Analysis Of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Faulkner’s Description of Dewey Dell in As I Lay Dying William Faulkner’s phrasing, point of view, and grammar in his polyphonic novel, As I Lay Dying, strategically employs the miserably pessimistic yet juvenile voice of Dewey Dell to characterize her as the novel’s naïve victim. The only surviving female in the Bundren family, Faulkner presents the hardships that Dewey Dell must endure. In addition, as an uneducated girl with no guidance, Dewey Dell experiences an uncertainty in many issues that arise in her life.

Most works of literature often use events and objects to display a deeper meaning to the current situation. In As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, there are many references that connect the Bundren family to mythological, Biblical, and classical allusions. Faulkner’s use of various types of allusions emphasizes the characters’ behavior and relationship to each other.

As I Lay Dying is a novel by William Faulkner that chronicles the journey of the Bundren family (Anse, Dewey Dell, Darl, Jewel, Cash, and Vardaman) to bury their recently deceased mother, Addie, in Jefferson. Throughout As I Lay Dying, Faulkner treats Darl as the de-facto narrator of the novel, endowing Darl with the most passages in the novel and endowing him with an omniscient perspective of the events chronicled in the book. Jewel, however, gets the opposite treatment from Faulkner; he only is designated one passage in the entire book and is known for being self-centered and close-minded. In terms of the motivation of traveling to Jefferson, Darl has none, while Jewel’s sole purpose is to give Addie a proper burial. By the end of the novel,

As I Lay Dying, a novel written by William Faulkner, describes the journey that the Bundren family makes to bury their mother. Along the trip Mrs. Bundren passes away and leaves behind her 5 kids and husband. The kids all have their own serious issues, and their father, Anse, is too self absorbed to care. The children transport their mother, and the hatred they have towards one another builds up and becomes exposed. Throughout the novel, Faulkner asserts that families need an understanding of love in order to form successful relationships and meaningful bonds.

His family wasfinancially stable, but his father, Murry, was an alcoholic. Their family dinners were done silentand Murry unexpectedly left town for a couple of days and then came back. Faulkner’s mother,Maud, was an independent, hardheaded woman. Murry and Maud fought really often. WilliamFaulkner’s books explore family dynamics, race, gender, and social class. Faulkner was somewhat misfit. It is said that he used to invent stories about himself. (“As I Lay Dying Analysis”).As I Lay Dying was a required to read in Pulaski County High School, a high school inSomerset, Kentucky as a reading assignment in an advanced English class. The book waschallenged because the book contains profanity and a part about masturbation. School boardmembers were concerned for the book’s language and dialect. Central High School in Loisville,Kentucky decided to ban the book for profanity and confusion on the existence of God (“Bannedand/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20thCentury”). Some of the bans were quickly reversed, but some remained banned (Baldassarro,“As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner”). “Then I would wait until they all went to sleep so I could lie with my shirt-tail up,hearing them asleep, feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowingupon my parts and wondering if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too, had been doing itperhaps for

    Analyzing character in a Faulkner novel is like trying to reach the bottom of a bottomless pit because Faulkner's characters often lack ration, speak in telegraphed stream-of-consciousness, and rarely if ever lend themselves to ready analysis.  This is particularly true in As I Lay Dying, a novel of a fragmented and dysfunctional family told through fragmented chapters.  Each character reveals their perspective in different chapters, but the perspectives are true to life in that though they all reveal information

Just finished “As I lay Dying”. I had a love hate relationship with this novel. As the Bundern’s family traveled farther in their journey, the events became difficult for me to read. The family could not catch a break and Faulkner never really made it clear they deserved to.

As I Lay Dying covers the story of a family as they journey to bury the mother, Addie, in her hometown after her death. They all go through the same situations but each experience different emotions and thoughts. They express these through the language they use. What each character says as well as how he/she says it lets the reader see the

The author of As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, really contributes to the aspects of literature through his ability to tell a seemingly incredible story through only the “stream-of-consciousness” technique. Faulkner takes his insight beyond the piece, through other’s views and thoughts. Although the characters might be acting differently upon each subject or handling each action in opposite ways, the tone and theme that he uses really brings the whole piece to a perfect balance. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner displays contradicting elements through the reactions of the family members towards the mother’s death with the use of dialogue, tone, imagery, and internal conflict.

In the novel As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner introduces the Bundren family, consisting of Anse Bundren and his children Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman, as they embark on a quest to bury their late mother, Addie Bundren, in the nearby town of Jefferson. Although some may see this novel as being optimistic, it can be seen through the fates of the characters that it actually has a pessimistic outlook.

William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying is a series of interior monologues told in the perspective of fifteen narrators. While most of the narrators are on a journey together with a common purpose to bury Addie Bundren, as the story unfolds through each narrator’s unique perspective, each one’s hidden agenda and self-interest is exposed. The author can achieve a greater depth of individual character development through each narrator’s own voice. Faulkner’s literary approach of using multiple voices to tell the story, which is itself fractured, underscores the characters lack of unity.

In “As I Lay Dying”, by William Faulkner, he incorporates the use of Biblical allusions and other works of literature along the lines of “The Odyssey”. Faulkner’s association with the two novels is that he wants to present the important take on the idea of Man’s spiritual journey. In this case, in “As I lay Dying” it would be the journey that the Bundrens take to get Addie to New Hope, and in “The Odyssey”, Odysseus’s journey is traveling back home from the Trojan war. Faulkner chooses to relate The Odyssey and As I Lay dying, because they both incorporate Biblical references.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (changed from the original spelling Falkner) was an American novelist. He usually wrote his novels, books, and poems in a mighty ways. This was one of the reason why only readers who pay strict attention to details can understand his writing’s main idea. Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. He came from a wealth family. His family lost all its financial power like other southerners did during the Civil War. Most of Faulkner’s early works were poetry, but he became famous for his novels set in the American South. He is best known for his novels such as The Sound And The Fury and As I Lay Dying. The novel As I Lay Dying is one of his novels written in a challenging way. Faulkner did not go back to his novel As I Lay Dying and change a word after he finished writing it.

Addie Bundren in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying Woman is the source and sustainer of virtue and also a prime source of evil. She can be either; because she is, as man is not, always a little beyond good and evil. With her powerful natural drive and her instinct for the concrete and personal, she does not need to agonize over her decisions. There is no code for her to master, no initiation for her to undergo.

On the back of my edition of As I Lay Dying there is a quote from William Faulkner on the subject of his novel. The quote says: I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I even put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall. The end result is a work of precision and care. Each word has been carefully chosen and carefully ordered to create his “tour-de-force”. This can be both a comfort and a frustration to a reader. On the one hand, a reader has a good deal more motivation to go looking for answers if they know that there is indeed an answer to be found. A reader can trust that Faulkner knows what he’s doing. On the other however, Faulkner’s deliberation means that not one word can be left unstudied nor one phrase unparsed if a reader wishes to fully grasp Faulkner’s intentions. At present, I do not believe myself to be fully capable of deciphering all of the novel’s layers, but I will make an attempt to understand a particular phrasing which I believe to be rather significant, that is, the title.