Essay On Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

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.

In As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner the reader gets to see how hard life is for the Bundren family. The Bundren’s face many obstacles throughout the book and somehow manage to come through most of them okay. The family fulfills their desires along the way to relieve them of these struggles. The main theme in As I Lay Dying is family dysfunction, and this family dysfunction leads to Darl’s insanity.

“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.

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

She becomes a wife and a mother. She loves her children and they adore her. When she grows old they will take of her, and when she dies, they long for her the rest of their days. The concept of such a desired and completed journey of motherhood and womanhood is dismantled in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. On a spectrum of maternity, characters Cora Tull, Addie Bundren and her daughter Dewey Dell each represent a different degree. Cora is a dedicated mother, Addie struggles to accept the idea of motherhood, and Dewey Dell rejects the role altogether. Through these female characters, Faulkner also aims to point out the absurdity of the universal experience of womanhood.

    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

William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, tells the story of a family that journeys cross-country with the intentions to find a proper resting place for their mother, Addie Bundren. After reading for only a short time, it becomes clear that two of her sons, Jewel and Darl, play a much larger role in the story than the other siblings. One could find many good points to support either character being labeled as the protagonist of the story, such as the various tensions that can clearly be seen between them. That being said, Darl is, without a doubt, the best possible choice. He is forced to overcome more obstacles, including alienation from his entire family, than any other character, and is truly a changed person by the end of the novel.

In As I Lay Dying, the Bundren family travels from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi to Jefferson. Addie’s family hails from Jefferson, the “big city”, and her wish is be buried with them. Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county in Mississippi based closely on the people and places of Faulkner's native Lafayette County. As I Lay Dying is set in the 1920s where it’s located in the typical southern atmosphere with a generally humid and hot climate. It is rural, dirty, poor, and worn down, and is the source of much turmoil for many of Faulkner's characters. The setting enhanced the mood of the family and lack of motivation to properly respect their mother’s wishes. Faulkner also depicts a natural environment that is at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile, bringing floods, heat, and intrusive buzzards. The novel hails not only as a voyeuristic eye into the rural slums of Mississippi, but as a pastoral novel

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.

Faulkner selects his descriptive words, thoughts and actions carefully in order to help the reader create a better picture, both physically and and psychologically, of the characters in As I Lay Dying. “From the inability of the characters to communicate with one another, to Addie’s singular distrust of words, to the unlikely vocabulary the characters employ in their narration, Faulkner explores the inadequacy of language to express thought and emotion” (“As I Lay

The birth of the modernist movement in American literature was the result of the post-World War I social breakdown. Writers adopted a disjointed fragmented style of writing that rebelled against traditional literature. One such writer is William Faulkner, whose individual style is characterized by his use of “stream of consciousness” and writing from multiple points of view.

The character’s struggles in As I Lay Dying help to get Faulkner ’s point across that humans prevail. He ironically uses death, a way many would consider to prove someone is mortal, to prove humans are immortal because they have souls which endure and prevail through everything. The character’s struggles in As I Lay Dying show how William Faulkner went against any fear he may have had to prove that humans will always endure and

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.

As we get into the story we are given a brief glimpse into the main character Seymour Glass and what he displays a multiple different behaviors with different characters. Salinger expresses the use of As the story progresses, Salinger uses conflict, characterization, and symbolism to demonstrate how a traumatic experience, like going to war can change a person’s perception. As the short story progresses

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.