Essays on As I Lay Dying

“My mother is a fish” is perhaps the most famous quote from William Faulkner’s Southern Gothic novel, As I Lay Dying (Faulkner, 1957, p. 84). William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in Oxford, Mississippi. The setting of As I Lay Dying, as well as...

On the surface, the county of Yoknapatawpha seems to be a close-knit community that provides a support system for the Bundrens in the aftermath of Addie Bundren’s death. While this is technically true, it is not as rosy a picture as Blackman makes it seem....

The story of a dysfunctional family and its epic journey across the South, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is famous for its use of multiple narrators who interpret and recount the journey of the Bundren clan from their own unique perspectives. All of the...

For human beings, life inherently exists with a void, which people look to fill through indulging in various constructs set up and measured by society. Some invest themselves in money, some absolve themselves with religion, and still others utilize vanity as an impetus for survival....

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it.” Although Addie Bundren dismisses the word love when used by her husband, Anse, as “just a shape to fill a lack,” her other relationships are not as empty (172). In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner reveals...

In typical modernist fashion, William Faulkner experiments in his work with a number of nontraditional stylistic and thematic characteristics, including brokenness, fragmentation, despair, pessimism, perception distortion, and the rejection of societal norms. In his novel As I Lay Dying, he focuses on a sense of...

Not only in reality, but also in the fictional world of literature, women have been silenced from time immemorial. This is the case in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a novel that details the journey of a family as they travel to bury the...

In William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, the dysfunctional Bundren family embarks on a telling journey from their farm in Yoknapatawpha County to bury their recently deceased and unmatronly matriarch, Addie. Composed of 59 sections narrated by 15 different people, Faulkner’s novel is a...

The entire novel “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner is filled with great heroic efforts but at the same time is someway seems absurd at times. Anse, the father of the family and the laziest person should have been the provider but unfortunately he...

It is human nature to desire a better understanding of oneself; without the magnificent powers of scientific fact, humans were forced to use the next best concepts: introspection, thought, and philosophy. Through the use of the dynamic human mind, human societies were able to determine...

William Faulkner uses multiple narrators in As I Lay Dying, a technique that enables him to illustrate different mindsets on events and ethical questions. Some narrators’ motivations are clear: Dewey Dell is determined to get an abortion, for example, and Vardaman longs for a toy...

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a novel about a family that travels to Jefferson, a town in Mississippi, to fulfill the wish of their deceased mother to be buried there. The long journey reveals the true character and motives of each family member....

In accordance with the increasing influence of Modernist thought affecting American literature during the twentieth century, William Faulkner was willing to exercise more experimental narrative techniques and styles. His novel that came from this experimentation, As I Lay Dying, is a testament to his critique...

“It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it,” (Faulkner, 233). In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, an obvious discrepancy exists between death and birth and between...

At the crux of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is the issue of communication. The characters’ methods of communicating are many and vary, in some cases, depending upon the characters’ relationships with one another. Verbal communication is curt and generally without special significance; the very...

The single chapter in As I Lay Dying where Moseley becomes the narrative focalizer, is anomalous because the focalizer is a character that had not yet been mentioned, and is never mentioned again. The general pattern in the novel is that each focalizer is either...

One of the central thematic elements of As I Lay Dying is the distinction between fact and interpretation of fact. Clearly, any objective fact can result in a multitude of subjective interpretations because the characters all have individual points of view. Their perspectives of any...

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying tells the story of the Bundren family when the matriarch of the family dies. Faulkner alternates perspectives between each member of the family and their neighbors. While most characters focus on their thoughts around Addie’s death, Darl Bundren is...

One of William Faulkner’s most celebrated qualities is his inventiveness. As I Lay Dying has fifteen unique narrators, one of them a dead woman, and the novel avoids traditional ideas of linear and chronological structure. Faulkner’s style demands that his readers are aware of his...