Introduction toAs I Lay Dying by William FaulknerPrepared by Ms. Teref :D

William Faulkner’s Bio

1897-1962, Mississippi

Famous novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929) & As I Lay Dying (1930) much critical praise, not commercially successful.

Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature (why does this matter?

During the last ten years of his life, he traveled, lectured, and became an outspoken critic of segregation. In 1962, after years of drinking and a succession of physical problems, he died in Mississippi.

Historical ContextOn October 24, 1929, the day before Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying, the stock market crashed marking the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In the rural South, however, economic hardship had been a way of life for years, especially for poor farmers. What do you know about the Civil War, Sherman’s March, the Reconstruction?

Religion in this poor white rural community was a potent factor, and a person's relationship with God provided one with values, activities, and friends. Many critics contend that poor whites used religious beliefs as a means of coping with economic deprivation, social inferiority, and political weakness.

Making Connections:Sound familiar?

- Southern writer

- Concerned with the rural poor of the South

- Concerned with the legacy of war, slavery

- Interest in the grotesque, freaks, the powerlessness of the south → Southern Gothic (nudge, nudge)

- e.g. FOF: textbook salesman from Denmark + kissing a corpse (most recent gossip from the deep South from Ms. Teref)

Map of the South U.S.

Pictures from the rural South in the 1930’s:

Purpose and Implication

Pictures from the rural South in the 1930s

Pictures from the rural South

ThemesAlienation and Loneliness: use of multiple narrators, characters’ inability to communicate effectively

Death: journey to bury a decomposing corpse

Language: limitation of language – dialect, grammar, education

Love and Passion: parental love, extramarital affairs, rejection of spouse, children’s love for parents

Sanity and Insanity: descent into madness, abortion, telepathy, hypersensitivity.

Sound familiar? Which literary works have we read so far that we can make connections with?

Making Connections:The Modern Novel

- Unreliable narrator/POV

- Dystopian world (opposite of Utopia): frustration with the world, existentialist concerns

- Nonlinear narrative structure

DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? Have we read a modern novel before?

Style – if you feel confused about who’s speaking to whom…

Setting: northern part of Mississippi in 1928

Point of View: 59 chapters narrated by 15 different characters. Darl is the most frequent voice, narrating 19 chapters Stream of Consciousness

a literary technique reproducing exact thoughts, like a “live broadcast” of what’s going on in the mind of certain characters. These thoughts are direct, revealing, unedited, ungrammatical, chaotic, unpunctuated, spontaneous, uncontrolled... Faulkner does not use this technique in all of his chapters, restricting it primarily to the Bundren Family, especially Darl and Vardaman.

Example: Vardaman reacts hysterically: "I ran down into the water to help and I couldn't stop hollering because Darl was strong and steady holding her under the water even if she did fight he would not let her go he was seeing me and he would hold her and it was all right now it was all right now it was all right.”

Example: Cora, p. 6: how is her stream of consciousness revealed?