William Faulkner 's Unconventional Writing Style

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.

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.

     William Faulkner is one of America's most talked about writers and his work should be included in any literary canon for several reasons. After reading a few of his short stories, it becomes clear that Faulkner's works have uniqueness to them. One of the qualities that make William Faulkner's writings different is his close connection with the South. Gwendolyn Charbnier states, 'Besides the sociological factors that influence Faulkner's work, biographical factors are of great importance…'; (20). Faulkner's magnificent imagination led him to create a fictional Mississippi county named Yoknapatawpha, which includes every detail from square mileage of the county to the break down of

“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.

Despite the fact that human beings are oftentimes reluctant to admit it, it is a fact of life that one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature is self-interest. Selfishness pervades everyday life, no matter what efforts are made to deny and rationalize its existence. In the novel As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, the unique method handling the death of Addie that each character uses exemplifies the inherent selfishness apparent in human nature and outlines the various emotions that accompany the death of a loved one.

    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

Addie felt differently about her children and with each one of them she had an impact on their lives even after her death. The way she convinced, treated, and viewed them resulted in the way each character did the same towards her in terms of her passing. She says “I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and not mine. And then I could get ready to die” (Faulkner 176). The monologue of Addie gave the reader insight on how she viewed her children in terms of which ones she loved more, which ones she had out of spite and which ones she had because of a passion within. It is interesting to see how the start of someone’s life and upbringing

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.

The Southern novel, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner gives readers a chance to dive into different characters’ views. Faulkner conveys powerful views about the value of life. Through the comic and tragic story, As I Lay Dying appears to be one the greatest reflections of Southern living through the author’s themes, characters, diction, dialogue, and technique.

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.

Addie narrates a significantly shorter portion of the novel than the rest of the Bundren family (only one chapter, in fact), and her death occurs well before the story’s conclusion. For these reasons, earlier criticism evaluated Addie not as an individual, but in relation to the other members of the Bundren clan, specifically, the men. Overall, Addie’s importance to the novel was grievously underestimated by early critics such as Edwin Muir, who observes: We are told far more about Addie Bundren’s corpse . . . than about herself . .

“If the purpose of your story is to unfold the secrets at the center of your hero’s life, then there is no reason the key events or revelations need to be presented in the calendar order in which they occurred. What is more important is that there is a march toward understanding, a sense we are drawing ever closer to the truth wherever it may lie” (Blake, 2). This statement sounds like something I believe Faulkner would say. Faulkner’s imagination was very great and this made him a great writer. Faulkner even went to the extent of creating his own town in Yoknapatawpha Mississippi (Meyer, 77). William Faulkner was a great author that has amazed people throughout the years. A statement he mentioned when he accepted his Nobel Prize really stuck to me. “Problems of the human heart in conflict with itself…alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat” (Faulkner, 77). Faulkner’s writing style differs from other authors because it is written in non-chronological order, which opens the door to exciting mysteries and excitement throughout the story unlike the film versions of stories such as A Rose for Emily, which is predictable due to the sequence of event. Due to this, many individuals that read books tend to like them more than the actual film that is developed. This can be said for many movies including recent movies that have been released such as Harry Potter and Twilight.