The constant movement of time is the most significant pattern in the complex texture of the novels of William Faulkner and Marcel Proust. Both authors focus on the continuity of past and present as a central theme, and use the temporal attitudes of their intellectual protagonists as a means of characterization, ultimately arriving at dissimilar conclusions concerning their characters' ability to survive. Whereas Marcel is portrayed in a successful effort to recall the actions of the past through the use of memory and the discovery of a metaphoric method, Faulkner's isolated intellectuals ultimately fail in their effort to understand the discontinuity between past and present. The quest which enthralls both Faulkner and Proust is the effort to discover elements of timelessness in the self and in experience. In the literary portraits of Marcel and of Faulkner's intellectual figures, they describe the protagonists' quests for unity of being and continuity of time within the framework of past, present, and future. With their philosophical focus on time as an eternal phenomenon which man attempts to survive through forms of transcendence, the Proustian and Faulknerian perspectives are remarkably parallel. While using several of the same aesthetic techniques, however, the two authors present their fictional interpretations of man's effort to transcend the passage of time in completely different manners. With his imagination focused on the present, and the belief that he experiences life's reality through the repetition of sensation, Marcel realizes that recurring sensation can restore his original sense of being, fusing past and present into one. Reality is thus revealed in arrested moments of memory that Marcel can then aesthetically reproduce in art, hoping that his writing will have the same effect of restoration of being for the reader. With imaginations held captive by the past, Faulkner's intellectuals believe that life's only reality is to be found in the recreation of their idealistic obsessions from a time long ago. Whereas Proust employs the aesthetic device of arrested moments and recurrent sensation as Marcel's artistic means of transcending time, Faulkner uses the arrested moments of his intellectual protagonists as an aesthetic device to reveal the static, spatially frozen quality of time created from an emotional impasse caused by the outraging of their ideals. Through use of the identical aesthetic device of the arrested moment, which Proust expands to be all encompassing and Faulkner contracts to be static and rigid, both writers nevertheless emerge with a philosophical emphasis on man's constant need for restoration of being, which represents life itself. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UMI