As I Lay Dying Literary Analysis

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.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your vision is clear, your whole body will be full of light” (). Ever since the creation of mankind, the eyes exist as the window to the soul. Taking one look into a person's eyes can leave you with more knowledge than ever thought imagined. Love, anger, lust, hatred, sympathy and guilt can all express themselves in just one glance. William Faulkner knew of this interesting trait and applied it to his 19___’s novel “As I Lay Dying”. Each character possesses their own unique traits and personalities which drive them to fulfill their end mission: burying their mother in Jefferson. To express their personalities, Faulkner incorporates a variety of similes and metaphors all relating to the eyes. This technique sheds light of their selfish ways. These selfish qualities, not the love for their mother, cause the Bundren children to succeed in their mother's dying wish.

Exploring the Layers of Maternity and Southern Womanhood in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

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

A morally ambiguous character in As I Lay Dying is Anse Bundren. Anse Bundren’s dedication and determination to fulfil his wife’s wish counterpoises the fact that he is self-centered and neglectful towards others. With his two biggest goals in mind, burying his wife and getting a new set of teeth, Anse Bundren demonstrates the theme of self-interest vs. heroic actions. Most of the members of the Bundren family have goals at the end of their journey to Jefferson, but Anse’s two goals are both the most selfish and altruistic goals of the book.

Unfortunately in some families there are circumstances in which a child must take the role of one or both of the parents in order to ensure the common good of the family. Whether it is abuse, neglect, or death these situations never come about from a good cause. The Bundren family’s situation in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is no different. After Addie Bundren, the mother, dies, her daughter Dewey Dell is called upon to become the new matriarch. However, other people in the novel make this task more difficult for her. Throughout the novel, numerous male characters take advantage of Dewey Dell’s unfortunate

In the novel, As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, two characters ,Darl and Jewel Bundren, each cope with their mother’s death and deal with their isolation from their family by expressing their feelings in deeply emotional behavior. Darl, the second eldest sibling out of five, questions his existence because of his isolation and the lack of love he received from his mother growing up. Jewel, on the other hand, was his mother’s favorite of all five of her children. Jewel was the bastard son of Addie Bundren and the minister she had an affair with, Whitfeld. Due to the violent situation by which he was conceived, Jewel expresses all of his actions, including love, through violence and hatred. Both Darl and Jewel Bundren, convey their

Foster shared that in pieces of literature the quest is one of the most fundamental conventions. Typically reader's view quests in scenarios involving a knight in shining armour, a dragon, and a damsel in distress. However, once those layers are peeled back, the reader is exposed to the deeper meaning of the journey. Foster reveals that the reason quests are vital in literature is that they often depict a discovery, such as self-knowledge. In William Faulkner’s novel this concept is mirrored to share the story of the Bundren family and their challenging journey to lay Addie Bundren to rest in Jefferson. If a person were to merely skim “As I Lay Dying”, they would initially assume the family’s main focus is to peacefully put their mother to rest, although as the storyline progresses you can detect that the remaining Bundren family

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.

The action of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is simple: Addie Bundren dies; and in answer to her wishes, the body is taken for burial to Jefferson, some forty miles away. But the weather intervenes, and floodwaters require that the cortege take detours. Some nine days pass before the coffin, which before long clearly announces its passing to neighboring places, is finally laid to rest. These days involve battling flood water and a fire set by one of the children, the threat of buzzards, the hazards of a broken leg, and other incidental losses and disasters.

The conversation to redefine gender roles is often dominated by polarized extremes. In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner explores the social and psychological effects of the traditional southern female gender role with the character Addie Bundren. Through Addie’s narrative, Faulkner presents the struggles of a woman as she lives the oppressive consequences of expressing her sexuality: childbearing and motherhood. The same consequences are reflected in the destruction of the life of Addie’s unwed daughter, Dewey Dell. Through these women’s stories ,Faulkner reveals the damaging effect of institutional patriarchy in women’s lives as storyteller rather than feminist.

William Faulkner’s  As I Lay Dying  novel explores and calls into question the meaning of heroic actions. That all such actions are evident as heroic only from the outside. As I Lay Dying   questions the value of heroism by showing how the Bundren’s heroic journey is actually committed in service of the family’s self- interests. Bundrens fulfill addie’s desire to be buried in Jefferson under the guise of heroic and family duty, ultimately rendering the idea of heroism pointless or self-defeating. The novel provides an ironic twist to a hero's journey. In any heroic novel there must be a hero or heroine, As I Lay Dying provides many villains but not so many heros. As evident every character ends up showing their true character, so who was

In William Faulkner's novel, As I Lay Dying many points of view are expressed through the use of interior monologue, but even when they are all put together, they can't serve as an objective view of what really happened. In the book, there are many monologues by many different people, often with opposing ideas and beliefs. Together the novel is a book of half-truths, with each set of events formed by what the narrator believes is the truth. To each individual what they say and think they consider a reality, however, it is merely their own perception of reality and consequently it becomes subjective. In the following essay, I will describe the structure the author uses in the book and the underlying

In an essay by Elizabeth Kerr, she recounts the novel of As I Lay Dying as an “ironic quest” by the Bundren family to take the family matriarch, Addie Bundren, upon her death, to Jefferson to be buried (5-6). This critique of the novel does well to include the irony of the story by explaining how each of the characters except Darl and Jewel, have their own agendas for wanting to go on this journey forty miles away, other than just to keep the promise to their mother to get her to her desired burial place (Kerr 6). While this critic uses irony as its main description for the story as a whole, it does not put enough emphasis on the use of stream of consciousness as main technique used by Faulkner to help the reader relate to the characters, to understand their true emotions, as written by Faulkner. Kerr doesn’t completely dismiss the use of the technique, as she explains how certain characters’ stream of consciousness help us to better understand the irony of the story, but does not include how important the technique is in the story when it comes to character relation. When I read As I lay dying, which undoubtedly uses the stream of consciousness technique, saturated throughout the novel, I feel like I could understand the readers true emotions about what was happening to them at any particular time. One interior monologue that I found particularly strong for character relation was that of the character Addie Bundren. Because Addie is the basic subject of the whole book, and the reason the journey is being taken in the first place, to understand her character is essential. Being able to understand Addie helped me understand the other characters motivations for their actions and intentions. In her interior monologue she explains how she really feels about her family and her choice to marry Anse, to have children, and how she feels about being a mother (Faulkner 169-176). When I read the