About Faulkner and his South

• Guiding Questions

  • Who is William Faulkner?
  • What makes "the South" an interesting setting?
  • What does it mean to have multiple voices or perspectives instead of just one?

  Overview

  "The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead for a long time" -- Addie Bundren in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
  William Faulkner's self-proclaimed masterpiece, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, is a fascinating exploration of the many voices found in a Southern family and community. The following lesson examines the novel's use of multiple voices in its narrative. Faulkner:
  

  often told his stories using multiple narratives, each with their own interests and biases, who allow us to piece together the 'true' circumstances of the story, not as clues in a mystery, but as different melodies in a piece of music that form a crescendo. The conclusion presents a key to understanding the broad panorama surrounding the central event in a way that traditional linear narratives simply are unable to accomplish.
  —Evan Goodwin on Faulkner

  The novel's title—As I Lay Dying—invokes a first-person speaker, presumably the voice of the dead mother, Addie Bundren. Yet she only speaks once in the novel, and she is dead, not dying, throughout most of the novel (aside from the beginning chapters). How does Faulkner's form for the novel—a series of competing voices and perspectives presented as a multiple-voice narrative—work for or against the novel's title?
  Students will also explore the context of the novel, examine background information on social and economic conditions in the rural South in the first decades of the twentieth century. This background will enable the teacher and students to "place" Faulkner's novel historically and sociologically; Faulkner wrote about his own time and a place he knew well. Faulkner's life will be presented, briefly, so that parallels can be drawn between his life and the life depicted in the text. Faulkner grew up in a small Mississippi town in a middle-class family and saw in his surroundings perfect models for characters like the Bundren family and their neighbors. In the lessons of this curriculum unit, students will
  

  • Explore the use of multiple voices in narration
  • Learn about the social and economic conditions of the rural South in the 1920s and about William Faulkner's life.
  • Read, annotate, and discuss the text in class, individually and in groups.
  •  
  Activity 1. Images of Faulkner and the South

Activity 1. Images of Faulkner and the South

Using the following websites, students will (preferably in groups) explore one aspect of or perspective on Faulkner's life and the culture of the South. Students should explore the webpage in detail and then write a brief summary of what they discover. If there are images on the website, students should also analyze them—what kind of image is it (graph, photograph, etc.) and what does it reveal about the subject? What does it obscure? The Document Analysis Worksheets, available via EDSITEment reviewed NARA Digital Classroom, might aid in this process.
Questions that students might want to consider:

1. What is the 'voice' of their website? Who wrote it? For what purpose? [these are also good questions for students to ask when viewing any webpage for academic purposes]
2. What effect does the style or form of the source have on your interpretation of the content? Does it matter if you read a biography, a chronology, a map, or an image? Do certain forms illuminate certain things while obscuring others? In what way?
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages to having multiple perspectives on the same subject?

The teacher should have each group present their findings, recording important aspects on the board

Web Links:

• 1. From William Faulkner on the Web via Internet Public Library:
  • Biography
  • Chronology of Faulkner's Life,
  • Faulkner Family Tree
• 2. William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech via Internet Public Library
• 3. Faulkner Biography at the Mississippi Writers Page via Internet Public Library
• 4. Faulkner Image Gallery at the Mississippi Writers Page has several interesting and useful images, including:
  • The Yocona River Bridge in the Early 1900s http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/dir/faulkner_william/yocona.html
• 5. Brief Faulkner biography via American Memory

6. www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/timeline/faulkner.html

7. www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec97/faulkner_9-26.html

• The South: What is it, Where is it?, excerpted from John Shelton Reed's My Tears Spoiled My Aim and available via EDSITEment reviewed American Studies at the University of Virginia, might be a good way for students to examine the multiple perspectives of the South. The article is lengthy, and uses statistics ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s, so teacher guidance is advised.
• Teachers might want to include some of the sections of Literature in the American South (as detailed in Preparing to Teach above). Drawn from The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, several excerpts have valuable information about the South in literature. Two valuable point of departure might be:
  • Civil War
  • Humor

Allow each group to offer a perspective, writing the information on a black board. After all groups have presented, you should have a list of different "perspectives." Discuss them and put them in the context of Faulkner's life and work. This activity serves two purposes. First, the fact finding aspect simply educates students about Faulkner's life, as well as some history of the South. Secondly, and equally importantly, the teacher can use this opportunity as an introduction to the idea of multiple perspectives or points-of-view in describing the life of one person. They are creating a narrative of Faulkner just as many perspectives help shape the narrative of Addie Bundren and her family.
Finish by reviewing the quotation by Evan Goodwin at the beginning of this lesson:

[Faulkner] often told his stories using multiple narratives, each with their own interests and biases, who allow us to piece together the 'true' circumstances of the story, not as clues in a mystery, but as different melodies in a piece of music that form a crescendo. The conclusion presents a key to understanding the broad panorama surrounding the central event in a way that traditional linear narratives simply are unable to accomplish.

Discuss how Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, like history, can be made up of sometimes competing or confusing bits of knowledge, based on the perspective of the viewer.