Needing to Narrate

Faulkner unites the problems of character and chronology that James and Conrad faced. Faulkner’s novels show the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to impose narrative order on experience. Critics often see Faulkner’s techniques, like Conrad’s, as representations of the disorder of reality—of the failings of human knowledge and the impossibility of communication. Yet through Quentin Compson’s desperate attempts to understand the story of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, and through the failure of the community in The Hamlet to recognize that they are merely characters in Flem Snopes’s story, Faulkner sketches the hazard and the value of attempting to know one’s place in the story of one’s life. In Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey extends the experiments of Absalom, Absalom! He includes more voices than Faulkner and juxtaposes more layers of history, testing against each other the competing claims of politicized local action and multiple forms of universal sentiment.