Relationships In As I Lay Dying

Alexus, a young middle school student can make connections to the story “The Gift Of The Magi” because like Jim and Della she has to make sacrifices for her loved ones. In the story Jim and Della don’t have enough money to buy each other christmas gifts. So Della has to cut her hair and sell it and Jim has to sell his watch to make money for gifts. The author of the story develops the theme when being in a relationship sacrifices is often needed.

Darl then questions the consistency of his being; to be able to assure of his identity, there must be a certain consistency that is maintained for a certain length of time. The verb to be now carries multiple functions; it is not a word that promises one’s existence but a word that endangers one’s identity. Even if anything “was” present in the past, it does not guarantee its presence at present; rather, it stresses the discontinuity of one’s being from the past to the present. The verb to be also connects the beings not as a marker of equivalence between beings but as a connective chain between existences; Jewel’s being is connected to Addie’s being, which again is connected to Darl’s being, and that is how he is able to have a self to empty

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

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.

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.

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.

Dying Wish If one was to live in Oxford, Mississippi, there is a good chance he would gain something from his experiences there. Whether it be from the people he would meet, or the places he would go, there is a part of Oxford that will stick with him forever. William Faulkner was one of these people.

The pressure to display wealth in society is an ongoing concern, one that has been present since social and economic classes were first introduced into society. “The Rocking Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence and “The Necklace” by Guy De Maupassant are two short stories that display what this kind of pressure can do to a person and their family. Both Authors lived around the same time, only a few years after socioeconomic classes were first introduced into Europe. The financial situation of Mathilde Loisel from “The necklace” ends up leading to more hardships. Their biggest problem is that Mathilde and Hester (from “The Rocking Horse Winner”) put their social appearance above other people in their families.

The study of these two novel shows how different people deal with the after effects of the same problem that is ‘Child Abuse’. In contemporary urban society, this problem of child abuse is of much prominence. Child abuse at times happens due to the neglect of parents towards their children because of their busy work-life schedule and so the outside world take advantage of the innocent children. Like in the novel, Perfect Match by Jodi Picoult, since both the parents were bread-earners, they did not pay much attention to their growing child and one day the child is abused by the priest. The irony of the novel is that the mother of the abused child, who herself is shown as a lawyer did not know about the case of her own child.

In As I Lay Dying, the darkly humorous story of the poor white Bundren family's journey from farm to town to bury its matriarch Addie, Faulkner uses the experimental forms associated with modernism to depict the impact of the sociocultural era called modernity, and the processes of urbanization and industrialization known as modernization, on poor whites in the rural South. Understanding the novel's engagement with rural life in the modern era redefines the relationship of Faulkner's work to the literature and politics of its Depression era context, exposes the social and aesthetic import of rural obsolescence, and suggests a means of rethinking modernism writ large. Through this personage, the novel explores the creation of the modern, laying

William Faulkner had a faith in humanity that few possess. In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he proclaimed that, “man will not merely endure: he will prevail”. He felt humans contained a certain compassion in our spirits, which is very valuable. Faulkner views America as a place where people often have more compassion or intelligence than they let on, especially in the rural areas. Everyone is capable of having these traits, but not everyone uses them.