Keywords

Spoken by a character to pause or slow down narration by another character so s/he can process the significance or take over the narration. The classic examples are from ABSALOM, but it's a signature verbal formula across Faulkner. JW

Any moment when everyone or many people in a place know something to be true, but they pretend not to know it. For example, everyone knows Linda is not Flem's child, but pretends to not know, just as everyone pretends John Powell brings his gun to work but people pretend he does not. JB

The action or process of fixing or being fixed. For instance, In AA!, characters find themselves fixed in place, unable to move beyond something either spatially or conceptually. JC

For when two characters (usually black and white) sleep in the same bed; Benjy with Luster in S&F, Lucas and Henry in GDM, etc. -JBP

Added to refer to Faulkner's reference in at least two texts to 1833, "the year the stars fell" (in Appendix and in Go Down, Moses). Seems to refer to an actual historical event of a massive meteor shower that year which many interpreted as an omen, possibly even of end of times. Here is one article referencing the event: https://www.ancestry.com/contextux/historicalinsights/night-stars-fell-m.... JBP

A moment in a character's story when something happens that changes the arc of his or her life. For example, when in Absalom! Thomas Sutpen is turned away from the front door of that Tidewater plantation. Or in The Mansion, when Houston tells Mink Snopes he still owes the one dollar "pound fee" (28). SR

When Faulkner refers to or re-writes an event more than once inside a single text, for example the four references to Caddy's muddy drawers in Benjy and Quentin's sections of The Sound and the Fury. SR