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As I Lay Dying

which the pattern of ideas emerges, the effect is that the first-person-limited technique limits the insight of the narrator to that of personal idiosyncrasy. But the reader gets the picture.

A sense of isolation is emphasized throughout the book. It is a bitter irony that the Bundrens for the most part have no sense of the meaning of isolation behind experience of it, only the experience itself. Anse, for example, experiences the knowledge of Addie's impending death as just one more piece of ill-timed bad luck; if Addie weren't dying and Anse didn't have to pay for the funeral or get a load of lumber to a customer, he could get his "mouth fixed where I could eat God's own victuals as a man should, and her hale and well as ere a woman in the land until that day. Got to pay for being put to the need of that three dollars" (37). To put it another way, Addie's death is happening to him, not to her. Anse's universe is in existential disarray, and if it's his not soon-to-be-late wife's fault, well, it's certainly not Anse's, either. His experience of Addie's death is one of vague unease and alienation, an attribute that is consistent with the existential world view. The same can be said of Dewey Dell, whose grief for her mother is mixed with her dread of being an unwed mother who will have to cope with a baby alone: "If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone" (58-9). The irony of Dewey Dell's situation is that, in the single human experience that unites the individual with the other, she feels isolated. She would like to feel independent, which is solitude without alienation. But the alienation is all that she feels. This is her experience of an alienated universe, which in turn gives substance to the existential view of the world.

Isolatio...

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As I Lay Dying. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:35, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1705181.html