by mk

Some critics argue that Faulkner deliberately modeled the structure of his earlier works, like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying along analytic-cubist lines. Just as Picasso and Braque fragment their canvases in an attempt to capture the subject from many perspectives at once, Faulkner shifts his narrative voice from one character to another, surrounding the plot from all sides while interrupting its flow. But little attention has been paid to whether Faulkner continues to trace the cubist trajectory in his later work (or, put differently, whether cubism remains a helpful interpretive framework for Faulkner’s mature fiction). Was he a synthetic cubist, too?