 Simon's use of self-consciously long sentences (often stretching across many pages and with parentheses sometimes interrupting a clause which is only completed pages later) can be seen to reference Proust's style, and Simon moreover makes use of certain Proustian settings (in "La Route des Flandres", for example, the narrator's captain de Reixach is shot by a sniper concealed behind a hawthorn hedge or "haie d'aubépines", a reference to the meeting between Gilberte and the narrator across a hawthorn hedge in Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu").The Faulknerian influence is evident in the novels' extensive use of a fractured timeline with frequent and potentially disorienting analepsis (moments of chronological discontinuity), and of an extreme form of free indirect speech in which narrative voices (often unidentified) and streams of consciousness bleed into the words of the narrator.The ghost of Faulkner looms particularly large in 1989's "L'Acacia", which uses a number of non-sequential calendar dates covering a wide chronological period in lieu of chapter headings, a device borrowed from Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury".