What is Faulkner's central idea about time?
Time, you see, it ain't a river flowing one way, carrying everything off to some sterile future. It's more like a swamp, or a tangled thicket. The past is never dead. It's not even past. It’s here, now, in the memory, in the blood, in the very soil. When I write of the Sutpens in 'Absalom, Absalom!', or the Compsons in 'The Sound and the Fury,' I'm not just recounting old events. I'm showing how those events echo, how they warp and twist and continue to inflict themselves on the present. The choices made by those long gone, they are still being lived out by their descendants. It's a kind of inescapable continuum, a cyclical, almost physical presence that shapes the lives of men and women in the here and now.
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