Analyzing William Faulkner's 'Lying'

This piece is a simpler one based off of the concept that words are unfulfilling to the concepts they represent. In As I Lay Dying, Addie states that words are “just words.” Addie developed a disdain for words as she slowly got more cruel the longer she remained trapped in this family. In a certain passage from As I Lay Dying, Tull and some locals are talking with Cash about Cash’s broken leg. Faulkner gives us two different conversation one is boring and mundane and is the one that was actually spoken, while the other is rich in content and opinion, a much more interesting conversation to have, but is only the thoughts of the men. The words spoken were not the true thoughts of the men and the men hold back their thoughts because they are very

She cannot fully possess herself – could this be the meaning behind the word that is left unsaid? Could the word she wanted to tell Selden be ‘freedom’? Earlier in the novel when walking with Selden in the park, Lily listens as he defines what ‘success’ means for him, ‘My idea of success,...is personal freedom...from everything – from money, from poverty...from all the material accidents’ (p.60). It appears that both Lily and Selden were too late in realising that it was in fact this freedom they both desired. The withholding of the word ultimately denies the reader access to Lily’s dying thoughts. However, it is this switch from omniscient narration to free indirect discourse that allows the reader to fill this “textual space”. Wharton manages to position the novel as psychological realism bordering on modernism. 7

Once Lily accepts what she has done and learns that her mother's death did not make her a bad person, her conflict can finally be resolved. As a result of resolving her conflict, she is able to mature because of the struggle, just like other people are able to grow and evolve from their own mistakes. This is evident when she admits "Before coming here, my whole life had been nothing but a hole where my mother should have been, and this hole had made me different, left me always aching for something, but never once did I think what he'd lost or how it might've changed him" (Kidd 293). Lily finally realizes that her mother's death has not only affected her, but also her father, T. Ray, and the calendar sisters. Through the course of Lily's struggle, Lily learns a lot about life and matures into a wiser

Lily starts off stuck living in an unloving, abusive household and decides to free herself from the negative atmosphere that she had been living in her whole life. Lily is perpetually abused by her father. He forces her to kneel on Martha White's, gets exasperated every time she speaks, and yells at her for no reason. Lily is not the only one noticing the terrible treatment, Rosaleen does too. Once after Lily had to kneel on the Martha White's Rosaleen said to her, “Look at you, child. Look what he’s done to you” (Kidd 25). Noticing the unloving treatment Lily gets, Rosaleen knew that their household was demoralizing place for Lily to be in, which is why she didn’t question when Lily when she later runs away. Lily one day realizes she needs to do something about her horrible life at home. While sitting in her room she hears a voice in her

In addition, after Lily’s liberation from T. Ray, another character pushed Lily to make a choice without even saying a word to her and that character was Lily’s mother, Deborah, who was dead and yet she still guided Lily to her next destination. Deborah’s largest contribution to Lily’s life was leaving behind a trail of love for Lily to follow, giving Lily someplace to go when she had no home. Lily immediately knows where to go after leaving her father's trammel, for she finds a picture of Deborah in Tiburon, South Carolina. Lily’s eagerness to learn more about her mother urges her to travel to Tiburon. Lily reveals her desperation on finding out more about her mother’s love towards her when she said, “ Well, think about it. She must have been there some time in her life to have owned this picture. And if she was, a person might remember her, you never know” (Kidd 51). Lily’s voice held a sense of hope as she believed that there was something in

She is expressed as dealing with “teenage problems” if I do say so myself a lot of issues that most teenagers have: identity, popularity, self-consciousness, and parental issues. The 14-year-old throughout her story feels a deep sense of longing for her mother as she did not know her, because she died when Lily was only 4 years old. In Chapter 1, Lily talks about how she misses her mother, and how she feels completely responsible for the fact that she doesn't have her. This quote, "This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away," is significant to the whole plot, because it helps us understand one of Lily's main concerns and desires. I myself have lost a parent at a very young age, and struggled to comprehend what happened, and how it would effect me through the course of my life. Lily Owens notices that she does not fit and is held back from that fact that her father does not care about Lily's life nor her needs. In Chapter 1, Lily indicates that she is “..worried so much about how I [she] looked and whether I [she] was doing things right, I [she] felt half the time I [she] was impersonating a girl instead of really being

This passage is important to the novel as a whole, because it is what makes Lily realize that she is not alone, and the she can be strong herself. All of her life Lily had faced the struggle of loneliness. Her mother had died, and her father treated her horribly. This held her back, and made her feel vulnerable and confused. When she ran away and got to the Boatwright’s house though, she began to feel less lonely and learned what it felt like to be loved. However, she did not lose that feeling of being weak and on the outside until August explained to her in this passage that Our Lady, the blessed mother is not just a statue, but something that lives in a person. August

Janie was the kind of woman who was always striving for better things. While living in a small town, she always dreamed of living in a better place. From a young age, she was bold enough to be sure she wasn’t going to stay with her grandma for a long time. This was because her Nanny was always sure to shrink her horizons, and Janie didn’t appreciate that. She was like that with Janie because when she was growing up, she never had the chance to better herself so she learned to settle for what she had. In fact,

August: I believe that Lily learned that sometimes you have to forgive things in life to get past hard times. She couldn’t forgive herself enough for killing her mother, and that is why she ran away. She needed to know the truth. Once she forgave herself, her whole life had changed.

However, one of Lily’s character flaws prevents her from being able to be part of such a society. She isn’t very good at disguising her motive to marry a man of wealth. In fact, she even tells her true love Seldom that she is “very expensive” and one “must have a great deal of money” to marry her ( Wharton 31). These kinds of declarations make Lily seem to be the one thing that this society cannot tolerate. Being elegant, single, as well as brutally honest regarding her intentions, Lily makes herself denounced in the eyes of the wealthy as an adventuress. She adventures to admit to one of her rich, married friends, “Why don’t you say it, Judy? I have a reputation for being on the hunt for a rich husband”(Wharton). Her main focus is the wealth of men and this manifests itself through her relationship with Lawrence Selden, as she falls in love with him but denies marriage as he is not wealthy. In the end, Lily is described as one of the “critics on the fence”, never able to achieve the life of social class that she desires (Wharton 71). Lily diligently strives to achieve this social status but never achieves it because she can not find the right wealthy man. Thus, Lily will eventually die because she lacks self identity after being discarded by a superficial society. This double-standard of men and women is portrayed throughout the entire novel. For instance, when Lily has tea with Seldon, she brings up in conversation the double-standard of men

This is Lily’s first experience when a black person that she is very close with facing prejudice in the legal system , the next being when Zachary is arrested. After this, she is exposed to the effects of mental illness when May commits suicide after she could not handle dealing with her condition any longer. Finally, Lily learns the truth about her mother at the end of the novel, truly opening her eyes to a question she had been trying to answer her entire life. While thinking about her mother, Lily thinks, “I'd spent my life imagining all the ways she'd loved me, what a perfect specimen of a mother she was. And all of it was lies.

They tried to control me. Like when I was a little girl, they would put me in the closet because they thought that would silence me. However, if only they could see what was really going on inside my head. It’s just like putting a bird in a cage. It may be trapped inside a confined space; still its mind cannot be controlled or limited.

Her father is described as a neutral figure and her memory of him is hazy at best. This lack of a father figure led to Lily’s attitude towards men. Because of this Lily always denies herself suitable marriages because she always feels she can do better. Lily is conflicted between the man she loves and the man with money. She loves Seldon but she deems him too poor for her perfect marriage. After much thought, Lily decides to marry Peter Gryce who is exceedingly wealthy but is too late as he is already engaged at the time of her decision. Lily cannot decide between love and money both of which are important aspects of her life. She is unwilling to compromise between the two which eventually leads to her downfall. Lily needs to marry a man with wealth and a stable status in high New York society because she needs a source of income to supplement her own unstable wealth.

She also starts to see and understand that different social classes exist, and that this is only a small part of the tension and suffering in the

William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying is structured and written in a way that explains the journey of a loathsome family going to bury their mother. Through this journey, the family faces conflicts and difficulties that include judging each other, bringing their mother’s corpse to the burial grounds, and a family that has siblings who are mentally challenged. Faulkner also writes this novel in such a way that he is not narrating the book but his characters are. This technique is used to draw the reader’s attention in and through this technique, the reader is forced to figure out who each character is and their relationship to the the Bundren family. Faulkner creates an ongoing conflict between the family members and other outside characters.