The unusual narrative technique Walker uses in Possessing the Secret of Joy reveals a debt to Faulkner. In The Sound and the Fury (1929), three narrators tell the story in internal monologues with no authorial comment and with a jumbled time sequence. An interesting note is that both novels also contain a retarded narrator: Benji in Faulkner's novel and Benny in Walker's. But the novel of Faulkner's that most seems like a precedent to Walker's is As I Lay Dying (1930).

Faulkner's novel has a highly segmented narrative. His novel is distinctive in that some narratives are only a line or two long. The famous example is Vardaman's "My mother is a fish."

Some of Walker's narrators speak only a few lines as well. The narratives are not always in chronological order in either novel, and the narratives are not numbered, which further suggests that both novelists are...