More about As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying: Style

Setting
As I Lay Dying takes place in the northern part of Mississippi in 1928. The Bundrens must travel forty miles to bury Addie in Jefferson, the primary town in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The Bundrens live in a time of economic hardship for cotton farmers, who have had to suffer through a depressed cotton market and disastrously heavy rains. They also lack modern farming equipment, instead employing farm animals and their own labor.
The modern world exists in Jefferson, however, and the Bundrens often comment on the distinctions between country people and town people. The social environment of the time features a code of ethics that obligates farm families to house and feed travelers, although the Bundrens refuse such assistance. Faulkner also depicts a natural environment that is at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile, bringing floods, heat, and intrusive buzzards.

Point of View
As I Lay Dying consists of fifty-nine chapters narrated by fifteen different characters. Darl is the most frequent voice, narrating nineteen chapters; some characters, like Addie Bundren, Jewel Bun-dren, and various townspeople, narrate only one chapter. Many chapters appear to unfold as events take place, particularly those narrated by the Bundrens; others relate events that occurred in the past. At times, Faulkner extends beyond the realm of credible narration, such as when Darl narrates Addie' s death when he is not present and when the deceased Addie recollects her life.
Through these varying perspectives, the reader witnesses both the events that take place and the character's individual perceptions of them. Indeed, at times the reader can only discern events by comparing information from various narrators. The reader learns about the assumptions and peculiarities of the different narrators, as well as their social and religious environment. As a result, Faulkner constructs not only a rendition of events but also a series of interconnected psychological studies.

Stream of Consciousness
"Stream of consciousness" is a literary technique that reproduces the thought processes of certain characters. These thoughts appear as if they are immediate, unedited responses. Faulkner does not use this technique in all of his chapters, restricting it primarily to the Bundrens, especially Darl and Vardaman.
The stream-of-consciousness passages reveal character and allow for complicated philosophical questioning. They also imply a character's confusion or distress. A key example occurs when Addie' s coffin falls into the river and Vardaman reacts hysterically: "I ran down into the water to help and I couldn't stop hollering because Darl was strong and steady holding her under the water even if she did fight he would not let her go he was seeing me and he would hold her and it was all right now it was all right now it was all right."
Although Faulkner employs paragraph breaks and, in one paragraph, italics, he does not use punctuation until Vardaman speaks to Darl at the end of the chapter. This moment and others in the novel involve the reader in the sometimes perplexing but always engaging world of the characters.

Humor
One of the most obvious features of the novel is its humor. One might expect a bleak tone from a story featuring death, a burial procession, abortion, and familial hardship, but Faulkner defies expectation by utilizing comedy, albeit dark comedy.
Faulkner employs a variety of means to achieve this effect. The family journey to bury Addie is absurd in itself, and the dogged determination of the Bundrens often evokes a humorous reaction. Faulkner also uses the characters' perceptions and faults to generate humor, such as when Anse slithers out of his responsibility for Cash's broken leg: “‘It's a trial,' he says. 'But I don't begrudge her [Addie] it.'" Cash's own understatement can create humor, as well, whether it is his stoic refrain on his leg, "It don't bother me none," or his recollection of the distance he fell off of a roof: “‘Twenty-eight foot, four and half inches, about.' "
Perhaps the most glaring and outrageous comic moment is the ending. After all the family has endured and the losses they have suffered, the selfish, resilient Anse appears with a set of new teeth and a "duckshaped" woman as his new wife. Such episodes make the novel difficult to categorize and greatly enrich its texture and effects.

Modernism
Critics often associate Faulkner with literary modernism, a movement that began before World War I and gained prominence during the 1920s. In fact, Faulkner was greatly influenced by two of the most celebrated modernists T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Eliot's poem The Waste Land explored, in both form and content, the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Joyce's landmark novel Ulysses featured the use of "stream of consciousness," which Faulkner employs in As I Lay Dying.
Modernist writers experimented with language and literary form and were concerned with the limits of expression. Most modernist authors depicted characters grappling with the loss of traditional beliefs after the destructiveness of World War I. These characters are alienated from their past and from others characters, and often suffer from an inability to communicate. Faulkner's interest in these practices and themes is obvious, especially in his experiments with narrative perspective, his focus on language and its failures, and his themes of alienation and the destruction of community, including families.

As I Lay Dying: Historical Context
Farm Life in the South
Despite efforts to improve technology and farming methods, a farmer's life during the 1920s involved a constant struggle for survival. The farming life was restrictive and demanding on both men and women. In fact, farmers often lived on an income of little over one hundred dollars a year. Therefore, even families who owned their land relied almost exclusively on themselves to supply both farm labor and basic necessities. Some would hire additional help during harvesting season, yet this expense could prove burdensome as well.
Farmers at the time in which As I Lay Dying is set, such as these people picking cotton in 1928, performed backbreaking labor and generally earned barely enough to survive. One can see, then, that Darl and Jewel earning three dollars to haul wood was a good job, and the purchases of luxuries like false teeth and bananas were a big deal. In essence, a farm family's land, labor, livestock, and equipment were its only assets. To lose any of them could prove disastrous, a fact which underscores the impact of Darl's decision to burn Gillespie's barn.
According to many scholars of Southern culture, two belief systems provided many Southerners with pride and a sense of purpose: religious conviction and racism. Religion in this community was a potent emotional and psychological force, and a person's relationship with God provided one with a set of values, activities, and friends. Many critics contend that poor whites used religious beliefs as a means of coping with economic deprivation, social inferiority, and political weakness.
White supremacist beliefs also served these ends for some white citizens, providing poor white laborers with a sense of personal worth and group solidarity against a perceived menace. The economic conditions, religious beliefs, and racial views of white farmers became important factors in Southern politics in the early twentieth century.

As I Lay Dying: Historical Context    35
A demonstration of a "psychoanalyzing machine." During the early 1900s, interest in psychology was growing and works such Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, with its interior monologues and psychological elements, were gaining interest. Economics and Politics in the Rural South On October 24, 1929, the day before Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying, the American stock market crashed. This financial disaster ended a period of post-World War I economic expansion and marked the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In the rural South, however, economic hardship had been a way of life for years, especially for poor farmers. Three factors, in particular, affected Mississippi cotton farmers. One, farmers operated under a lien system, whereby they pledged future crops to merchants in return for necessary supplies. Thus, they were in continuous debt. Second, a longstanding depression in the cotton market forced farmers to go further into debt until they could barely manage to sustain their farms or their families. Third, heavy rains and floods in the late 1920s nearly ruined production. These elements combined with outdated farming methods to make already difficult conditions even worse.
Such tensions were a staple element of Southern life in the early decades of the century. The exploitation of the working class generated populist movements that impacted Mississippi politics in the early 1900s. Sometimes termed "the revolt of the rednecks," these reforms ushered in a new breed of politician.
One of the most prominent of these men, James K. Vardaman, serves as a representative example (especially since Faulkner's family supported him and Faulkner named the youngest Bundren son after him). As Mississippi governor from 1904 to 1908 and a United States Senator from 1912 to 1918 Vardaman was a flamboyant orator and advocate of white laborers. Coming from a poor background, he called for greater regulation of corporations and supported such progressive causes as a graduated income tax, child labor laws, and women's suffrage.
One of his most potent appeals, however, was his strident racism. His views and manner earned him both the nickname "The White Chief" and a reputation as a demagogue who used racial hatred to further his own ambitions. By 1918, Vardaman had lost his once-formidable influence because he opposed American involvement in World War I. "Vardamanism," as his brand of politics was termed, had faded by the late 1920s, but populist loyalties still existed among farmers, as did the white supremacist ideals that provided poor whites with a false sense of superiority and power.


As I Lay Dying: Critical Overview
After its publication in 1930, As I Lay Dying garnered several positive critical reviews in America and Britain. The American reviews were generally more favorable than the British, but this early critical commentary touched on issues that were to become pronounced in later, more substantial critiques of the book.
In those early reviews, critics recognized Faulkner's talent but remained suspicious of As I Lay Dying. Many commentators questioned the novel's controversial subject matter—such as abortion—and its emphasis on the grotesque and violent. Some critics derided As I Lay Dying as tasteless and immoral. Faulkner's style and narrative method, of course, received much critical attention. In general, his use of the vernacular was praised, but his more complicated and elusive passages were deemed confusing. Social-minded critics condemned Faulkner for his lack of overt social commentary.
Most of the early reviewers questioned both Faulkner's tone toward his characters and the genre of the work, issues that recur in later critical commentary. French critics provided Faulkner with his most enthusiastic early notices, although the novel was not translated and published in France until 1934.
After 1940, more substantive critiques of the novel began to appear. A major reason for the renewed interest in As I Lay Dying was the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946. The editor of the volume, Malcolm Cowley, was a seasoned literary editor who contended that Faulkner had successfully developed a distinctive Southern mythology based on his fiction set in and around Yoknapatawpha County. In his influential introduction to the book, Cowley advocated reading all of Faulkner's works as a collective project or, in his words, "part of the same living pattern." Cowley's opinions influenced Faulkner criticism in the following decades.
Critics began to take a more universalistic approach to Faulkner's fiction, viewing his Southern world as representative of the modern world and as a means of exploring timeless human dilemmas. Many commentators began to read As I Lay Dying as affirmative and even moral.
Irving Howe, in his 1952 work William Faulkner: A Critical Study, clearly articulates this stance: "Of all Faulkner's novels, As I Lay Dying is the warmest, the kindliest and most affectionate.... In no other work is he so receptive to people, so ready to take and love them, to hear them out and record their turns of idiom, their melodies of speech."
Other prominent critics, such as Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, focused on the family's heroism in the face of many obstacles. Brooks's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) was, in fact, the most influential critical work on Faulkner for many years. It still holds a prominent place in Faulkner studies today.
These favorable views of the Bundrens did not go unchallenged, however. In her chapter "The Dimensions of Consciousness: As I Lay Dying," from The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation (1959), Olga Vickery contends that the Bundren family's journey is not heroic. She focuses attention on the character of Addie and her relationship with her children. For Vickery, Cash becomes the most ethically reliable character since he matures during the journey.
Vickery's views proved highly influential. Other critics followed her lead and continued to debate the tone of the novel. Many rejected the notions that Faulkner is sympathetic to his characters, the Bundrens heroic, and the novel essentially moral. These commentators focused attention on Faulkner's comedic elements and satiric stance. Even the critics who explored Faulkner's journey motif and its connections to myth, Christian symbolism, or existential philosophy disputed the tone of Faulkner's treatment of these issues.

Questions surrounding Faulkner's technique, style, form, and use of genre continued to garner comment. Many commentators discussed his relationship to modernist writing and experimental painting, particularly cubism. In a 1967 essay, "Narrative Management in As I Lay Dying," R. W. Franklin criticized Faulkner's stylistic technique for its inconsistencies in tense and strategy. Franklin's reading has since been effectively challenged by more careful treatments, such as Catherine Patten's "The Narrative Design of As I Lay Dying." Various critics have viewed the novel as epic, tragic, comedic, farcical, or absurd.
André Bleikasten investigates these issues in the first book-length study of the novel, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1973). Like some critics before him and many after, Bleikasten contends that As I Lay Dying defies genre distinctions because it fuses multiple approaches to its subject. In summary, Bleikasten asserts, "As I Lay Dying offers us at once a comedy and the reverse of comedy, a tragedy and the derision of tragedy, an epic and the parody of an epic."
Recent critics have expanded on earlier treatments by integrating new theories in psychology, linguistics, gender relations, and cultural studies. Some scholars, for instance, examine the novel in light of Freud's psychological concepts, such as the Oedipal theory. Scholarship in gender construction has placed important emphasis on the female characters in the book. A few critics investigate Faulkner's linguistic constructs, such as Stephen M. Ross in Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner (1989). In addition, sociological critiques have recently been revived in more complex forms.
Critics have detailed the effects of economics, politics, religion, and technology in the novel. Warwick Wadlington's 1992 book As I Lay Dying: Stories out of Stories is the most comprehensive of these studies. Almost all of the recent treatments view the work favorably, appreciating, if not always celebrating, Faulkner's ability to make the misadventures of the haggard, unfortunate Bundrens such a potent subject for critical scrutiny.