As I Lay Dying
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In the novel As I Lay Dying, the central character is the dying matriarch of the Bundren clan, and she is presented as the center of the life of the family in a number of different ways. She represents Faulkner's view of how strong women hold a family together. Albert J. Guerard sees Faulkner as at least partially a misogynist (Guerard 69), but Faulkner's Addie, for instance, is not painted so darkly and is both appealing and repellant at the same time. The fragmented technique of the book, with multiple points of view represented, only emphasizes how central Addie is, since she is the primary issue for every member of her family. Her death and burial marks a turning point for the family as a group and for every member of the family as an individual, and they reflect on what she means to them. In addition, Faulkner includes a number of narrators who are not Bundrens and who offer therefore a more objective view of Addie and the family. Addie's life is a reminder of the secondary place women hold in society at large and how they make up for it, for good or ill, by taking a central place in the family. In Addie's case, she uses violence and anger as a way of making people recognize that she is alive, though in the end she also sees the need to do something else to make it clear that she had existed. As she faces death, Addie remembers her youth and both the hope she once had and the loss of that hope as she faced the reality of her life:
. . .
ical affairs and in the non-verbal world of experience (Vickery 244).
This is seen in Addie as she considers life after the birth of Cash:
That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit what they are trying to say at. . . I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride (Faulkner 171-172).
In this sense, Addie contrasts with the male characters, and the fact that she has only one narrated section while they have many only emphasizes that they are given to being part of the world of verbal behavior and she is not. However, not all women follow this same approach to life, and Cora contrasts in that she is verbal where Addie is not:
Conventional and righteous, as devoid of brains as her chickens--yet withal kind and well-meaning--she is a comic figure, but not one that can be thereby ignored. Her speech is full of the phrases and rhythms of rural Southern religion, her life is largely shaped according to its verbal formulas, and her response to both individuals and situations is automatically dictated by it (Tuck 39).
The multiple points of view are seen as confusing by some critics and as a self-defeating technique, but it actually strengthens
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Approximate Word count = 1649
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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