As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner - Essay Example

Appraising "truth" turns out to be an equally tricky enterprise, with Faulkner portraying a truth as mutable and vicious as the river the Bundrens cross midway through the novel.
The structure of As I Lay Dying is influential and ground-breaking. Fifteen tellers of tales alternate, delivering interior monologues with changeable degrees of coherence and emotional intensity. The language is powerful and extremely subjective, with an identifiable change in language depending on the narrator. Every section falls somewhere in the series from confessional to stream-of-consciousness.
The narrative emerges fragmentary; however, the story shows marvelous unity: it is restricted to the span of a few days; also the different sub-plots are understandably and competently interwoven. Faulkner's novelty is in how we see this incorporated set of events: we are mandated to look at the story from several different views, each of which is extremely subjective.
“As I Lay Dying” notifies us with a far greater variety of voices. The voices are more numerous as well as more ambiguous. Among Faulkner's accomplishments, in this novel and elsewhere, was the depiction of the dialect of the South into a poetic literary language. The Bundrens live in Faulkner's illusory community of Yoknapatawpha County, a setting used in several of his novels, and they are among the poorest characters in all of Faulkner's work. And so far Darl is one of Faulkner's most eloquent and poetic creations. His obliteration has a tragic depth and self-respect. Faulkner portrays the beleaguered and impecunious Bundrens with empathy and loveliness, even though he never romanticizes them, nor does he shy away from portraying their ignorance and failings. His portrayal here of poverty and rural people is among the richest and most encrusted representations in all of literature. (Donald M. Kartiganer, 1979)
Thus the narrative method of Faulkner is that he tells the story through his characters by providing them with each short section through the story in which they are the narrators. This method, which is named "stream of consciousness", serves lots of purposes. First, it forces the readers to turn out to be more involved in the story for the reason that they must make their assumptions as well as conclusions founded on what is provided by each character. He as well permits the readers to see into the minds of every character, determining for them what kind of person they are. Since Faulkner does not interpose his views, the reader is merely subjected to the opinions of the characters concerning themselves and each other.
One more purpose of this method is to permit the reader to see events from the diverse views of the characters. This way the reader can take out from the different narratives information to outline an unbiased view of the actual event. The author as well includes narrations from characters that are not part of the Bundren family to provide the reader with objective views of the Bundrens as well as their journey. These outside narrators are mainly incorporated to remind the reader that the Bundrens are not normal people and also to provide a clue of reality. Read More