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Introduction to As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Introduction to As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. William Faulkner’s Bio. 1897-1962, born in New Albany, Mississippi and later moved to Oxford, Mississippi Worked as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi but was fired for reading on the job.

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Introduction to As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

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  1. Introduction toAs I Lay Dyingby William Faulkner

  2. William Faulkner’s Bio • 1897-1962, born in New Albany, Mississippi and later moved to Oxford, Mississippi • Worked as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi but was fired for reading on the job. • Married his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham, who developed a drug addiction, and they had 3 children together. • His alcoholism was a constant hardship on his heath and mental performance. • The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) received much critical praise, but were not commercially successful. • For the rest of his life, Faulkner made his living as a writer of fiction and Hollywood screenplays. His most accomplished works in the 1930s and 1940s: Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. • Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. 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.

  3. Historical Context • On October 24, 1929, the day before Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying, the American 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 (Civil War, Sherman’s March, 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. • He often wrote about Southern social dynamics, specifically the inequality felt by African Americans. • His stories correspond with his own life experiences and his fantasies, like his drinking problem, and a strange obsession with rape, incest, suicide, and greed.

  4. Pictures from the rural South in the 1930’s

  5. Pictures from the rural South in the 1930s

  6. Pictures from the rural South

  7. Faulkner’s Fiction • Faulkner created an imaginary place called Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi, along with its inhabitants over thirty years of writing. This county was modeled after Lafayette County. This is a Chickasaw term that means “water passes slowly through flatlands” • This location was used to show the decay of the Old South through the Sartoris and Compson families. • Racial prejudice, class division, and family are recurring themes in his works.

  8. “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades.” The Title comes from Agamemnon’s speech to Odysseus in the Odyssey, Book XI.

  9. Themes • Alienation 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.

  10. Style – if you are clueless & befuddled 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 “The Stream of Consciousness” • a literary technique reproducing exact thoughts, like a “live broadcast” or a “brainstorm” 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.”

  11. The stream of consciousness literary technique… • provides a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional character’s consciousness • creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind, gaining intimate access to their private “thoughts” • presents in the form of written text something that is neither entirely verbal nor textual (ergo the grammar/syntax are strange) • focuses on the emotional and psychological processes that are taking place in the minds of one or more characters (ergo it’s ok if you’re having trouble following the text) • has the plot line which may weave in and out of time and place (ergo may be difficult to follow).

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