As I Lay Dying Essay: The Characters

One of the notable coping methods that Faulkner analyzes in his novel is that of denial and negotiation. Various characters utilize denial to escape the pain of the death of their mother, and this technique is best exemplified

In reading the novel As I Lay Dying, many questions arose in my mind. However, the one that plagued me was the question that I could not pin down. All of the characters in the book have a personality and play a certain role in the tale. However, the one character who fascinated me, yet I could not explain was Cash. Is Cash a bigger player in the novel than it appears on the surface? I believe he is. Cash is the cog in the family that keeps the others from spinning away. Cash becomes, throughout the course of the novel, the patriarchal figure in the novel. He is thrust in to this position through his words, actions, and Anse's total lack of leadership. Cash becomes that patriarch. Diligence. Definition: " Close

Who knew a high school dropout would become one of the most well-known authors still known today? Even though William Faulkner did not finish school (“William Faulkner – Biographical”), he certainly knew how to capture a reader’s attention and drop them into a new world with just a pen. The style in which he writes is unique. With only three semesters of college, he was forced to create from nearly a blank slate; college had not brainwashed him in to a repetitive nature with writing a certain way. He was forced to think outside the box and this makes him stand out from other writers. The building blocks of his stories can be derived from his life. If a reader had a collection of his literature, it would not be hard for them to take a guess at what his personal life was like. Faulkner lived an interesting life and incorporated its aspects into his short stories, two of which, “A Rose for Emily” and “Dry September,” have similar characters, symbolism, and themes. Critics have explored the meanings behind his work and thus given readers a better insight.

Here Faulkner makes a direct correlation in Vardaman's perception and his longing to be with his mother, and giving fault to her death by Dr. Peabody's heavy weight. He hears the "foot steps" and he can "feel the floor shake", Faulkner is appealing to our senses. Faulkner engages our senses us directly to show us Vardaman's thoughts. Varadaman comes to the conclusion that his mother is a fish and the imagery that Faulkner portrays allows Vardaman's thought process easier for us to comprehend.

This renders the tone more one of reminiscence and, if Faulkner's narrator is not as grandiloquent as Poe's, he nonetheless paints vivid pictures, as in his description of Emily later in life: “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in water, and of that pallid hue” (Faulkner 3). What may be most interesting in the differences of narrator tone, however, is how each underscores the thrust of the story. Poe's extreme voice works to build up to a disturbing conclusion of murder; the exaggeration of Montresor's tone conforms to the trajectory of the story. With Faulkner, understatement is the key. His story ends as dramatically, if not more so, than Poe's, and the effect of the revealed necrophilia is amplified by how moderately the narrator conveys the tale.

When reading through As I Lay Dying, one can not ignore the trope of wood and its importance to the understanding of the characters in the novel. Wood is frequently used to describe multiple animated objects but the use of the metaphor on the Bundrens adds to the stiffened characteristic of the family. Ignoring such a major trope, causes the reader to lack a deeper upstanding of Faulkner’s work and his characters. In her article, “The Casket in the Corpse: The Wooden (Wo)man and Corporeal Impermanence in As I Lay Dying”, Amber Hodge highlights the importance of wood in describing the Bundrens and their lives and its representation of decay and regeneration in the novel.

Lou Aronica once said, “Trepidation is either the sign of great weakness or great wisdom.” In As I Lay Dying, Darl Bundren makes one want to question this quote because for him trepidation acts as both not one or the other. Nobody understands how Darl knows such information, nor why he executes such tasks. On that note, why would an author include a character that is hard to identify? Nine out of ten, that is the main reason Darl is such an important character because William Faulkner, the author of As I Lay Dying, writes in a very peculiar style nobody understands.

The manner that Faulkner applies point of view in "A Rose for Emily" provides the readers with the idea of the dying values, traditions, and customs of the “Old South”.

Faulkner’s use of southern gothic writing style helps the reader build a mental depiction of Miss Emily. When the town sent their ambassadors to discuss the taxes that were owed, Faulkner described Miss Emily as “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water” (2182). This description gives the reader the sense that the character is not well. Faulkner’s description that Miss Emily looked bloated achieves the desired effect on the reader to show how hideous she appears. This graphic description, combined with the author’s depressing description of the parlor (2182), makes the reader think of death. The reader gets the sense of being in a funeral parlor which helps to strengthen Faulkner’s narrative.

The novel As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is filled with moments of great heroism and with struggles that are almost epic, but the novel’s take on such battles is ironic at best, and at times it even makes them seem downright absurd or mundane. The Bundren family is on a mission to bury Addie. In the midst they defeat water and fire on the way to Jefferson where Addie is to be buried. Their take on these engagements seem heroic, but they come to the point where the family’s’/ family member(s) actions are more foolish than anything.

One thing I found to be so fascinating was Faulkner's use of making the audience wait for things. Even the mundane could be spun into a mystery. For example, in one of Vardaman's early narrations, he refers to some sort of object, but we, the audience don't know to what specific thing he is referring: "Dewey Dell says it wont be sold because it belongs to Santa Clause and he takin it back with him until next Christmas. Then it will be behind the glass again, shining with waiting"(100). While we have some sense that Vardaman is referring to some sort of toy, Faulkner only provides the basest of context; and by leaving out one minute detail in the narration, effectively spins out a mystery. This makes our discovery of what Vardaman is referring

His actually education only goes as far as one year at the University of Mississippi. After leaving Oxford and living in New Haven, Connecticut for a few years, Faulkner joined the British Royal Flying Corps. He never served active duty, as the war ended before his training did. Faulkner returned home and began writing poetry. But his early writing was more of the traditional style- a mix of Shakespeare, Victorian, and Edwardian. It wasn’t until a trip to New Orleans in 1925 that he began to fiddle with his writing style, after a friend encouraged him to write more Southern based prose. His style also grew as he began reading James Joyce, a “high” modernist writer, and Sigmund Freud, and also took a trip to Europe- the center of modernist writing. With these influences, Faulkner began writing novels about Southern society, with an emphasis on the psychology of the characters. For example, in his novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner writes from four different points of view; the first three sections are of each of the three brother’s point of view, and the last section is omniscient. His writing also plays with chronology, not always following a specific timeline. The disjointedness of time is very prominent in As I Lay Dying. About the death of a mother, the 59 inner monologues and fifteen characters make the book more about the characters psychology rather than a

William Faulkner, at his Nobel Prize in Literature speech, speaks to the young men and women who want to be the best writer he or she can be. Throughout his speech, he uses strong word choice, analogies, and metaphors to explain how to achieve writing meaningful work.

In Faulkner's story, an onlooker tells of the peculiar events that occurred during Miss Emily's life. The author never lets the reader understand Emily's side to the story. Instead, the reader is forced to guess why Emily is as strange as she is. In the story, Emily had harbored her father's dead body in her house for three days (par. 27). The reader is told of how the town looked upon what Emily had done, but the reader is never able to fully understand Emily's actions until the end of the story.

By focusing on the figure of Caddy, Bleikasten’s essay works to understand the ambiguous nature of modern literature, Faulkner’s personal interest in Caddy, and the role she plays as a fictional character in relation to both her fictional brothers and her actual readers. To Bleikasten, Caddy seems to function on multiple levels: as a desired creation; as a fulfillment of what was lacking in Faulkner’s life; and/or as a thematic, dichotomous absence/presence.