1. Introduction to As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Prepared by Ms. Teref :D

2. William Faulkner ( ) “My requirements for writing: paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky”
Grew up in Oxford Mississippi in a long-established Mississippi family
Uncle a colonel in the Confederate army
Family’s roots in the Old South furnish him with settings, themes, and cultural identity for sixteen novels and many short stories
His work is decidedly southern
Began writing after he was in WWI

3. William Faulkner’s Bio
The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) much critical praise, 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.

4. Historical Context
On October 24, 1929, the day before Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying, the American stock market crashed (remember The Razor’s Edge?) 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.

5. Map of the South U.S.

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

7. Pictures from the rural South in the 1930s

8. Pictures from the rural South

9. Migrant Mother- Florence Owens

10. I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. - Dorothea Lange

11. The American South and As I Lay Dying
The loss of the Civil War shaped the mentality and outlook of all southerners
In Faulkner’s writing, the history of the south is a tragedy which must be addressed
The novel asks: How do people deal with devastation and degeneration in their lives?
Like the death of a loved one, a mother or wife, war also causes immense upheaval
The novel is not about the Civil War; rather it is about the manner in which people deal with adversity in their lives: it is about the Human Experience

12. Fictional Yoknapatawpha County
Although Fictional, Faulkner gave it credibility, supplying a physical place and a census count
Location used in several of his novels
Near the real Yocona River in Mississippi

13. Crossing the Yocona River in 1900

14. 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.

15. 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.”

16. 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).

17. Faulkner’s Style in As I Lay Dying
Written in stream of consciousness form
Reader “hears” a character’s thoughts
Faulkner never directly comments, describes, or explains
Novel comprised of 59 monologues by 15 different characters
Dream-like writing: often disjointed, distorted, and seemingly illogical
Readers must piece the story together in a puzzle-like fashion
Tale of a journey: nothing impedes the straightforward movement of plot to its destination-Jefferson and the burial of Addie

18. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Major Conflict
The members of the Bundren family trek across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
Source of the Title
Agamemnon’s speech to Odysseus in the Odyssey, Book XI
“As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades.”

19. Tips for Reading Faulkner
Be patient.
Be willing to re-read.
Focus on the characters.
Look for timeless tales.
Make the story your own.

20. Things to Look For
Characters often express conflicting opinions and contradicting sides to the same story.
Look for changes in typeface. When the text goes from normal to italic it indicates a shift in perspective or a character’s inner thoughts.

21. How to Read Faulkner If you get lost…
Check to see whose name is at the beginning of the chapter.
Go back to the last place you remember the story make sense and reread.
Ask yourself, “Where is Addie?”