William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

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William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

In his book, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner pioneers new and interesting literary forms. His most obvious deviation from traditional novel writing was the new style of narration in which he used all the main characters as the narrator at one point or another. This allowed the reader to gain insight into the character’s thoughts, and also to prove very interesting and entertaining. Faulkner also ignores all boundaries that sane people have placed upon the English language to keep it readable. Faulkner forges his own set of rules for syntax that allow for a very choppy yet elegant stream of consciousness in the character’s narration. Lastly, Faulkner makes incredible leaps away from established textual formatting to again make his own way of doing things. He makes chapters of only one sentence, he makes lists of thoughts that were numbered; in other words he flexed the usual methods to fit his ideas of stream of consciousness and character development. Faulkner is quite revolutionary in all of his methods, especially for the time period in which he wrote it.

Narration in As I Lay Dying is bewildering at best. And at worst it is a ragged collection of thoughts and paraphrased verbatim by sporadically chosen characters in the wrong order. But no one is trying to claim that this book is normal. The most notable attribute of Faulkner’s narration is the changing narrator idea. Faulkner starts out telling the story from Darl’s po...

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