Style Mirrored in the theme of As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner in his book As I Lay Dying communicates the central theme of Independence to show his style of writing; Point of view. In As I lay Dying the theme is independence; of the family, of each character. Each of the characters independence is devised of their isolation and their individuality. In each characters chapter its their points of view, either if they are reliable or not, he shows what they are and converts it through the characters words and then to us. There are three passages in sequential order which show true isolation through their points of view are; Cora, Addie, Whitfield. These three characters have conflicts relation to one another, but each of their chapters they inform us more, while the other characters are oblivious to what really happened.
In the chapter of Cora (the wife of Tull, a religious woman in the area, who disapproves of Addie) she spends the finals hours of Addie’s life with her. There was a flashback to when they were having a conversation of religion, how Addie was judging rather then leaving it up to God. Addie was vain and proud of it, and she realized that Jewel was her favorite and most appreciative. That Jewel is her God “He is my cross and he will be my salvation.” Cora is independent to this family; she has nothing in common but their location. They Bundren family is not religious compared to Cora, Cora seems as a missionary trying to convert this family into believers. But even thought The Cora and the family don’t see eye-to-eye, she thinks that she needs to be there to explain religion.
For instance, “Uncle had helped him get through the desert that way, bit by bit, one step at the time. Perhaps… perhaps Salva could get through life at camp.”(72) This shows that Salva is going to walk to the refugee camp with all the strength he has without the help of his uncle who has been supporting him all the way. In addition, another example would be, “Nya’s job at the lake camp was the same as home: to fetch water. With her hands, she would dig, a hole in the damp clay of lakebed. She kept digging, scooping out handfuls of clay until the hole was as deep as her own. The clay got wetter as she dug, until, at last water began to seep into the bottom of the hole.”(26-27) Nya goes on her own to fetch water each day, she keeps on going without help. Even though she struggles Nya manages to past that hurdle all on her own, this represents that Nya is being independent in the story. To conclude with the last piece of evidence, “All those eyes looking at him… but every face interested in what he had to say. It was the same here. The audience had come to school cafeteria because they wanted to hear him. Thinking of that made him feel a little better, and he spoke into the mike again.” The passage represents Salva being able to go up in an audience all by himself and speaking up towards the people who have came to the school cafeteria to hear him. Independence allows the two main protagonists, Salva and Nya, to go off on their own with the experience there have gone through giving them to do whatever all by
Heron, stops by the tavern and asks Tim to deliver some letters for him. Tim's father says no, but Tim, hoping for a taste of the kind of adventure that Sam is having, sneaks away to do it. While he is walking down the street with the letter in hand, Betsy sees the letter and wrestles it away, convinced that it contains spy information on Sam (it does not). Tim spends the summer around the tavern and then he goes on a trading journey with his father to Verplancks Point, his first trip away from home and his first encounter with his cousins. On the way there they are stopped by "cow- boys," Rebel roadside terrorists, who harass them a bit. On the way back Tim's father is kidnapped by the same cow-boys. Tim outsmarts them, saves himself, and has to bring the wagon of goods home on his own. Because of this experience, he matures overnight and takes control of the maintenance of the tavern, excited about impressing Sam with his new knowledge and competency.
William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize winning author, wrote the novel "As I Lay Dying" in six weeks without changing a word. Considering the story's intricate plot, not changing a single word seems like it would take a literary genius to complete. Many people agree that Faulkner could very well be a genius due to the organization of this story. Faulkner uses fifteen different characters to narrate and allow the reader to analyze each of their point of views. Through the confessions of each character, the reader is able to form his or her opinion about different characters and issues. Since some narrators are unreliable for different reasons, it could be confusing to form opinions. One character that is easily understood is Dewey Dell Bundren. She is the only daughter in the Bundren family and ends up being the only woman in the family. "As I Lay Dying", the story of a family's journey to bury their mother and wife, is also the story of Dewey Dell's journey toward maturity. Along their journey to bury their mother, the characters, like Dewey Dell, seem to evolve through their encounters with other people. Faulkner depicts Dewey Dell as a very monotonous person in the beginning of the book. In the beginning, Dewey Dell is seen fanning her mother, picking cotton, or milking cows. However, towards the end of the book, her repetitiveness is lost. Towards the end of the novel, Faulkner specifically shows Dewey Dell in numerous situations becoming a mature individual.
In the book Literature by Edgar V Roberts, Faulkner begins the story “A Rose for Emily” with an extremely long sentence which shows the communities reaction to death and immediately displays a scene through gender differences:
Loewen, James W. "The Truth about the First Thanksgiving." Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New, 1995. 67. Print.
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.
“Got it. Now I got to put the stuffing in the turkey. Got the turkey done now I
If we compare William Faulkner's two short stories, 'A Rose for Emily' and 'Barn Burning', he structures the plots of these two stories differently. However, both of the stories note the effect of a father¡¦s teaching, and in both the protagonists Miss Emily and Sarty make their own decisions about their lives. The stories present major idea through symbolism that includes strong metaphorical meaning. Both stories affect my thinking of life.
Billy is coming home from work one day when suddenly he hears some dogs up the street fighting. He goes to check it out and finds them picking on a redbone hound. He saves the dog and cares for it through the night. It reminds him of his childhood. When Billy was ten years old he lived on a farm in the Ozark Mountains of northeastern Oklahoma. He wanted two good coonhounds very badly, he called it “puppy love”, but his papa could not afford to buy him the dogs. For many months, Billy tries to content himself with some rodent traps his papa gives him, but he still wants a dog. Then one day he finds a sportsman’s catalog in an abandoned campsite. In it he sees an ad for good hounds, at $25 each. He decides he wants to save $50 and order himself two hounds. Billy works hard, selling fruit and bait to fishermen, and gathering fruit that he sells to his grandfather at his store. Finally, he saves enough money and gives it to his grandfather to order the dogs for him and asks him to keep it s secret. When a notice comes that they have arrived at the mail depot in the nearby town of Tahlequah, they decide to go into town the next week. That night Billy decides he can not wait any longer. He packs himself a little food, and heads of for town following the river through the woods. He walks all night, and finally reaches town in the morning. The people in town laugh and stare at the young hillbilly, but it does not bother Billy he is there on a mission to get his dogs. He finally collects his dogs and walks back out of town with their small heads sticking out of his bag. Some schoolchildren mob around him and knock him down, but the town sheriff rescues him. The sheriff is impressed with Billy’s determination, and says he has grit. That, night Billy camped in a cave with his two puppies. They wake up in the middle of the night to hear the call of a mountain lion. Billy builds a fire to keep them safe, while the bigger of the two dogs, the male, barks into the night air.
In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the Bundren family lives in the rural south of the early 1900s. After Addie, mother of the Bundren children, passes, the rest of the family embarks on an arduous journey to bring her to her gravesite in Jefferson. Addie’s death also sparks individual, mental journeys for the Bundren children, a few of whom begin to grapple with ideas of existentialism. As each character’s interpretations of the surrounding world evolve along his/her journey, the way characters perceive each other also changes. Thus As I Lay Dying discusses identity not only through introspection, but also through the eyes of others. In particular, Vardaman’s repetition and syntax display how his confusion about others’ existence reveals the instability of others’ existence and identity.
William Faulkner in his book, As I Lay Dying, portrays a Mississippi family which goes through many hardships and struggles. Faulkner uses imagery to illustrate an array of central themes such as the conscious being or existence and poverty among many others. From the first monologue, you will find an indulgence of sensual appeal, a strong aspect of the novel. Each character grows stronger and stronger each passage. One of the themes in As I Lay Dying is a human's relations to nature. Faulkner uses imagery to produce a sense of relation between animals and humans.
By reading closely and paying attention to details, I was able to get so much more out of this story than I did from the first reading. In short, this assignment has greatly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the more complex and subtle techniques Faulkner used to communicated his ideas in the story.
Faulkner first presents an image of time through the character Benjy in “April Seventh, 1928”. Benjy’s interpretation of time stems from his disability to distinguish between past and present. The connections Benjy makes between the differences in time allow him to see through the Compson’s family obsession with their previous greatness, and instead Benjy recognizes the family’s self-destruction. Faulkner illustrates Benjy’s connections by using a stream of consciousness narrative to portray all events, in “April Seventh, 1928”, in the present regardless of when they occurred. Although the events that occurred in the present are insignificant and rather confusing to follow, they evoke memories within Benjy that prove to be both important and enlightening for the reader. On...
Has one story ever been told twice by two different people and they both sound similar but not quite the same? In As I Lay Dying that happens consecutively. The theme of this book is, versions of reality. As I Lay Dying was written by William Faulkner in 1930. The book is narrated by 15 different characters throughout the different chapters. In the beginning Cash, the oldest of the group of children, is putting together a coffin for their dying mother Addie. Darl and Jewel, the second and third oldest, decide to make a delivery into town for their neighbor, Vernon Tull, whose wife and daughters helped mend Addie, even thought their mom was due to die soon. Shortly after they leave Addie dies. During that same time, the youngest child, Vardaman,
Faulkner uses these tactics of piecemealing, shuffling, circular arrangement, narrator shifts, and stream-of-consciousness to put the reader in the shoes of the Everyhuman, the tie that bind us to each other, to all things, one fading as another rises, rising and fading together always already. He shows us truth is an elusive chimera, never able to be pinned down for showcasing in all its realness. Only the fragments of the broken mirror of truth can be pieced together through memory and will, and perhaps with courage and a bit of shrewdness.