The Sound and the Fury

Written immediately after — same multiple-narrator structure, same Yoknapatawpha County, darker comedy and even more extreme formal experiment

The direct predecessor — Faulkner absorbed Joyce's stream-of-consciousness innovations and pushed them further into the American vernacular

Morrison's formal debt to Faulkner is explicit — shattered chronology, multiple perspectives, the past as permanent present, trauma that cannot be processed linearly

Same Yoknapatawpha territory — Faulkner's treatment of race becomes more central and more violent, Joe Christmas as the outsider the South destroys

Quentin Compson reappears as narrator — the unfinished business of The Sound and the Fury is taken up and expanded into the full history of Southern self-destruction

Published four years earlier — same modernist moment, opposite formal approach. Where Fitzgerald controls his beauty, Faulkner lets his narrative collapse under the weight of what it contains.