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...