Comparative Notes

It was clear to me that William Faulkner was influenced by James Joyce when he wrote the short story, “Ad Astra,” about ten years after the publication of Ulysses. In the story, six American soldiers go drinking on a break from fighting in the trenches on the Western Front during World War I. The structure, characters, and many of the descriptions parallel those found in Chapter One of Joyce’s novel:

Joyce’s choice of setting is romantic in its abstraction-- It’s set in a tower on the beach. William Faulkner also sets his story somewhat ambiguously. His American soldiers wear British uniforms as they drive to a club. Why a tower? Why British uniforms?

Yet the answers to these questions aren’t as important as the characters’ interactions in these meditations on human isolation. Many authors-- and directors, for that matter-- will place characters in a strange context in order to connote the absurdity of their habits.

Neither the college students in the tower nor the soldiers in the Jeep communicate in any way. They attempt to express themselves, but all of their exchanges are abrupt, brief, and incomplete. However, the inner lives of the characters are portrayed with richness. Joyce uses the stream of consciousness to reveal his characters’ struggles and philosophies, Faulkner allows his characters to reveal their thoughts in conversation.

Both works suggest an abyss that represents the richness and variety of human perceptions-- In Ulysses, it is represented by the sea; in “Ad Astra” by the subadar as he discusses the approaching end of World War I.

“’But soon it will clear away,’ he said. ‘This effluvium of hatred and of words. We are like men trying to move in water, with
held breath watching our terrific and infinitesimal limbs, watching one another’s terrific stasis without touch, without
contact, robbed of all save the impotence and the need.’”

This is represented in the structure of both works, which waft from dialogue to Faulkner’s philosophical narrative or Joyce’s stream of consciousness and back again. There is little action in either work, which address the variance in our modes of being, and the way in which that isolates us.