Several of the novels take place at exactly the same time, but the events are viewed in a different manner, which in turn brings new light and interest worthy of duplicating. This is extremely obvious when you compare Absalom, Absalom! to The Sound and the Fury the novels themselves both tell the same story. In spite of this both books manage to stand apart from each other. The key isn’t that the events are the same, but rather the viewpoints aren’t. This use of time is one of the main reasons that Faulkner was considered a genius in his own time. (Frederick J. Hoffman, 17) Faulkner writings brought about a lot of characters. It was most likely Faulkner’s opinion that he could represent every kind of person using the concentrated population of Mississippi. In his short stories he presents just about every imaginable combination from Indians who owned slaves to 49ers who were unsuccessful and were forced back to move back to the South. Faulkner uses his characters in a variety of ways, but most commonly he pelted them with steady moral judgment. One of the best examples of this is in the short story A Rose for Emily in which an old maid falls in love with a Northerner. The old maid kills her lover and keeps his body upstairs in her bedroom. This is not discovered however until after the old maid dies and they are able to get inside the house. Despite this rather gruesome image the focus of the story is not concentrated on it at all, instead the point of the novel is on the old maid and what she thought about how much the world was changing. Or in the short story The Evening Sun the story is concentrated on a Negro woman who is impregnated by another man and lives with the terror of it every day. The narration is done through a small boys point of view this gives you an innocent but honest look at her life and the terror she must endure. These are just examples of how Faulkner is able to throw you in to ...
