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.
Vardaman’s panicked syntax, repetition, and tone after Addie’s death indicates that Vardaman enters an outwardly-focused existential crisis. The moment after Addie dies, Vardaman says the fish he caught earlier is “all cut up into not-fish now. [He] can hear the bed and her face and them and [he] can feel the floor shake”(53). Paralleling Addie’s death, the distinction between “fish” and “not-fish” reveals the confusion Vardaman faces in digesting the concept of death: because “not-fish” acts as a euphemism for dead fish, Vardaman exposes the lack of understanding he has of his mother’s death. This confusion also arises through the lack of punctuation in Vardaman’s latter sentence, expressing panic and showcases the chaos overcoming Vardaman’s mind. The latter sentence also reveals Vardaman’s panic through “floor shake,” whose dramatic connotation illustrates the distress in his own mind. Refocusing Vardaman’s confusion on Addie’s deat...
... middle of paper ...
...s, Jewel and Cash’s identities assume fragile and unstable qualities.
With his existential crisis precipitating from his mother’s death, Vardaman demonstrates through his panicked syntax the impermanence and fragility of identities. Because Vardaman is a child and the most impressionable of the Bundrens, he easily absorbs and clearly reflects his family’s concept of identity, thereby asserting the impermanence of identity as one of As I Lay Dying’s major themes. With its fluctuating, identity-questioning qualities, the impermanence of identity embodies the essence of Modernism in the early 1900s. In this Modernistic spirit, Faulkner illustrates the futility of trying to solidify one’s own identity, drawing upon sentiments from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester’s identity is at the mercy of the Puritan community’s many-layered and fluctuating judgement.
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:
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.
“As I Lay Dying, read as the dramatic confrontation of words and actions, presents Faulkner’s allegory of the limits of talent” (Jacobi). William Faulkner uses many different themes that make this novel a great book. Faulkner shows his talent by uses different scenarios, which makes the book not only comedic but informational on the human mind. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is a great book that illustrates great themes and examples. Faulkner illustrates different character and theme dynamics throughout the entire novel, which makes the book a humorous yet emotional roller coaster. Faulkner illustrates the sense of identity, alienation, and the results of physical and mental death to show what he thinks of the human mind.
Faulkner, William. As I lay Dying. First Vintage International Edition. Toronto, Canada: Random House of Canada Limited, 1990. Print.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. Edited by Noel Polk. New York: Vintage, 1985. Print.
One of the main themes in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is the concept of isolation and loneliness of not just the characters in the book, but humanity itself. Each character is essentially isolated from all the others, as the plot is told through each of the characters’ perspectives through stream of consciousness. As a result of Faulkner’s use of multiple narratives, the reader does not attain an objective third person viewpoint of everything that occurs. The closest the reader gets to an omniscient narrator is Darl Bundren as he is able to relate events that occur while not having been present at the time. Although the Bundrens live together as well as make the journey to Jefferson, it is through their inherent isolation and loneliness that they cannot effectively communicate with each other which ultimately leads to Darl’s fateful actions.
Through an intimate maternal bond, Michaels mother experiences the consequences of Michaels decisions, weakening her to a debilitating state of grief. “Once he belonged to me”; “He was ours,” the repetition of these inclusive statements indicates her fulfilment from protecting her son and inability to find value in life without him. Through the cyclical narrative structure, it is evident that the loss and grief felt by the mother is continual and indeterminable. Dawson reveals death can bring out weakness and anger in self and with others. The use of words with negative connotations towards the end of the story, “Lonely,” “cold,” “dead,” enforce the mother’s grief and regressing nature. Thus, people who find contentment through others, cannot find fulfilment without the presence of that individual.
William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying takes place in the fictional town of Yaknapatawpha, Mississippi in the 1920’s. It is set in the summertime in the ‘deep south’, which had continual dry and hot conditions. The novel tells of the quest of the Bundren family to bury Addie Bundren in Jefferson, where her family was buried. The Bundren family goes through many unexpected trials on this journey, but still manages to bury Addie where she requested. Among her children, were two of her four sons, Darl and Vardaman. They both had different perspectives and ways of understanding people and Addie’s death. Darl and Vardaman’s perspectives differed widely because of the age difference and maturity levels.
Addie Bundren of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has often been characterized as an unnatural, loveless, cold mother whose demands drive her family on a miserable trek to bury her body in Jefferson. For a feminist understanding of Addie, we have to move outside the traditional patriarchal definitions of "womanhood" or "motherhood" that demand selflessness from others, blame mothers for all familial dysfunction, and only lead to negative readings of Addie. She also has been characterized as yet another Faulkner character who is unable to express herself using language. This modernist view of the inexpressiblility of the creative spirit does not apply to Addie simply because she is not an artist; she is a woman and a mother, a person who feminist theorists would desribe as "traditionally mute." To characterize her using universalizing, humanist terms erases the way that her character is marked by her biological sex and by the gender roles she is forced to play. Addie is not a representative of humankind, or even of womankind, but an individual woman trapped in a partriarchal world that represses her desires and silences her; a woman who longs to find an identity of her own that is outside patriarchal constructions and not always definable in relation to the men and the children in her life. Most importantly, Addie is a character who is acutely aware of the linguistic and social oppression that traps her into a life she does not want.
“As I Lay Dying”, is a well known novel, written by William Faulkner, who tells a story about a dying mother and her one last dying wish. The Bundren family tries to attempt to grant the mother’s, Addie Bundren, last wish but each character had his or her selfish reasons for actually traveling to where Addie Bundren wished to be buried at. The journey to Jefferson burial grounds had the Bundren’s helping one another through the different situations that occurred, but also the Bundren family had many differences between each character that caused betrayal to one another.
In William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, the youngest character, Vardaman, has a chapter where he says “My mother is a fish” (84). He is going through some psychological drama due to the death of his mother. He is trying to make logic of the situation. He compares his mom to the fish he caught. The fish was once a fish, alive and well, until it was caught, and Vardaman cut it up. The fish was a fish at first, but after it deceased, it wasn’t a fish anymore. He is basically saying that his mother was his mother, until she died, and now she wasn’t anymore. Vardaman didn’t exactly understand the death of his mother, so in his eyes, comparing her to a fish, was the best thing he could do.
Throughout his villanelle, “Saturday at the Border,” Hayden Carruth continuously mentions the “death-knell” (Carruth 3) to reveal his aged narrator’s anticipation of his upcoming death. The poem written in conversation with Carruth’s villanelle, “Monday at the River,” assures the narrator that despite his age, he still possesses the expertise to write a well structured poem. Additionally, the poem offers Carruth’s narrator a different attitude with which to approach his writing, as well as his death, to alleviate his feelings of distress and encourage him to write with confidence.
In As I Lay Dying the Bundren family faces many hardships dealing with death and physical nature. Nature plays a major role in moving Faulkner’s story. Nature takes a toll on the family in their time of despair of losing a loved one. They are challenged by human nature and the nature of the elements. Throughout the story the family overcomes the human nature of emotions and the nature of the weather. They face nature in the most peculiar ways, like a flood that keeps them from crossing, the decaying body of Addie, and how they all grieve over the death of Addie; Dewey Dell said, “I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had” (Faulkner 110). The forces of nature compete with the Burden family.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
Myra, who is dying of illness, escapes the confinement of her stuffy, dark apartment. She refuses to succumb to death in an insubordinate manner. By leaving the apartment and embracing open space, Myra rejects the societal pressure to be a kept woman. Myra did not want to die “like this, alone with [her] mortal enemy” (Cather, 85). Myra wanted to recapture the independence she sacrificed when eloping with Oswald. In leaving the apartment, Myra simultaneously conveys her disapproval for the meager lifestyle that her husband provides for her and the impetus that a woman needs a man to provide for her at all. Myra chose to die alone in an open space – away from the confinement of the hotel walls that served as reminders of her poverty and the marriage that stripped her of wealth and status. She wished to be “cremated and her ashes buried ‘in some lonely unfrequented place in the mountains, or in the sea” (Cather, 83). She wished to be alone once she died, she wanted freedom from quarantining walls and the institution of marriage that had deprived her of affluence and happiness. Myra died “wrapped in her blankets, leaning against the cedar trunk, facing the sea…the ebony crucifix in her hands” (Cather, 82). She died on her own terms, unconstrained by a male, and unbounded by space that symbolized her socioeconomic standing. The setting she died in was the complete opposite of the space she had lived in with Oswald: It was free space amid open air. She reverted back to the religious views of her youth, symbolizing her desire to recant her ‘sin’ of leaving her uncle for Oswald, and thus abandoning her wealth. “In religion , desire was fulfillment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded”( Cather, 77), it was not the “object of the quest that brought satisfaction” (Cather, 77). Therefore, Myra ends back where she began; she dies holding onto