Addie in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
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Addie, in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, is shown to be a hardened, hard-working, unloving woman, wife and mother who sees life as a matter of fulfilling a woman's duties to her husband and children, and little else. She is an unsympathetic character, but she is so clearly and completely trapped by her social and familial circumstances that it is hard to judge her. She accepts life as it is given to her by others, never considers that life is anything but a series of duties to her family, feels nothing in her conscience about her failure or inability to love, and must at least be given credit for holding her family together until she dies, even though the family is a group of deeply troubled individuals. Addie's monologue shows her to be bitterly determined to defend herself and her life to the very end. She feels that she has done just what society taught her to do--hold her family together through hard work and harsh doses of reality about how difficult life is. She is angry, miserable, and cynical, but she makes clear that she has become the way she is in large part because of her father and the lessons he taught her about life, lessons she then passed along to her children. "I could just remember how ny father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time." Recalling her daughter Cora's effort to get her to pray, repent and save her soul, Addie says, "salvation is just words." About her children, she writes, "In the afternoon when
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ople about whom Hughes writes are not able to fulfill their dreams, are not even able to try to fulfill them. Although Hughes is writing about blacks, the poem's theme can be applied to anyone who has had his or her "dream deferred" in any way or who empathizes with those who have. The dreams deferred are, says Hughes, like "raisin[s] in the sun."
The theme deals not only with sadness but the outrage which comes from the knowledge that this massive deferring of dreams of a great bulk of an entire race of people does not have to happen and did not have to happen. There is an implied warning in the last line, "Or does it explode?"
In Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," the poet explores the themes of hope, inspiration and a sense of the interconnectedness of generations of people through the centuries. Hughes's theme carries the message that blacks were not born into slavery and were not the helpless victims of injustice from the moment they appeared in the world. To the contrary, they have had a proud and accomplished history in which they and their civilizations reigned supreme. The theme of hope also creates a spiritual feeling that comes from the poet's words about his soul and the soul's kinship with both the earth a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Lay Dying, Blanche DuBois, America Learning, Especially Hemingway, Speaks Rivers, Dream Deferred, Stanley Stanley, Addie Bundren, Named Desire, Kilimanjaro Harry, emotionally psychologically, de nigger, fur ah, black female, bad luck, dream deferred, de white, hughes's theme, hughes's poem, opportunity connect,
Approximate Word count = 2043
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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