1992
First Published
4.40
Average Rating
123
Number of Pages
Part of Series
Economically put, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the story of the death and eventual burial of Addie Bundren, matriarch of the poor, farming, Southern Bundren family, and of the meaning of her death and burial journey to that family. But this is a story that defies a brief summing up. As Addie herself says in the novel, "Words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at." Especially so few words about such a multifaceted work. Embedded in the text is the secret story of each character's inner life; the tangled ensnaring story the characters live together as a family; the universal story of human beings struggling with the meaning of death; the cultural story of the impoverished 1920s in the rural South; the American story of the struggle between individual desire and the collective good. Faulkner unravels all of these stories—and more—from the impelling event of Addie's death. In this concise critical assessment of the novel, Warwick Wadlington takes the view that each of the stories the novel tells simultaneously grows out of and informs the other, much as people shape and are shaped by one another. Faulkner's tendency to show the reader his fictional world from many different angles and points of view—giving each of the characters, for example, a chance to tell his or her private version of a story—is thus echoed in Wadlington's approach to the novel. The author takes into account the many frames through which As I Lay Dying can be perceived—sociohistorical, psychological, cultural, religious, political, artistic, personal—and synthesizes them for the reader. Faulkner's novel as a whole, too, is a story pulled out of older stories that would eventually be taken up by newer ones. As I Lay Dying shows the influence of such master narratives as Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, James Joyce's Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land . And it anticipates much 1930's writing.
Avg Rating
4.40
Number of Ratings
5
5 STARS
40%
4 STARS
60%
3 STARS
0%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
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