William Faulkner's Book As I Lay Dying: A Research Paper

Introduction

Literature is a great form of entertainment, unfortunately it is only entertaining when the author is skilled in using the proper literary devices and writing styles that capture our emotions, and make it enjoyable to read their books. This story was thoroughly disappointing. It had a lot of hidden plot, symbolism, and a confusing writing style. The overall story was not compelling enough to maintain interest in discovering the symbolism or allusions (Bedient, pp. 202-214). As well, the separate monologues for each character became boring and repetitive and it kept the characters from being thoroughly developed. The total effect is disappointing: the insufficiency of the characterizations does not capture the reader's sympathies and compassion's. It fails to make the reader see the full mental and physical being of each character because they are only presented in their specified chapter, and were not quite depicted in enough detail after their chapters and then-on through the rest of the book. The ending makes the reader feel as though we have been tricked into caring at all. The title of every chapter is a character's name in the story and that is the narrator until the next chapter...they are going to Jefferson to bury Addie (the mother)...and each character tells the story differently. It is the reader's job to find out which narrator to trust (Bedient, pp. 202-214).

The Bundren family lives in a small town in Mississippi. Addie's (the mother of the family) health is deteriorating quickly. She makes a dying wish to her husband Anse that she be placed to rest with her relatives in Jefferson, forty miles away. After Addie dies, the family sets out for Jefferson in a mule-drawn wagon. The family encounters some unlikely mishaps along the way making their journey to bury their loved one a very uneasy task.

Faulkner makes the symbolism in this book really difficult to understand. "My Mother Is A Horse" (Shoemaker, pp. 99-105) The quote means that Jewel was somewhat distant from his family; he does not exactly fit into the family because he is a bastard, and only a half-sibling to the young-uns. To explain this further, Jewel also 'abandons' his family by choosing to work at night to buy a horse rather than work during the day to support his 'family'. Therefore, metaphorically, Jewel has chosen a horse over family, and, Darl, inferred this to mean that Jewel had chosen a horse to be his family rather than his half-blood relatives. "My mother is a fish," (Alldredge, pp. 3-19) this quote means that Vardaman really does think Addie (his mother) is a fish. That is really the only way he, in his young age, can relate things. The fish was dead and never coming back, just like his mom, which explains why he threw a tantrum when the fish was cooked. After Addie dies, the Bundren siblings have no mom. Yet in a conversation between Vardaman and Darl, they talk about having a mother ...