Possessing the Secret of Joy | Literary Precedents
The unusual narrative technique Walker uses in Possessing the Secret of Joy reveals a debt to Faulkner. In The Sound and the Fury (1929), three narrators tell the story in internal monologues with no authorial comment and with a jumbled time sequence. An interesting note is that both novels also contain a retarded narrator: Benji in Faulkner's novel and Benny in Walker's. But the novel of Faulkner's that most seems like a precedent to Walker's is As I Lay Dying (1930). Faulkner's novel has a highly segmented narrative. His novel is distinctive in that some narratives...
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