Although The Reivers shares characters with other works, notably Boon, who also appears in Go Down, Moses (1942) and other stories, this is Faulkner's only novel that is consistently comic in tone and form. Still, the situations and techniques he uses here are characteristic of his work almost from the beginning. Late in his career, he had used the tall tale extensively in the Snopes novels, The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), but the snowballing absurdity that is typical of his tall tales can be traced back at least as far as The Sound and the Fury (1929), for example, when Jason Compson, Jr. chases his niece and her lover around the Mississippi countryside to recover stolen money she has taken from him.

Another novel that seems especially close to this one is Intruder in the Dust (1948), which shows an adolescent coming of age in his efforts...