For Faulkner, the repercussive is more central than the original blow. What counts is not cause, but effect. Not action, but perception and memory. Not truth, but narrative. Faulkner's form highlights the logic of subtraction, simplification, and omission on which most narrative depend.
Most narratives subtract multiple viewpoints, simplify motives, or omit contradictory information.
Faulkner's by contrast, draws attention to narrative gaps, multiples perspectives, and complicates, rather than refines, the narrative structures that we often use to make sense of our lives. The way Faulkner repeats and repeats psychological motifs ground by a traumatic incident or fixed ideas makes his characters not so much two-dimensional as obsessive. Some representations, if not transcendent, have much more weight than others. If they are not determinative, they are at least definitive.