Absalom! is the best examples of expressionism in American fiction. Because of his interest in stream-of-consciousness techniques Faulkner may also be considered a psychological novelist. In both The Sound and the Fury and Light in August the action centers round the events of a single day, but previous and subsequent incidents are filled in through recollections of the characters and though adroit and complex flashbacks, in either case seen internally, through the often semiconscious reaction of the characters are involved. The interest of the author is not so much in the incidents themselves as in complicated mental reactions they evoke in the characters. Here Faulkner resembles Proust and Joyce more than he resembles American naturalists.
From another point of view Faulkner is a regionalist, although his region is an imaginary one based on reality: "Yoknapatawpha County" with its county seat of Jefferson. Since Jefferson is described as seventy-five miles south of Memphis on the Illinois Central Railroad, it can easily be identified as Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner passed most of his life. At the same time Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional region only loosely related to real Mississippi County of Lafayette. But when Faulkner departs from Yoknapatawpha territory, his fiction looses a measure of its grass-roots strength and significance.
Though some incidents, like the murder of old Colonel Sartoris, are drawn from family traditions, in the main Faulkner’s characters are the product of his own imagination. For this reason Faulkner is able to create characters of great diversity: the gangster Popeye, the spinster Miss Burden, the rebellious Temple Drake, and the brooding Harvard student Quentin Compson are equally forceful, real, and meaningful.
Where Faulkner’s style is most difficult and the narrative line most complex, he demands the active participation, of the reader in the creative process. As Quentin tries to get at the truth of the past in Absalom, Absalom! by a compulsive telling and retelling of the story, bringing in new historical sources including interviews and letters, finally bringing the Canadian Shreve McCannon into the reconstruction as well, so is the reader drawn it. The demands on the reader are great – you may have to puzzle out an impossible sentence or go back to pick up a lost thread, but the rewards are great. Among other prose writers who make similar demands are Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Proust, Kafka, Gertrude Stein. As has been said of some of their work: it does not nave to be difficult to be good, but it helps.
The language of presentation is purposely chaotic. The action does not generally develops chronologically but in jerks. The story is related in retrospect by diverse speakers and sometimes it is difficult to understand who the speaker is. The events in the novels may range within a hundred years. For a character like Quentin Compson who is seeking the truth and is continuing to love the South in spite of its shame it is of no importance when the event occurred. Well known is Faulkner’s "theory of time": "There is no "was" – there is only "is". If "was" existed the bitterness and suffering would have disappeared."
Another element in Faulkner’s fiction is its capacity for comic vision, as in Hamlet, The Town, and The Manison. It is Joycean in style but thoroughly indigenous and American. His last novel, The Reivers, published shortly before his death, is hugely comic.
When Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature he delivered a brief speech of acceptance before the Swedish Academy which has become a classic in our time. Often reprinted it contains important clues to Faulkner’s work:
"Our tragedy today is a general and universal fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing…he must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid, and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart … – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."
