As I Lay Dying Dichotomy Analysis

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is about the Bundren family of six on their journey to Jackson to bury the matriarch of the family, Addie Bundren. The family consists of Anse Bundren, the patriarch of the family, Cash, the oldest son who makes Addie’s coffin, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman. Faulkner writes this novel with fifteen different viewpoints, each chapter narrated by one character, including Addie, who expresses her thoughts after her death. The characters’ chapters, except for Darl’s, are all jumbled and hard to read due to the absence of an objective narrator. Instead of being presented with a framework of events, the jumble of images, memories, and unexplained allusions by the alternating narrators, force the readers to take the pieces each character gives

While Vardaman observes Jewel’s decision on taking the horse instead of riding the wagon with the family to Jefferson to bury their dead mother; he finds himself discussing Jewel, Darl, and himself’s identity. The distinct metaphors apply on Vardaman’s mother and Jewel’s mother and subtle stylistic placement of sentences present that Jewel actually isn’t a part of the Bundren family, according to Darl. At the moment where Vardaman thinks his mother is a fish again, Darl breaks into his thought: But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it.

In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Faulkner employs several points of view to immerse readers into the complex and absurd world of the Bundren family. By utilizing various characters’ first person narratives, Faulkner allows readers to be drawn into the compelling yet somehow simultaneously repulsive family dynamics, offering only a few brief glimpses into how other individuals see the Bundrens from an outside perspective. This narration style creates an incredibly unreliable retelling of the story, while at the same time giving readers a chance to view the chain of morbid events that compose the plot of As I Lay Dying from the point of view of the very family that partakes in such insanity.

INTRODUCTION Descriptive and figurative language is a way for an author to express and bring their characters’ life and experiences to life. Descriptive language is used to create images that appeal to the reader’s senses. Helping the reader to get a clear picture of how the subject looks, feels, smell or taste. In Vertigo, Amanda Lohrey uses descriptive language to bring the characters to life. She uses this to layer the emotions as they lead up to the climax.

With the exception of Anse, the end of As I Lay Dying leaves all of the Bundrens worse for wear. Darl has been exiled because he is believed to be insane. Similarly, the skin has to be removed from Cash’s leg, Jewel has lost his horse and his last connection to the family, Vardaman is more confused than ever, and Dewey Dell remains pregnant. Despite all of this, Anse’s condition is better than it has ever been. He has purchased teeth, has visited a barbershop, and has come out of all of this with a new wife.

Have you ever imagined risking your life for your family and friends or can you imagine being afraid to win the lottery? Dystopia is a futuristic imagined universe, where the dictators or government controls people by philosophical and religious ideology or many other ways. There are a lot of movies or books about dystopia, which shows the community as an undesirable and frightening society. How do we know if a society is dystopian? According to Živković, D. Milan in the article “SOCIETY IN THE ENGLISH LITERARY DYSTOPIA”

Most of the stories readers read, many author used intertextual elements in their stories. The reasons why the author used intertextual elements is because they wanted the readers to use their scheme and asked themselves, why this is in this text? What is the purpose behind this? By having the readers used their scheme, they are able to find the meaning or connection between this text/passage related their everyday lives. In the story, As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, the author used many intertextual elements in each ‘chapter’ from each character’s point of view in the story.

One of the few things that are certain in life is that it eventually comes to an end, and this is a constant truth which applies to every person from every corner of the earth. Therefore, it is only natural that most authors have used the theme of death in their literary works. Beowulf’s heroic sacrifice, Hamlet’s philosophic pondering on the after-world, Poe’s attraction to the ominous and mysterious side of un-being, all show different aspects of this multi-faceted subject. In Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”, death itself can be considered to be the protagonist, and even in the mind of a child, Vardaman, who cannot fully understand it yet, it remains an obsessive and haunting thought.

In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner uses the characters Anse and Cash, and a motif/symbol in "My mother is a fish," to reveal the psychological and societal problems of the twenties and thirties. Written as soon as the panic surrounding the stock market in 1929 started, Faulkner is reported as having, “took one of these [onion] sheets, unscrewed the cap from his fountain pen, and wrote at the top in blue ink, 'As I Lay Dying. ' Then he underlined it twice and wrote the date in the upper right-hand corner"(Atkinson 15) We must take care to recognize Faulkner not as a man of apathy, but one of great compassion and indignation at the collapse of the economic foundation of the U.S. This is central in appreciating the great care with which he describes the desolation and poor landscape of Yoknapatawpha County, which is where As I Lay Dying takes place.

Most tend to group together the words “ death” and “ dying”. When they do not necessarily mean the same thing. See death by definition is the end of the life of a person or organism. While dying means you are on the verge of death, but the synonyms are terminally ill and on one’s death bed . These words can be used together to describe a situation, but do not mean the same.

Parents find the need to constantly try and protect their children from anything that could possibly harm them, whether it be emotionally or physically. With that comes along the need to protect their children from death because of the belief that it will be too much for them to handle. In “On Death and Dying” an excerpt from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s book, Kubler-Ross gives information, from a psychiatrist point of view, about how people deal with death today and some of the similarities and differences from how people dealt with death in the past. Kubler-Ross explains how hiding death from children could in the long run be more damaging than if they were just told the truth from the beginning. She says by not telling them that someone has