Novels like ""The Sound and the Fury"" and ""Absalom, Absalom!"" are often thought of as canonical modernist texts antagonistic to traditional notions of plot and storytelling. Blair Labatt, however, argues that Faulkner's fiction, regardless of its modernist gestures, is filled and driven by sophisticated manifestations of plot - willed challenges, structural targets, gambits, designs, and battles - a language of competition and conflict and a syntax of events.