As I Lay Dying

To discuss As I Lay Dying in terms of existentialist concerns of alienation and isolation is to discuss the whole of Faulkner's opus in those terms. Set in the milieu of a journey to Jefferson to bury the mother of a family, As I Lay Dying describes a condition of man in turmoil, powerlessness, isolation, increased and aggravated by the character of their human relationships--rarely simple and unaffected, often eccentric, sometimes depraved, nearly always compelling. Seeking to placate or overcome the furious confusion of the present, they hold to an illusion of personal and social pasts. What the reader discovers as the characters travel through this space of time is not merely that life isn't what it was, but that it never was what it was. The past--the peculiar mythos of the family on one hand and the overriding ethos of the Old South on the other--offers deceptive sustenance. But evasion and persistent denial of authentic self-hood of Faulkner's characters serve to increas

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ependent on the actions that define the everyday experience of life. It was not that I could think of myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now . . . And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words to straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words (173-4). In other words, one's mental experience of the world is dissociative with one's physical experience of the same world. In consequence, the individual who experiences such dissociation is alienated not only from the world but from himself. The individual enacts one life but experiences quite a different one, and the difference increases in intensity to the degree that the physical enactment of life is perverse, unsatisfying, random, lacking in anything approaching fulfillment. In the days of waiting for Addie to die, knowing that Addie's coffin will be placed on the wagon for the trip to Je
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Approximate Word count = 2822
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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