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.
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