In Absalom, Absalom! the richness of texture and detail is so great that the full effect of the many narrative frames is easily obfuscated. The comparison between the present (the narrative frames) and the past (Sutpen's story) accentuates many of the central themes of the primary story, imparting a sense of timelessness to the story and showing how myth is created to contrast with the reality from which it grows. Yet a far more subtle and revolutionary effect of the novel's overlapping and interwoven frames is the manner in which they—as they reflect and distort both the primary story and one another—comment on the problems of epistemology, the imagination, art, and the creative process.

While Faulkner is centrally concerned with the imagination in all his novels,… he never directly extended this concern to the province of art…. Perhaps this omission was caused by a more traditional attitude toward art than, for instance, such a novelist as Gide or Mann had—one which both did not so radically question the possible conflict between the traditionally moral function of the novel and a more purely esthetic perspective, and one that accepted art's traditional function of representing an ultimate reality. Such an attitude might seem inconsistent with Faulkner's depiction within his novels of the imagination as a distorting mechanism that limited rather than increased man's contact with reality; but Faulkner … never fully applied his perceptions of the mind's inherent distortions to the functioning of his own artistic imagination. It is for this reason that Absalom, Absalom!'s narrative frames are of particular interest, for they set up an implicit—even if partially unintentional—metaphor for the artistic process, thus extending a concern for the imagination to the province of art.

Although the novel's themes, like its structures, are complex and diverse, the central theme of the primary story of Sutpen deals with love, which the novel seems to define as the ability to see and care for another in his own right. All the characters in the primary story lack this ability and this ubiquitous lack is the ultimate cause of evil in the novel. (pp. 135-36)

However, while this theme of love denied is central to the primary story, in the secondary narrative framework the central theme is the search for truth—the truth about Sutpen's, Bon's, and Henry's complex motivations, and, more generally, the truth about all human motivation…. As the novel progresses, we along with Quentin seem to progress toward the truth. (p. 136)

There is an ironic element to this sense of progress toward the truth, for each successive narration of the story appears to be told by a narrator who is further removed from the original action both in time and in direct involvement…. Such an inverse relationship between distance and truth suggests that a type of detachment, an emotional and artistic distance on events, is needed to discover the truth. (pp. 136-37)

However, there are problems with such a neat thesis. For one thing, the progression is not so clearly defined as it at first might seem…. More importantly, while in some ways we seem closer to the truth as the novel progresses, in others we seem equidistant or further removed from it, although the fact of our removal is subtly, even deceptively, made. The successive versions of the story are increasingly products of the imagination. Therefore, while they are more fully and vividly told, this sense of their reality is in inverse proportion to the actual knowledge the narrators have. (p. 137)

[A radical twist occurs near the end of the novel.] Not content to embellish upon and flesh out the truth upon the skeleton of bare facts, Shreve changes one of these facts. He insists that it was Henry, not Bon, who was wounded in the war…. The radical nature of this statement goes far beyond the one fact it alters. Although we may reject Shreve's logic as applied to this one case, it serves to suggest how tenuous is our hold on even the "facts" of the story. (pp. 138-39)

All the narrators' accounts are distorted by their own interests and needs…. [In Quentin's case] his concern with manhood, impotence, and incest is reflected throughout Absalom, Absalom! and it is not hard to imagine how he receives and in turn creates the various versions of the primary story. From this perspective, Absalom, Absalom! becomes a novel about the narrators rather than about their narratives. (pp. 139-40)

To fully appreciate the problems inherent in this question of narrator interference is to open a Pandora's box on rampant skepticism as to the reliability of any fact and to consign oneself to the impossibility of knowing anything absolutely. To the initial problem of deducing from an incomplete set of mere external facts complex motivations is added the consideration of a myriad of reasons and ways in which each of these facts may have been distorted. To separate the actual occurrence from narrator distortion and addition is an impossible task, for we cannot merely compensate for idiosyncratic reflections of the narrator in his narrative since there always remains the possibility, and in many cases, probability, that some such "reflections" have originated in the story itself and colored the narrator's personality. Thus it is not merely one distorting lens that we are faced with but two opposing, distorting mirrors, each reflecting the distortions of the other. Moreover, because of the series of narrators involved in most of the products we receive, we have a whole series of distorting lenses and mirrors, each conditioned by the distorted version received from an earlier narrator. Even such distortions, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. There is the more egregious problem of outright fabrication…. (pp. 140-41)

From this perspective, while the central theme of the primary story is the inability of any character to truly love another, the central theme of the secondary frames as they reflect that story is the inability of anyone to know the truth. Nor are these two themes of love and truth so separate…. [Both] failures—to love and to know the truth—have the same source, the overbearing ego that imposes and projects upon everything outside itself, itself. (p. 141)

Yet, although such speculations lead to a radical appreciation of the illusive and illusory nature of all truths, the case that Absalom, Absalom! presents for the attainment of truth is not so unilaterally bleak. The contrasting nature of the other imaginative level of truth does not allow so simple a skepticism. In a sense Faulkner seems to be playing a game with the reader. In the search for truth we are continually teased with facsimiles of the truth which, to the degree they seem real, are in fact false, for the meagerness of knowledge about the primary events forces any scrupulously scientific reportage to exist as mere skeletons, ghosts of truth, while the more truly imagined and thus more detailed scenes take on more readily the semblance of reality. What seems real and what is seen to exist in an inverse relationship to one another. (pp. 141-42)

[The] form of the novel, the interaction between narrative frames and primary story, introduces a concern for the imagination and the artistic process…. In fact, in what might seem a largely pessimistic novel, the only source of transcendence comes, not in the primary story through an individual's power to love, but through the secondary frames of the narrators, primarily Quentin and Shreve. Through the power of their imagination they transcend time and self, uniting with each other and with Bon and Henry…. In fact, if there is any sense of love shown in the novel, it is displayed by these two narrators as they work together, their imaginations united.

This link between the moral and esthetic sphere and the identification between imagination and love as transcending factors, so that the esthetic factor, the imagination, becomes a criterion for judging the moral sphere of love, are themes found usually in a more purely esthetic writer such as James or Nabokov. The paradoxes that Absalom, Absalom! inevitably creates because of its form—the paradoxical nature of truth and the necessity of creating esthetic distance to bridge emotional, psychological, and spiritual distances—link it with the involuted, self-conscious fictions of such writers as Nabokov, Barth, Cortazar, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, and Beckett. All are writers who deal with the problems of the relationship between reality and the mind as bridged by the imagination and who use the metaphor of the novel itself to discuss and reflect these relationships. By placing a representation of himself as novelist in his novel, the self-conscious novelist automatically creates a series of mirrors that not only reverberate within the novel but between it and the "objective" external reality of author and audience. In so dispelling the conventions of the novel form that established qualitative distances between the characters, the novelist, and his audience, the self-conscious novel challenges that absolute nature of any reality and investigates the relationship between truth and illusion, not merely as they undercut, but as they contribute to one another.

Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner's most self-conscious novel and by internalizing narrators equivalent to himself he implicitly sets up the metaphor of novel-writing and creates truncated versions of many of the same effects that can be found in the fictions of more fully involuted writers. Like such fictions as Nabokov's Pale Fire or Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, but to a far lesser degree, Absalom, Absalom! is a novel about its own creation. Once the narrators, primarily Quentin-Shreve, are seen as novelists of a sort in the process of writing and rewriting a novel, each time moving a bit closer to the finished product, embracing a truer picture through a purer use of the imagination, all that has been said here becomes a series of statements about the artist's relationship to his art. (pp. 143-44)

Faulkner seems to be suggesting that the ideal artistic relationship between the artist, his material, and his audience is a symbiotic relationship in which each partakes of and is changed by the others and all are simultaneously active and passive. (p. 145)

In the application of this thematic duality of simultaneous creator and audience to Faulkner's relationship to his readers and his novels, it is interesting to note that not only does he force on his readers in many of his novels a greater participatory role than in most traditional novels, but in talking of his relationship to his characters he often places himself in the more passive role. (p. 147)

The involuted novels of Nabokov or Barth invariably describe themselves and in Absalom, Absalom! there are numerous passages that on a second reading can be seen to describe the novel itself. (p. 149)

The double metaphor that Judith Sutpen employs to describe the restrictions each individual encounters both from others and apparently from on high can also be read in this manner:

… you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better….

Both metaphors have their source in art and describe not merely the interaction between characters in the primary story but both the interaction between narrators, each attempting to impose his own patterns on events, and our trouble as readers attempting to separate our own meaning or pattern from the apparent chaos of narrator-imposed patterns. The two levels of the double metaphor imply a double level of patternmaking, not merely by the individual weavers or puppets but by the Puppeteer or the "Ones who make the looms"—that is, the artist-narrators and Faulkner. Judith's problem of asserting her will is thus not merely limited by her contemporaries (the other characters in the primary story) but by those succeeding generations of narrators who impose their own obscuring patterns upon hers. Yet the apparent chaos of this triple imposition of patterns is resolved—although Judith cannot see it—in the larger pattern of the novel (or Loom or Puppet Show) which uses the interwoven patterns of apparent chaos (the interwoven narrative frames) to form a clear, if intricate, meaning. (pp. 150-51)

[An] artist's imaginative patterning replaces outside fate and becomes a comment on the imaginative psychology of the creator of the pattern rather than a statement about an external fate.

The stylized nature of all the primary characters, who never seem to truly emerge as full characters, should also be viewed from this perspective. We are not viewing them directly through Faulkner's eyes but through the intermediary multiple veils of narrator-artists who, quite contrary to Faulkner's own realistic aims, are involved in mythmaking. That the primary characters, although we know far more about them, seem less real than the narrators, is Faulkner's comment on the limits of his narrators' imaginations. Although they create, their inability to fully conceive another person is a comment not on Faulkner's artistry but on Quentin's, Shreve's, and Mr. Compson's shortcomings. (p. 152)