ABSTRACT
Faulkner's best novels analyze the often man-made separations between ideal and reality, need and satisfaction, hope and encounter. Faulkner depicts life as an uneasy striving towards ever-receding goals, an oscillation between reach and attainment whose endless conflict, not any a priori essence, creates man's "endurance" and will to live on. Notoriously erratic, Faulkner's early search for new hypotheses and arguments had seemed to some erroneous from the start. Yet it gains power and credibility exactly through the risks that it takes. Freed as he was of time, he was a far more definite presence in the room than the two of them cemented by deafness to a dead time and drawn thin by the slow attenuation of days. The play of absence and presence takes several forms. On the historical level, the effects of the Civil War have destroyed what seems a purer, more powerful past.
