When generalized structurally, these stories become similar with respect to selected characteristics.

In each of the stories the existence of the character is in question.  

The main characters face physical death as well as intellectual failure.  

The narration of the story is from the main character's point of view: no story before his birth and none after his death.  

The existence of the character depends on the character rejecting some part of the ritual agenda of his culture.  

The moments in the narrative are memories of choice, ritual reenactment of past events, the reverberating memory.  

In rejecting part of the ritual agenda, he risks his life.  

Quentin Compson remembers his aristocratic roots as recalled by his aunt Rosa.  

Quentin’s family provides for Quentin’s Harvard education. Rosa remembers their former opulence.  

Quentin’s sister, Caddy (who appears in Sound and Fury), is at least as distant from the Old South as Quentin. She does not help him.

To Quentin, the memories are of severe financial and emotional austerity as his ancestors strove to preserve what shreds of power they had left after the Civil War.

Quentin commits suicide in Sound and Fury.

The ritual of narrative itself is established in all of Faulkner's memory stories.  Aunt Rosa tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, preserving the story-telling tradition.  She goes about the telling of the story in a certain way, 

Humans are the narrating animal.  

Much of the travel seems ritual.  The return of Thomas Sutpens sons was repeated many times, often with additional detail, which creates a timeless effect as if the event continued forever.  Ritual demonstrations of manhood.  

Tom Wakefield remembers his aristocratic roots as recalled by his mother, Amanda Wakefield.

Tom provides for his sister, Laura, and his mother. His mother remembers her former opulence.

His mother and sister try to prevent Tom from forgetting. Tom’s sister’s remembrance is more general, less historic, because she does not actually remember her mother in the old days but does see how important they are to her mother and in keeping the family together.

To Tom, the memories are a trap designed to cage him at home, to chain him to his neurotic mother and sister.

Tom runs away to the merchant marine, leaving his mother and sister in greater poverty, yet remembers them in his travels.

Rituals of the glass menagerie itself, gentleman caller, mom's wake-up call, dinner, Tom's work.  Mom's work.  Going to the movies.  

Stephen Dedalus remembers classical scholarship and Catholic ritual as told to him by Jesuit priests. 

Stephen’s family try to remember their former opulence while provides for Stephen’s education. 

Stephen has a distant relationship with all members of his family. He lives apart from them at school.  

To Stephen, the Jesuit memories are of self-sacrifice, of denial of pleasure, denial even of choice apart from serving the order.

Stephen rejects the role of priest and becomes a writer.

Stephen performs all the rituals of the boarding school, church, and brothel.  Additionally, he may assume the rituals of the priesthood.  

Does Franz remember? Does he have a vision of the past?

Franz provides for his family, who remember their earlier opulence.

After his metamorphosis, Franz’s sister provides for Franz for a while. His family eventually hates him.  His sister later.  

Franz does not confront the memories of his family. He becomes even more distant from them.

Franz dies.

Work is ritualized, as are family relationships, all of which become unbearably oppressive.  

The generation of ritual is a digestive process.  There is nothing left of the originating event.  

In all the stories, the character is distanced from that which the other characters remember. This creates the possibility of story, edition of the story, and a constructed romanticism.  It suggests contrast and irony.  

In all the stories, except Franz, who is not told what to remember, the characters encounter the tale of the remembered event with foreboding.

The characters’ existence, even if deprecated, depends upon the remembrance. It is in relation to the remembered event that the character decides what to do.

While the characters can repeatedly remember the decline and fall, the fall itself is irreversible. The Indians will not return to Yoknapotawpha County, the murdered will not come back to life, the childless spinster will not bear children and continue the family. We are seeing the literary equivalent of thermodynamic entropy, the dissipation of order, the deconcentration of energy, the heat-death of a civilization, and the resulting deterioration of the justification for living. Quentin Compson kills himself; Tom Wakefield abandons his impoverished family; Franz turns into an insect and dies; only Stephen Dedalus opens. 

In our own time, the abandonment of destiny creates an insatiable craving for origin and authenticity.

Because it is repeated and referred to, ritual creates its own existent.  

In both stories:

• The young man is the sole support of his family.  
• The young man is not appreciated by the family.  
• The young man is close to  his sister.  
• The young man’s distance from his family increases his distance, drives him further away from those who need his support.  
• The young man ceases to support his family.  
• The young man changes catastrophically.. 
• Story is from the point of view of the young man.  

In Faulkner, someone maintains the memory, centered around the mansion. A central figure demands the tacit respect due to the stoic individual, generates the drama, keeps the house. Another character assumes a parasitic existence, writes the book, and lives consciously off the choices of the ancestors.

The central character emerges almost out of the earth, as always having been there and projecting the always will be.  Even in the ritual recitation of the ancestry of the central characters, they become rooted to the earth, bound by the story itself.  

Desire exists in the narration only as the originating event. The story is the aftermath of the attempt to reach for the object of desire and the failure to attain the ideal in spite of the strength and persistence of the character. 

Stylistically, Faulkner cleaves away the accumulating falsehoods in the imagination of the reader, leaving only the residue of choice, devoid of expectation, abandoning sentiment, pleasure, moral, and self, left standing utterly alone, reverberation of memory, all there really is to live on.

The diversity of actual existence, which consists of being alone together, gives the faulknerian epic its width. It provides for the possibility of the achievement of existence, total success depending on each individual, each linked in support, each is pillar of what actually happens, each no less critical.

There's nothing better to do than hold up the sky, stubbornly insisting on each moment like Atlas given a crumbling world to hold.

Faulkner’s Quentin Compson is transfixed by the stories, remembering the early grandeur while facing the miserable residue that is his actual heritage.

None of Faulkner’s characters are insiders but Quentin is the most outside of them all. He moves to the frozen north while his family and friends stay in Mississippi or New Orleans. Memphis is as far north as anyone dares to go. He attends Harvard while the rest have little schooling. Some go to the University of Mississippi. Despite being born into a long-established family, the characters seem to have just got here, not certain if the should stay, and like the old unkempt houses that stand empty, will not remain here.  The challenge is to be remembered.  Hell is to be forgotten.  

His family is dispersed and incapable of any kind of mutual support, apart from that which keeps him in school. Their existence was always tied to that of the Sutpens anyway, especially Thomas, that Indian-swindling, slave-driving pioneer whose mansion promised grandeur, whose stark and austere promise in words was delivered to the keepers of memory. Quentin’s generation is nothing to the giants that came before.

Faulkner's relationship to his characters, however thickly disguised, is the tacit respect due to the stoic individual, who generates the drama, who keeps the house, whose ultimate parasite writes the book or even reads it, all living cheap off the distant choice. 

There's nothing better to do than hold up the sky, insisting each moment like Atlas given a crumbling world to hold. 

Those who ignore the load are its shop-keepers, its writers, its whores. 

In Absolom, Absolom Thomas Sutpen is the beam of the edifice of the novel.  He is an original pioneer, not the noble pioneer, but the Indian-swindling, slave-driving, plantation-building, womanizing pioneer, ruthless, cruel, determined, austere, taking no pleasure from nor offering any reason for his actions.  He is detestable but never detested, never loved, but omnipresent. 

Duty leaves the characters starved of love with a story to remember, a reason to stay on the land.  Without the story, characters wander off into the vast, all-receiving chaos. 

Stephen Dedalus is devoted to himself. His life is about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Even his piety is about avoiding the horrors of Hell or embracing the honors of the priesthood. He is self-referential, amoral, and apolitical.

In contrast to Tom Wakefield, Quentin Compson, or Franz, Stephen Dedalus goes deeper into the illusion, at one point imagining himself as an honored and powerful priest, an agent of the old myth drawn by destiny. However, he abandons the possibility of having a fundamental external reference in the Church. In fact he trades away honor, power, reputation, money, marriage and all institutions that compromise his self with community. He will devote himself to art.  

Tom Wakefield’s mother repeatedly accuses Tom of selfishness. She wants him to stay home and support the family until Laura gets married to a husband who will take over Tom’s financial responsibilities.

He eventually decides to free himself of the futile attempt. He abandons his family because he has lost hope in his sister’s ability to engage the social world and because of his mother’s increasingly shrill and desperate fear that he will leave.

However, the physical abandonment does not kill his memory. He still must remember, however indirectly, his vanishingly small portion of the remains of the civilization of the Old South.

Kafka’s Franz is isolated from his family by the job that he must perform in order to support his ungrateful family. He becomes an outsider to his family.

His distance becomes so vast that he becomes the hated other, which prevents him from supporting those who depend on him.

The postmodern can successfully dismiss the Church, the Old South, and the nuclear family and everything else, really, as illusions. A pack of lies.  

We can say that there is nothing of substance.

We can say there is only faith in substance, which is only motion.

The remembrance (or the denial) of the grand unified hallucination of human glory, the fabulous junk of tradition, is the background of the existential character dismally contemplating the wreckage of the fable.

To Faulkner and Williams, it was the civilization of the Old South, diseased and deceased but nonetheless scavenged by stubborn romanticist for a crumb to feed his hunger for existence.

For Kafka, it was not about the death of illusion but about the meager residual reality, the character’s immobilization in the here and now faced with the insupportable conceits of humanity.

For Joyce, it was the seizing of the self by the self and for the self that makes the life of the artist possible.

Religion, the imagined sweeping unities of historicism, and scientism, cosmic parents providing over-arching Minds, invisible and coy, represented by authoritarian human agents, sit upon a pedestal of high civilization in whose temples one might be permitted a glimpse of the eternal and find a place to rest your tiny form.

Albert Camus’s The Fall: The character contemplates the wreckage of his expectations.

Arther Miller’s After the Fall: In the first act, the main character envisions triumph in his life. In the second, he contemplates the wreckage.

In Heinrich Bohl's The Clown, after the fall of Nazi Germany, the main character wishes to live in the real world but his lover wishes for myth. 

The process is similar to outlining a topic for exposition but specializes in the type of features to be focused upon.

The features come from the work itself and not from the researcher’s ideas about the work or anything else.

Identify and describe features within in each story

Begin to include rules for identification and extraction

Exclude one’s own theories and opinions..

Generalize the description of features within each story to enhance similarity between stories without compromising the descriptions.

Within each story…

Flat

Descending

Ascending

Repetitions and cycles

Random, unpredictable.

Issue the unifying statements referring to your research.