William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and in Virginia Woolf’s A Mark on the Wall - Subjective Narrative

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and in Virginia Woolf’s A Mark on the Wall - Subjective Narratives in Modernist Texts

Like many other modernist texts, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying employs many unreliable narrators to reveal the progression of the novel. One of the most interesting of these narrators is the youngest Bundren child, Vardaman. Like the rest of his family, Vardaman is mentally unstable, but his condition is magnified due to this lack of understanding of life and death. Because he doesn’t grasp this basic concept, Vardaman’s attempts to understand his mother’s death are some of the most compelling aspect of the novel. Over the course of the book, Vardaman attempts to rationalize his mother’s death through animals, particularly a fish. Through these rationalizations, Vardaman comes to a seemingly logical conclusion about the nature of life and death. While these conclusions seem perfectly logical to Vardaman, they are nonsensical to the reader. This concept helps illustrate the use of subjective narrators in As I Lay Dying, and defines it as a Modernist text.

Vardaman’s first narrative comes right after his mother Addie’s death. Frightened, he runs out of the house and tries to rationalize what has just happened. He describes his earlier chore of gutting and chopping up a fish in the yard and then directly relates this experience to Addie: “If I jump off the porch I will be where the fish was, and it all cut up into not-fish now. I can hear the bed and her face and them and I can feel the floor shake when he walks on it that came and did it” (53-54). Here, Vardaman is confused as to what exactly happened in Addie’s bedroom. He portrays the before and after of the fish, being “ fish”...

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The use of the subjective narrative in Modernist literature is one component of the movement’s radical break from previous literary periods. The subjective, psychologically oriented narratives in As I Lay Dying and “A Mark on the Wall” are illustrative of this radical literary change. Vardaman Bundren’s irregular logic reconciling his mother’s death, Virginia Woolf’s meandering stream of consciousness narratives help define their texts as key elements of this groundbreaking movement.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Random House, 1985.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Mark on the Wall.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century. 7th ed. Vol. 2C. Ed M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 2000. 2143-2148

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