaze, their perilous fixation on the past, but also to engage the reader
actively in the experience of synchronous time, inverted time, time arrested, and other
permutations enacted by the dynamics of narrative. By drawing on and supplementing
Genette’s methodology, one can locate and ascertain the primary reading rhythms of these
novels and can compare them with those of other modern novels. According to Genette the
large-scale rhythm of a narrative is chiefly determined by “the relations between external
divisions (parts, chapters, etc.) and the internal narrative articulations” (88), including the
duration and tempo of the narrative. Tables I and II below provide data concerning these
relations in a total of fifteen modern novels, including five written by Faulkner at the zenith of his
powers. The tables include tallies of the textual divisions in each novel and the average length
of division, and highlights their relation to the temporal dynamics of story and discourse.

TABLE I

4
 Macro-Rhythms in Ten Modern Novels

Novels No. pp.* Divs. Avg. Div. NOW-Span Isoch. Tempo Time-Space Index

Portrait of the
192.8 24 8.03 pp. 18 yrs. p = 34.1 days 273.64 days/div.
Artist

Sons & Lovers 295.6 15 19.71 pp. 26.5 yrs. p = 32.72 days 644.94 days/div.

To the
148 45 3.29 pp. 10 yrs. p = 24.66 days 81.14 days/div.
Lighthouse

Lord Jim 236 45 5.24 pp. 8.5 yrs. p = 13.15 days 68.91 days/div.

Power & Glory 154.2 54 2.86 pp. .176 yr. p = .41 day 1.17 day/div.

Passage to
204.8 40 5.12 pp. 2.42 yrs. p = .23 day 1.19 day/div.
India

Nostromo 320 32 10.0 pp. .083 yr. p = .094 day .94 day/div.

Confidential
141.6 15 9.44 pp. .016 yr. p = .043 day .4 day/div.
Agent

Mrs. Dalloway 146.5 12 12.17 pp. .002 yr. p = .005 day .61 day/div.

Under the
268 12 22.33 pp. .002 yr. p = .002 day .045 day/div.
Volcano

Median 198.7 28 8.74 pp. 1.3 yr. p = .32 day 1.18 day/div.

*Note: A standardized page is used to tabulate all the novels; p = 500 words.

TABLE II

Macro-Rhythms in Five Faulkner Novels

Novels No. pp.* Divs. Avg. Div. NOW-Span Isoch. Tempo Time-Space Index

The Sound &

222 pp. 4 55.5 pp. 17.85 yrs. p = 29.35 days 1629 days/div.
the Fury

Absalom,
278 pp. 11 25.27 pp. .33 yr. p = .43 day 10.9 days/div.
Absalom!

Sanctuary 160 pp. 59 2.7 pp. .42 yr. p = .94 day 2.54 days/div.
Light in
300.4 pp. 72 4.17 pp. .083 yr. p = .103 day .43 day/div.
August

5
 As I Lay
113.2 pp. 59 1.92 pp. .03 yr. p = .09 day .17 day/div.
Dying

Median 222 pp. 59 4.17 pp. .33 yr. p = .43 day 2.54 days/div.

*A standardized page is used to tabulate all the novels; p = 500 words.

Comparing the figures on the two tables above, we find that in these novels Faulkner generally
tends to divide his text more than twice as often as the normative rate found in the novels
examined in Table I: the median number of divisions in Faulkner is 59, while the median is 28 in
the other group. Correspondingly, the textual divisions are less than half as long in Faulkner
(4.17 pages to 8.74 pages). Generally speaking, textual division signals a pause in the onward
movement of narrative, an interval often emphasizing the end of a scene or sequence, a
transition to a new narrative unit, or a tacit invitation to reflect back on previous units in hopes of
finding a connection between them. Among other possible effects, to increase the
frequency<4> of formal division is to call more attention to the narrative as a written text, an
artifact, subtly subverting the illusory “actuality” of mimetic representation. There is, of course,
considerable variation among the five Faulkner novels in the frequency of textual division, with
both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! exceeding all of the ten novels on Table I
in the tendency to divide the text infrequently, with the result that the average stretch of text
between formal divisions in these two novels is much longer than the norms for either group
studied to this point. This anomaly is readily explained by Faulkner’s use in both novels of
extended monologues by each of his narrators in turn, often (especially in Absalom) going over
the same ground repeatedly from different perspectives. The practice corresponds to
Faulkner’s notorious use of long sentences, in which Faulkner grandly claimed he tried “to put
the whole history of the human heart on the head of a pin . . . [in] an attempt to get his past and
possibly his future into the [present] instant . . .” (qtd. in Gwynn and Blotner 84).
These same two novels have comparatively long time-spans in the narrative present. The
Sound and the Fury, in particular, involves a lengthy duration (17.85 years), in this case mainly
due to the lengthy ellipsis between Quentin Compson’s monologue, dated 2 June 1910, and the
other three sections, dated April 7, 6, and 8, 1928, respectively. Through dividing the overall

6
duration--the NOW-time span of the story<5>--by the total number of pages, we can derive the
normative speed at which present time passes in a complete narrative. This measurement of
the isochronous tempo<6> of the narrative can then be considered in relation to the average
frequency of division to arrive at what I call the time-space index: a ratio of the average tempo
of NOW-time and the normative length of textual unit in a narrative. This measurement
indicates what might be called the macro-rhythm of a narrative.
Applying these methods to both groups of novels, we can see that As I Lay Dying, with its
numerous short chapters collectively spanning only ten days in time present, has a low time-
space index (.17 day, or about four hours per average textual division); in this regard, its
norminative or “zero-degree” rhythm resembles that of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and
Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), both of which are also highly subjective novels whose story
in time present spans a relatively short period, in their case only a single day. There are no
novels on Table I whose time-space index even approaches that of The Sound and the Fury,
1,629 days per average division--a seemingly absurd figure whose sum is wildly skewed by the
above-mentioned lengthy ellipsis included in the NOW-span. The macro-rhythms in Absalom,
Absalom! (10.9 days per division), Sanctuary (2.54 days per division), and Light in August (.43
day per division) seem, by this reckoning, to represent the “middle” norm for these novels by
Faulkner. In terms of macro-rhythm, they roughly correspond to The Power and the Glory (1.17
day per division), A Passage to India (1.19 day per division), and Nostromo (.94 day per
division) in that a relatively short span of NOW-time passes in textual divisions of medium
length.
Of course, identifying macro-rhythms of novels by giving priority chiefly to the action in the
narrative present is--literally--only part of the story. To fill out the remainder it is necessary also
to examine the use of anachronies, which generally interrupt the flow of NOW-time and send us
back to significant moments in the past--or, occasionally, ahead to the future. Just as formal
divisions break up the onward impetus of reading narrative, so anachronisms disrupt the flow of
time in the present. Most disruptive, as a rule, are flashbacks or more precisely, external
analepses, defined by Genette as the “evocation after the fact of an event that took place
earlier” than the beginning of NOW-time (40).<7> Clearly, this is an exceedingly prominent
feature of Faulknerian narrative, and we are not surprised to find (see Table III below) that in

7
most of his novels a far greater proportion of the text is devoted to the representation of the past
(35.7%) than is the case in the ten novels listed on Table IV (14.4%). Although the latter group
tends to resort more often to external analepses (40.5 as compared with Faulkner’s norm of 26),
they are only about one-third as long in pages as Faulkner’s external analepses in the five
novels studied. This difference is all the more remarkable when we bear in mind that the
“control group,” as it were, in Table IV includes several novels by Conrad and Woolf, writers
whose fascination with time and the narrative representation of it rivals that of Faulkner. Yet
only two of the ten novels on Table IV--Lord Jim and Greene’s The Quiet American--come close
to Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August in the degree of emphasis given to the narrative past.
By combining the normative tendencies indicated on Tables II and III, we begin to have a clearer
sense of the distinctive rhythms of Faulknerian narrative.

TABLE III
Anterior Time in Five Faulkner Novels

No. Ext. Total pp.* in Ext. % of Overall Avg. Ext.

Novels Total Past Span
Analepses Analepses Text Analepse

Absalom, Absalom! 176 244.64 pp. 88% 1.39 pp. 102 yrs.

Light in August 26 141.08 pp. 47% 5.43 pp. 108 yrs.

Sound & Fury 213 79.21 pp. 35.7% .37 p. 35 yrs.

As I Lay Dying 15 12.1 pp. 12.1% .91 p. 35 yrs.

Sanctuary 10 5.84 pp. 5.84% .934 p. .25 yr.

Median 26 79.21 pp. 35.7% .934 p. 35 yrs.

TABLE IV

Anterior Time in Ten Modern Novels

No. Ext. Total pp.* Ext. Avg. Ext.

Novels % of Text
Analepses Analepses Analepse

Quiet American 20 103.8 pp. 83.3% 5.19 pp.

8
 Lord Jim 102 97.73 pp. 41.6% .96 p.

Nostromo 50 86.0 pp. 26.9% 1.72 pp.

Under the Volcano 220 55.34 pp. 20.65% .25 p.

Mrs. Dalloway 58 27.45 pp. 18.8% .43 p.

To the Lighthouse 84 14.4 pp. 10% .17 p.

Power and Glory 31 4.46 pp. 2.9% .14 p.

Passage to India 14 2.56 pp. 1.3% .18 p.

Confidential Agent 7 .67 p. 0.05% .096 p.

Sons and Lovers 13 7.24 p. 0.025% .56 p.

Median 40.5 20.93 pp. 14.40% .34 p.

*A standardized page is used to tabulate all the novels; p = 500 words.

Useful as these profiles of narrative dynamics may be, however, they are really only a first
step toward the kind of analysis that would fully define that distinctiveness and its possible
effects on the reader. In order to understand the ways in which the shaping of “virtual”
experience in a given novel animates and focuses the reader’s cognition, we must look beyond
the macro-structural level to the more immediate level of smaller, local units of discourse. In
doing so we move closer to the subjective, moment-by-moment, expectation-bound yet finally
unpredictable process of reading itself. At this immediate level, reading rhythm is more volatile
and responsive to the vicissitudes of the moment. Engagement with the narrative at this level
supersedes attention to general, normative tendencies in favor of a succession of what seem
distinctive moments unbounded by the equal intervals measured by the narratological clock.
The reader’s progressive responsiveness to these subjective intensities necessarily complicates
his or her experience of a work’s narrative rhythms and does so in ways elusive of precise
measurement. While the more objective tempo, with its varying but usually ascertainable speed
at which the fictional clock-time passes, provides the overall rhythmical base, there are certain
junctures when the objective tempo is subsumed by accumulated subjective pressures,
especially toward the end of the narrative. At such junctures objective time and space may

9
become distorted, inverted, or may even be transcended. <8>
These moments of intensity and transcendence are strongly characteristic of Faulkner’s
major narratives. One thinks, for example, of moments such as that when Dilsey in The Sound
and the Fury, leaving the Easter service beside the retarded manchild Benjy Compson, declares
with unimpeachable authority that she sees the first and the last, the beginning and the ending--
a holistic vision that intuitively grasps both the temporal continuity and the finality embodied by
the Compsons’ decline and, simultaneously, “the annealment and the blood of the remembered
Lamb” (185), by virtue of which Dilsey herself moves beyond entrapment in that doom.
Another of these time-abolishing moments moments of fullness is dramatized toward the
end of Light in August, in Gail Hightower’s vision of the revolving luminous wheel comprised of
human faces, his own among them. For the reclusive Hightower, it is a rare instance of human
contact and involvement, which leaves him “lying spent and still upon the window ledge which
has no solidity beneath hands that have no weight, so that it can be now Now” (492), the last
two words as it were pronouncing the translation of time into eternity through Hightower’s
realization of guilt and his ultimate deliverance.
A third example presents itself in the final chapter of Absalom, Absalom! when the college
roommates, Shreve McCannon and Quentin Compson, imaginatively collaborate in their re-
visioning of Thomas Sutpen’s final downfall, and in the process make it their own experience,
just as the fully engaged reader does. In one of the novel’s most memorable images of this
shared imaginative experience, Quentin realizes momentarily the transcendence that he has so
despairingly--and, until now, futilely--sought:
Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never
once but like ripples maybe on water after a pebble sinks, the ripples
moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to
the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed. . . : that pebble’s
watery echo . . . moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space
to the old ineradicable rhythm. . . . (210)

Such defining moments in Faulkner attain remarkable force despite the fact that they cannot by
their nature be sustained, as Quentin, for his part, learns to his cost. The intensity of these

10
moments typically arises out of pressures that have accumulated throughout the narrative as a
whole and are released, as it were suddenly, at a strategically auspicious juncture.
In this paper I have argued that narratology provides an array of resources for identifying
and tracking these structural dynamics. The isochronous tempo, the time-space index, the
frequency and extent of external analepses all facilitate a precise understanding of a work’s
large-scale rhythmical tendencies. By providing a context of objective evidence describing
these normative tendencies, this method prepares one to take the crucial next step beyond
normative rhythms and toward a heightened awareness of the constantly varying dynamics of
the work as it unfolds in the time-act of reading. Fully elaborated, this sort of analysis should
reinforce our intuitive assent to Faulkner’s claim that “there is no such thing really as was
because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment.”

Notes

<1> Other recent critics who have contributed studies of individual Faulkner novels of interest to
the narratologist include Peter Brooks (286-312), Michael Kaufman (36-51), John T. Matthews
(71-91), Brian Richardson (119-24), Patricia Dreschsel Tobin (107-32), Marianna Torgovnick
(157-75), and Austin Wright (218-39). Richard C. Moreland’s Faulkner and Modernism (passim)
suggestively addresses the relationship between Faulkner and certain key aspects of
modernism in terms of two contrasting forms of repetition--revisionary and compulsive--focusing,
however, chiefly on fiction produced during a later phase in Faulkner’s career than the period
highlighted in the present study.

<2> Of course, the first complete novel in the Yoknapatawpha series was Flags in the Dust, a
much-edited (and now superseded) version of which appeared under the title Sartoris (1929).

<3> Brian McHale, singling out Absalom, Absalom! as “a high-water mark of modernist
poetics” (8), uses this novel to exemplify the shift from the modernist emphasis on epistemology
to the postmodern emphasis on ontology (10).

11
<4> In this paragraph and for the remainder of this paper I use the term “frequency” to indicate a
rate of occurrence rather than in the special Genettian meaning defined previously.

<5> NOW-time is a term coined by Seymour Chatman (63).

<6> Genette defines isochrony as an hypothetical normative tempo “of unchanging speeds,
without accelerations or slowdowns, where the relative duration-of-story/length-of-narrative
would remain always steady” (87-88). In effect it is not unlike the musical tempo indicated by a
metronome.

<7> In contrast, the internal analepse evokes after the fact an event that took place after the
beginning of NOW-time but before the present moment in which it is recalled. Such analepses
are commonly used, for example, to fill in perceived “gaps” in the story. Genette also includes in
his analysis the less common kind of anachrony involving an evocation of a future event
occurring after the present moment in which it appears in the narration: the prolepse or flash-
forward.

<8> Building on Genette’s methodology, I have also attempted to identify and account for such
moments of subjective intensity in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (see Walker 65-79).

Works Cited

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Random,
1984.
Books, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.

------------. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978.

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Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1978.

Crane, Ronald S. “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones.” In Critics and Criticism.
Ed. R. S. Crane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990.

-----------. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990.

----------. Light in August: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990.

---------. Sanctuary: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990.

---------. The Sound and the Fury: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism.
2nd ed. Ed. David Minter. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1994.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, 1927.

Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review 53, Spring (1945).

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca,
Cornell UP, 1980.
Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at
the University of Virginia, 1957-1958. New York: Vintage, 1959.
Irwin, John T. Doubling & Incest/Repetition & Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner.
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Kaufman, Michael. Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print. Lewisburg:

Bucknell UP, 1994.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York:
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Matthews, John T. “Faulkner’s Narrative Frames.” In Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Aladie, eds.
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1987. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 1989, pp. 71-91.

Mc Hale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.

Mendilow, A.A. Time and the Novel. New York: Humanities P, 1952.

Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Moreland, Richard D. Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting. Madison: U of

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Reed, Joseph. Faulkner’s Narrative. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973.

Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark:
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Sacks, Sheldon. Fiction and the Shape of Belief. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964.

Tobin, Patricia Dreschsel. Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative. Princeton:
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Torgovnick, Marianna. Closure and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.

Walker, Ronald G. “Leaden Echoes Dissolving in Air: Narrative Rhythm and Meaning in
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Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

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--Ronald G. Walker 1999; rev. 2016

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