As a fictionist Faulkner was not of any school, nor would he have abetted or blessed the recruitment of one…. In each work, and throughout each, he is his own man; and at his truest and best he has not yet been proved imitable. In various ways at many points he brilliantly intensified and refined effective fictional practices, by apt extensions of known artistic techniques…. [His] accomplishments remain unparalleled; and with the conspicuous tangentiality and cultural dispersions in more recent American fiction, it becomes plain that no one since him draws any such strong bow so closely aimed. What is still to be fully appreciated … is that despite some extravagances and excursions into the baroque, Faulkner stands as the central and preeminent American novelist, and if that fabulous entity the great American novel has already loomed above the horizon, it must be one of his major displays of mastery, such as Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, Go Down, Moses, or the Snopes trilogy. (p. 144)

Realistic regionalist, regional realist—the factors are reciprocal in the substantive and artistic unity of a Faulknerian work. This will be felt if the thrust of his realism and the focus of his regionalism are closely discerned. Their interrelations are complex yet harmonized. Faulkner cannot be given two discrete faces, even though sharply drawn, as a kind of realist and conversely a kind of regionalist…. His realism and regionalism are most distinctly recognizable in their complementary aspects, the local matter broadly conceptualized in a sustained artistic unity. For Faulkner realism is something more than naturalism, and quite the opposite of its extreme forms. His narratives do not move at an automated pace along determinism's constricted path, nor are his protagonists wholly indentured to milieu, no matter how weighty its impingements…. Faulkner feels too nearly and concernedly for his major characters to consider any of them wholly explicable, and yet he ventures to represent them in their conscious active lives as discernibly motivated, and suggests in each some bent toward congruence, so that through successive actions there aggregates the suggestion of a personal trend in which character becomes the more defined to others as also more deeply committed to its intentional self. (pp. 145-46)

In Faulkner's stories a moving force operates through some major characters in their disinterested and magnanimous advocacy of [certain values] overtly in a socioethical context but also at deep subjective levels of their private realizations. Recognized in this aspect, Faulkner's realism can be termed humanistic…. While Faulkner's fictional proponents of humanistic values resolutely combat unprincipled men, they cannot always prevail, nor can they stave off further offenses by such as Flem Snopes and lesser villains; therefore a weighty element in many of the stories is at a subjective level, in the protagonists' frustration, somber doubt, and sometimes outrage under the stress of a resisted temptation to give up. Through their uncertainties, disenchantment, and exacerbations in the struggle against socioethical offenses and incorrigible disorderliness there comes to be heard as a recurrent undertone the artist's own melancholy apprehensions. By some this has been felt as morbidity, but these readers may not have fully assessed Faulkner's realism, with its humanistic imperatives…. His recognition in his fiction that the well-intentioned are often deflected and even defeated and the innocent may be basely betrayed, while moral victories are transient in the flux of ever-changing circumstances only proves the honest percipience of Faulkner's realism and makes more exemplary the persistence of his agents of justice and mercy. (pp. 148-50)

It is with primary reference to character that humanisticrealistic aspects merge in Faulkner's art, through works rising to an enhanced organicism and authenticity beyond the inconsistencies of average behavior and the transient improvisations of expedient men in societal contexts…. Faulkner is objectively-subjectively aware of his characters not only as individual but intrinsically solitary beyond any conforming or gregariousness or even the remedies of love; his narratives comprehend such isolation, yet treat of it not with that autographic mock-pathetic solipsism often exhibited in modern novels, but as under the genuine ordeal of onerous, frustrating, sometimes disastrous human involvement. For Faulkner as oriented artist the existential being always is of primary interest and importance…. (pp. 150-51)

A vitalizing factor in the flow of Faulkner's subjectively realistic narratives enters through recurrence in some characters of recollected awareness, whether out of earlier acts or observations or information, and now returned to in a not merely extended but experientially modified perception and evaluation of them. This strategic use of repetition is acutely illustrative of Faulkner's constant basic concern with existential motion and change…. [Some] of Faulkner's most penetrating effects are to be found in such repetitions, where substance previously communicated, especially as a character's subjective experience, is transposed by further instance into another mode and reorchestrated with a fuller significance…. When read with response to this mode of a ranging subjectivity, Faulkner becomes a most absorbing storyteller, paradoxically the more so by his repetitions, in which matter is modified within the character's further realizations under changed circumstances, and this is to be valued not only in itself for its honestly realistic relativism, but in the artist's tactical use of it in the total narrative structure. Such a basic progressional-consequential setting-forth is of course the plain main way of all fiction; Faulkner's unique, dynamically objective-subjective use of it show genius at its height. (pp. 154-55)

Faulkner the humanistic realist is never sensational. He does not embroider events for their separately arresting effects, and while aspects of his stories are startling and in some degree shocking, yet the more intense this is, the more pervading is the created sense, in a many-toned, subjectively-attuned composition, that the issue is one of basic values. Concurrently there is always Faulkner's strategic narrative momentum, which does not dwell unduly upon event in itself …, but draws action into the modulations of consequence as realized and ethically evaluated by at least some of its enactors. His practice seems a careful avoidance of preoccupation with mere incidents, lest they overshadow the realities of a continuum…. Not just plotted event …, but conception and embodiment of such a deepening fluidity of experience, conveyed primarily through a directly represented awareness in his characters, is at the heart of Faulkner's humanistic realism, and is what his dramaturgically apt composition is designed to undergird.

It is only as seen in the unified functioning of such complementary factors that Faulkner's realism can be adequately estimated. Within the conceptualized and imaginatively rendered unity of a Faulkner novel the abstracting of verities increasingly apprehended by the working consciousness of protagonists is in an intuitive and responsive relationship with reality. Here the subjective and the societal are interactive and indeed symbiotic…. [Relativism] becomes dynamic in narrative actions, since it sharpens delineation of any human life in the endured fluxions that are its cumulative lot, and in particular makes fully veritable a conveyance of the matter through the turbulent counterpoint of a protagonist's objective-subjective experience. Herein Faulkner's searching realism is unflinching in its admission that grave threats to humanistic values persist…. (pp. 159-61)

[For] Faulkner as humanistic realist, men individually are the undependable but essential and possibly effective agents of melioration and can most fully realize themselves within such orientations. This is of course not unique in Faulkner, but he stands supreme in modern American fiction through the primacy and potency he gives this fundamental view. (p. 161)

Faulkner as fictionist concerns himself with stresses, frustrations, and miscarriages even under the law and more often under the looser rule of custom, yet he postulates that while implemental conventions and institutions as well as personal attitudes ask for reassessment situationally, certain value-concepts though pragmaticaaly arrived at have proved abidingly applicable and hence imperative whatever the pains. Faulkner discovers this again and again as an active kind of folk knowledge among common people tempered in the brunt of their beset lives, and he finds it equally operative among men and women whose good fortune imposes a strict sense of obligation. (p. 162)

The declared "Sole Owner & Proprietor" of that variously peopled and fabled "Yoknapatawpha Co., Mississippi" is one of the greatest of regionalists and irresistibly solicits consideration as such, yet as a rigorous realist. Moreover, in the light of his relativistic humanism and his corresponding attention to his characters' subjectivity as the way of close approach to theme and a medium of the matter's full imaginative realization his regionalism may be termed romantic in the most central and persistent sense of the term. (p. 163)

It would be erroneous to characterize Faulkner as self-in-dulgent in any aspect of his art…. Even when his style is copious it is to a point and of a calculated weight; and his narrative structures however complex are not loosely rambling but of proportionate and effective design, entirely to serve his brooding reflectiveness even in proximity to a throng of characters in a flood of events.

Faulkner not only illustrated as transcendental reality that one can go venturing in one's own back yard, he showed that what a fictionist has seen most of he may be able to see into most deeply…. (pp. 164-65)

The broad dimensions of Faulkner's genius are to be estimated both from the magnitude and substantiality of his conceivings of regional subjects and from his commensurate imaginative penetration into a continuum of events given their coloration through characters involved by their awareness as well as in their actions. Thus his regionalism, humanistically realistic, goes deeper than the data of naturalism; thus his representations of subjectivity, going beyond that of an isolate introverted life, show involvement in matters of wide relevance and personal interrelation, and more than single import. Not that the narrative may not include characters' states of mind concealed from all but the reader, but those transpire in a context of circumstances; these are contributively particularized by the subjective responses to them, an interaction that epitomizes Faulkner's basic idiosyncratic fictional mode. In this fusion of scope and subjectivity his fictional art achieves an equilibrium and a steadily operative reciprocation, with a suggested symmetry, a uniquely potent aesthetic effect. It is indefinable, and its factors are scarcely to be analyzed, but it is there, the characteristic Faulknerian tone, an extraordinary achievement in the craft of fiction, that distinctive resonance which in some novels and in portions of others may seem comparable to the sostenuto of a perfected lyric poem or an unintermitted musical composition. (pp. 167-68)

Though racial interrelations constituted a major and in some ways central theme in Faulkner's regionally focused fiction, that was not his whole story. Tensions arising from racial antipathies and anxieties may have widest societal significance, and he seems to be probing most deeply when it comes to that, but there are other kinds of conflict on less extended grounds to which he gives as much intensity…. The socioeconomic and psychological stratifications in the South as typified in Yoknapatawpha County are not only a matter of race but of antecedents and ongoing tendencies and consequent distinctions in the whole society, within the perspectives of regional history. Yet quite possibly an adequate appreciation of Faulkner's works was retarded, perhaps even impeded for a while by the emphasis some critics put upon considering it a kind of epic in many episodes and books, even a saga of the South…. [Throughout] the oeuvre from novel to novel there are great differences in magnitude, narrative structure, and mode; and this may well be noted not only as evidence of a profuse imagination but also as a passion at that particular point for its own focus and concentration of effect. It seems especially the characteristic of his artistic temperament to be susceptible to absorbing commitments. With each work the artist appears to have given himself completely during the process of its creation, bent upon the most intense realization of its potentials. No doubt such absorption in the singular task and its opportunities was made easier by a continuing familiarity with regional materials, but the perfected autonomy in each novel as a work of art is closer to the essence of the Faulknerian achievement than the sense of locale or of recurring racial tensions, and a proof of the matter is that when an already known character enters into yet another narrative action he or she is absorbed into it, depending on no credentials from another country, and manifesting a fresh aspect in his new surroundings. This, however, is not by subordination of identity, but in fresh instancing of the subjective element as the pervading factor imaginatively uniting a humanistic reality and a romantic regionalism. (pp. 173-74)

Faulkner's works are each so particularly formed, colored, and consummated that he continues to defy the sort of imitation which can produce a school…. What was characteristic that could be an influence (in addition to a brilliant example of the regional transmuted into dynamically representative art) was his alertness to the forceful centrality of the subjective element, as he had found it in the strongest fiction of his times, and as he had gone along with this trend but to his own ends, with rapidly acquired skills, through adaptations less conspicuously technical than in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Therein he became more various, with a greater tonal range even if in less extensive subject matter and with less sophistication than James…. Faulkner was also more originative than Conrad, whom nevertheless he resembles greatly as a spirit, a temperament that must have some place in the work, though Faulkner's felt infiltrations, while more forceful, are less frankly personal. (pp. 218-19)

In Faulkner's narrative art a progressive modulation operates regulatively within the mingled flow of objective-subjective matter. Such gradations result in a more complex texture than that in pure stream-of-consciousness narration or in the typical uses of a central intelligence, whether first- or third-person. Both these modes, as well as overt omniscient narration, enter into Faulkner's practice; the difference is that often they are refracted from a formal, sustained employment of one or the other into transitory uses in a complexity that fluctuantly combines modifications, sometimes of them all, always with variances between objective-subjective extremes. Faulkner is not unique in this, but he was an independent pioneer in such synthesizing of representational modes within a unitary fictional narrative, and what is extraordinary is the intensity of his achieved effects, combining a fluidity of subjective penetration and an enhanced momentum…. Faulkner in his most characteristic bent left still further behind the easiness of a preempted and constantly presiding authorial omniscience, to achieve instead an almost Flaubertian aloofness. Even when narration is in first person it is the verified player speaking; and the widely proved advantage of such distancing in modern fictional art is that the characters, left on their own whatever the mode of expression given them, are made to stand forth and represent themselves in deeds, words, and states of inner being, as these are the immediate passing aspects of their roles…. By their involved, responsive, and projective imaginations Faulkner's protagonists become impressionistic poets of situation and involvement…. (pp. 220-21)

Faulkner has followed the main way of much of [modern English and American fiction at its most serious levels]. He is not an eccentric artist; he does not differ essentially from those in the fertile modern trend that derived its aesthetics of fiction, including control of point of view and narrative use of subjectivity, primarily from James and Conrad, and produced a remarkably various yet instrumentally conventionalized flowering in Faulkner's own time. Faulkner's distinction, which requires that he be named among the most distinguished of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, is not in a difference from the most significant trends in fiction; rather it is in his superlative accomplishment, in its scope, grasp, vigor, and intuitive penetration, and the sheer virtuosity of his greatest compositions. (pp. 257-58)

That Faulkner's closely centralized regionalism was not an opportunistically chosen fixed stance is apparent not only in his fictional excursions from native ground but in the thematic range of his Yoknapatawphan novels themselves as unique artistic autonomies. (p. 270)

Regionalism provided the rich substance and fluent modes of Faulkner's work, but the profound idiom of his communications is a humanistic realism…. While naturalism in fiction is not without objective grasp in its constancy to profuse materials, in this aspect Faulkner's regionalism, though forcefully authentic, was more selective of detail, to further ends. For him emphasis by comparative limitation of substance and selective ordering of narration itself served to implement a dynamic realism stressing what in the local instance also suggests the more widely typical. Thereby as a regionalist whose developing concepts … had feeding roots which ran close and deep in an immediate acquaintance, his fictions transcended entirely the dimensions of typical naturalism. (pp. 271-72)

Under Faulkner's synthesis of regionalism and realism what his technical accomplishment most differed from was not a simple objective naturalistic fiction but its opposite, stream-of-consciousness narration, with its narrowed exclusive subjectivity along a more random and desultory way, with a greater self-preoccupation and less involvement, in a diminution of dramatic tensions. The very life of each of Faulkner's greatest fictional works is in its lives figured as interpersonally situated, through which there fluctuantly interpenetrates a variable fusion of forces, objective-subjective, communal and individual, overt events and private responses tinged with relevant individual concern. Regionalism sharpens issue through its situational immediacy in the pressures of milieu, and thus frames the singular qualities of individual responses; correspondingly through that medium a humanistic realism makes the local representative and further sanctions its specificity. In this totality the private awareness of Faulkner's characters is shown moving through attitude into action, and such purposeful consciousness implies subjective configurations, the gestalts of organismic thought and feeling. Presumably out of comparable imaginative awareness and response there may have loomed more largely the cloudy silhouettes of not impossible fictional entities for this greatly gifted artist to arrest and perfect into the totalities of inclusive concept and aesthetically containing form. This apparently he had proved as the one thing needful for himself, given the fruitful juncture of regionalism and humanistic realism in an achieved objective-subjective juncture and functioning. That unity, ultimately validated in the holistic work of art itself, could have increasingly stimulated him to the pure sorcery, through style and structure, which liberated his genius and enabled consummate masterpieces. (pp. 273-74)