There are little touches [in Faulkner's early novel, Soldier's Pay,] of narrative pace—crucial incidents withheld …, ironic juxtapositions, abrupt yet unmarked transitions within and between scenes which would confirm a sense of Joyce if one approached them with the Joyce parallel already in mind. Yet as a whole, Faulkner's novel is not Joycean in either theme or style. The almost wordless figure of Lieutenant Mahon, a massive, unmovable rock in the stream of time, fills the center of the novel; he can hardly fail to remind us of Benjy, who will occupy a similar position in The Sound and the Fury, but for such a figure there is no parallel in Joyce at all. Around his unmoving figure the characters range themselves in response to various motivations and impulses, but not in accord with an underlying pattern, least of all a mythological one. The book fulfills "normal" narrative expectations by moving in time; its structure involves no sense of the cyclical. In all these ways, therefore, Soldiers' Pay, even as it confirms Faulkner's early acquaintance with Joyce, makes clear that mannerisms and surfaces were what the young Faulkner chiefly imitated. And much the same argument could be made regarding Mosquitoes, which an early reviewer commended, rather condescendingly, on the ground that the writing was occasionally good when it wasn't Joyce. It is a study of ephemerids, with more contempt for its characters and more esthetic lecturing than the author can quite control; and again it is through mannerisms that Joyce's influence makes itself most clearly felt…. But the basic tone of the novel, determined by its character as satiric social comedy, is closer to the youthful Aldous Huxley than to Joyce.

Faulkner's two apprentice novels are very different indeed from one another, but alike in showing clear awareness of Joyce and a set of superficial or fragmentary responses to him. The Sound and the Fury, which shows fewer traces of direct influence or imitation, is in fact much closer to the techniques and structural energies of a Joycean novel. The book makes much more thorough-going and consistent use of stream-of-consciousness techniques than did any of Faulkner's previous novels; those streams are choked and barricaded in more elaborate ways, and more intricately dappled with thematic repetitions. Under its surface, never quite explicit but increasingly felt as the novel progresses, is a mythical parallel (a parodic crucifixion, descent into hell, and resurrection) which can be treated either as a central narrative pattern in itself or, more interestingly, as a shadowy counter-structure to the contemporary fable. The energies of the reader are completely involved in piecing together fragments which, when assembled, tell a bitter tale of futility and circularity. Like Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury is relatively indifferent to the moral note, which is simply a way of saying that good and bad intentions don't count for much in the book's economy. The doom of the Compsons is deeper than any villain can spin out or any savior redeem. (pp. 84-5)

More than anything else, it is the field of centripetal-centrifugal forces in violent self-contained conflict that defines the greatness of The Sound and the Fury; the book could be described as a series of private, defeated furies united in a common doom. Having no use for the trappings of epic, and little interest in mimetic tricks or parodic parallels, Faulkner wrote a far tighter and more economical novel than Ulysses had been…. Quentin Compson, in the complexity of his mental processes and the layered, allusive quality of his mind, is comparable to Stephen Dedalus, but he takes no time out to exercise on the Indian clubs of literary criticism, as in the "Library" scene. His thinking on time is … pointed and functional (fictionally speaking)…. Ulysses had made some play with scrambled or undefined identities or different persons passing under the same name; Faulkner, as a man obsessed with temporal repetition, makes his reader discriminate between two Quentins, two Maurys, and no fewer than three Jason Compsons—yet holds these various confusions strictly subordinate to a passionate historical complexity in his own mind, which doesn't allow or require him to say a word of incidental explanation…. Faulkner has built from the bottom up and the inside out in turning Joycean techniques to his own purposes. He was not only a less informed but also a less formal artist than his great predecessor; certainly in The Sound and the Fury, he worked under a greater head of emotional steam, toward a more shattering, intimate, and personal experience than Joyce in many parts of Ulysses was attempting. Faulkner's masterpiece isn't, therefore, in any sense a Joycean imitation, though it's clearly a book which, without the example of Joyce, would not have taken anything like its present form. When Faulkner said that in writing it he had put the entire question of publishers and publication out of his mind, he meant something more than editors and audiences; a whole set of structural devices and narrative conventions went with them, as he stripped his novel down to the basic themes and the techniques essential to bring them living forth. That so much evidence of Joyce's presence remains is surprising; but it simply confirms that the Joycean influence wasn't for Faulkner either a passive or an adventitious thing; it was built, so to speak, into the structure of his fictional vision, into the way he defined consciousness, into the way he wove a web of past circumstance into a tissue of present action.

For example, Benjy is, beyond all question, the central pivot of The Sound and the Fury, not just because of his nature but because of his positioning. Around him all the other lives in the book revolve, to him the reader is constantly referring back his later experiences in the novel. His mental arrest, though different in all sorts of ways from the deadly stasis in which Stephen Dedalus is frozen during the first three units of Ulysses, functions similarly in the novel. He is the screen through which the reader's mind must penetrate; but, more than that, he is the hopelessly marred materials out of which full humanity must be built—built by the reader…. Benjy's consciousness is in fact less a flowing stream than a crossword, cross-referenced puzzle, a Daedalian maze. Simply by positioning him at the head of the novel, Faulkner converted into instant advantages most of the inherent deficiencies of "stream-of-consciousness" method. But in so doing he imitated, in a way that can't be described as "imitation" simply because its essence is boldness and audacity, the pattern of Joyce's fictional construction. No doubt this is one reason why Faulkner's novel has seemed, like Joyce's, to stand a little apart from other fictions, as involving the reader more radically, to the hazard of his equanimity, in a perilous personal enterprise.

After The Sound and the Fury, traces of Joycean structure and verbal device fade gradually from the work of Faulkner. Indeed, there is a pronounced mythical structure underlying Light in August, and both As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom make sustained use of a monologue which, if not fully interiorized, is at least given a heavy coloring of individual manner. But none of these novels reminds us decisively of Joyce; they are a working—eloquent, funny, impassioned—of indigenous materials that Faulkner needed no specially Joycean techniques to handle. Occasionally in later years, when he tried to draw his artistic calculations very fine, Faulkner fell back on fictional mechanisms as a substitute for the kind of unitary passion he generated in The Sound and the Fury. The solemn machinery of A Fable represents his most notable failure of the sort…. But the greatest of Faulkner's novels is less an example of Joycean influence or even inspiration than of Joyce's liberating effect on an indigenous and independent inspiration. Even apart from the masterpiece that resulted, it is one of the most interesting examples in literature of influence accepted and converted into the direct opposite of itself. Thus it became a substantial influence in its own right…. (pp. 86-8)