In the following essay, Gray examines how Welty has used William Faulkner's style of repetition and interweaving lives within Losing Battles, and discusses how her characters use talking and storytelling to remain connected to each other and to reality.

"Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished," observes Quentin Compson famously in Absalom, Absalom!

Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe
on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving
on spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical
water-cord to the next pool which the first pool
feeds has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain
a different temperature of water, a different molecularity
of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a
different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn't
matter: that pebble's watery echo whose fall it did
not even see moves across its surface too at the original
ripple-space, to the...