As I Lay Dying

(excerpt—Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech)

Analyzing character in a Faulkner novel is like trying to reach the bottom of a bottomless pit because Faulkner’s characters often lack ration, speak in telegraphed stream-of-consciousness, and rarely if ever lend themselves to ready analysis. This is particularly true in As I Lay Dying, a novel of a fragmented and dysfunctional family told through fragmented chapters. Each character reveals their perspective in different chapters, but the perspectives are true to life in that though they all reveal information about the Bundren family and their struggles to exist they are all limited by the perspective of the character providing the revelations. The story centers on the death of the mother of the Bundren clan, Addie, whose imminent death creates fragmentation and chaos in the Bundren family because Anse, Addie’s husband, has promised to travel to Jefferson to bury her with her family. Floods, fires, injuries and poor decisions mar the journey, but the family endures and Anse brings home a new Mrs. Bundren. However, Anse, often read as the most selfish Bundren is the only one prepared to go on with life and accept Addie’s death.

Others in the family are not so ready to accept the displacement of their mother so readily. Among them, Vardaman and Dewey De

. . .
might be why Faulkner has misspellings, out of place syntax and a lack of punctuation dominate his chapters. Unlike Darl, Vardaman does not possess extra-sensory perception or some other valuable tool of gaining insight into the world and himself. His only support to endure was his mother, now dead, which is why we still see his anguish and fear when her coffin is almost carried off in the flooding river, “he comes a long way up slow before his hands do but he’s got to have her got to so I can bear it” (Faulkner 144). Thus, Vardaman is not much more than a frightened child in this situation but Faulkner’s style makes us recognize that most uneducated children without support would be in a similar state. As for being deranged, dysfunctional would be closer to the truth for Vardaman since his entire family exhibits dysfunction of one sort or another. This could be why Darl comments that Vardaman’s face was “fading into the dusk like a piece of paper pasted on a failing wall” (Faulkner 48). Dewey Dell’s comparison to a female vegetable seems less accurate than Vardaman’s description as a frightened child, because she is quite active sexually considering she is a young teenager. A vegetable connotes a lack of life or vigor
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Dewey Dell, Darl Vardaman, Lay Dying, Nobel Prize, Nail Faulkner, Anse Addies, Dewey Dells, Freudian Oedipal, Bundren Anse, Cash Cash, dewey dell, bundren family, vardaman dewey, vardaman dewey dell, lay dying, faulkner lay dying, individualized characters, displaced love, female vegetable, loves mother, dysfunctional family, displaced love mother, love mother transferred, faulkner lay,
Approximate Word count = 1393
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

More Essays on As I Lay Dying