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As I Lay Dying
Jewel and Cash see themselves in very different ways; Cash is a responsible son who sacrifices himself for his mother, while Jewel is the prized son who always receives his mother's attention....
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As I Lay Dying
The female protagonists in both Madame Bovary and As I lay Dying are similar in the sense that both were women who were deeply unhappy in their marriages. In Madame Bovary, Emma finds that marriage...
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As I Lay Dying
Through Cash's description of making his mother's coffin, the reader can tell that he is very meticulous and also has a difficult time dealing with her death. Instead of engaging directly with his...
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As I Lay Dying
Modernism has come to be identified with a few specific stylistic methods and a few over-arching themes. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying exemplifies the hallmarks of modernism in both of these areas as...
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As I Lay Dying
In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Cora indicates that Darl has a different relationship to his mother Addie than his brothers and sisters do that she, for some reason, can sense: It was like he would...
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As I Lay Dying
We can say that the two concepts that anchor this novel are family and psychology. These concepts are intertwined in some complex ways and we can see this exemplified in the chapter that depicts...
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As I Lay Dying
Impassioned and wild and set apart from the family, Jewel has a special connection to a horse just as his mother has a special connection to him. "Jewel Bundren, Preacher Whitfield’s...
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As I Lay Dying
Vardaman Bundren in William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying is a six-year-old child, brought up in an eccentric family living in the rural south, who has just been traumatized by the death of his...
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As I Lay Dying
Addie calls Jewel her salvation because he is born out of love for another man (Whitfield). Since Anse has no real claim to the boy, Jewel, as a separate child from her loveless relationship with...
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As I Lay Dying
In my opinion, Darl Bundren is the most interesting character in As I Lay Dying. He is an intuitive, misunderstood by the world and the other characters of the novel and, as such, is labeled...
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As I Lay Dying
In the 40th section of As I Lay Dying, Addie assumes the role of the narrator. She explains and reflects on her true feelings of resentment for Anse and the children the two of them made together....
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As I Lay Dying
With fifteen different narratives in the form of stream of consciousness, the reader of As I Lay Dying understands that there are fifteen different realities--no absolutes. In this way, the reader...
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As I Lay Dying
The first thing to understand about Faulkner's work is that he was not writing about "society" in As I Lay Dying. He was writing about a rural sector of Southern society. There is no expectation...
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As I Lay Dying
This is an interesting question requiring us to engage in some conjecture. We can only surmise about what the reasons for this might be. Some evidence we might consider: Jewel and Addie are...
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As I Lay Dying
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As I Lay Dying
An underlying theme in both As I Lay Dying and To the Lighthouse might be that life is disappointing. In each case, we have a group of people whose interactions are strained and confused, and who...
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As I Lay Dying
The way this question is posed presents a bit of a conundrum. In the novel, both Addie and Anse are largely passive and absent as parents in terms of modelling behavior, providing affection, and...
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As I Lay Dying
You have selected a good list of themes. What you need to do now of course is go through the book and pick out quotes that you can use to support your exploration of those themes. What examples can...
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As I Lay Dying
In this novel by William Faulkner, we can discuss the central themes of the text and attempt to interpret the text's meaning. This is different from identifying a thesis, though we can attempt to...
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As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner is a writer who appreciated good writing. He wanted to be judged at least as much by the skill of his phrasing as by the themes or ideas dealt with in his works. He was, in fact, a...
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As I Lay Dying
Addie Bundren is bitter. She was bitter as a school teacher and she is bitter as a wife. Addie's one moment of joy and freedom came when she had an affair, cheating on Anse and becoming pregnant...
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As I Lay Dying
For Cash, thinking logistically is his way of dealing with the world. His mind seems to function very much like a measuring tool, like a balance, making calculations which either indicate a lack of...
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As I Lay Dying
I think the bananas are a treat for the family and so demonstrate how poor and truly provincial the Bundren's are. Though this is not an especially significant detail, as far as I can tell, it does...
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As I Lay Dying
Darl Bundren can be considered a tragic hero largely because his greatest strength leads to his downfall. To make the argument for this point, we will need to look further at what defines tragedy...
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As I Lay Dying
With the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and memories in the minds of the fifteen different narrators of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the reader, albeit confused at times, is presented with...
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As I Lay Dying
Darl is probably the most dynamic character in the book, in the sense that he undergoes the greatest change. His defining characteristic is perceptiveness, and that characteristic does remain...
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As I Lay Dying
In certain ways, Darl is the most intelligent and perceptive character in the novel, and may be the one with whom we are intended to sympathize. On one level, we can think of him as a shell-shocked...
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As I Lay Dying
I would say that none of the Bundren’s get what they deserve. Selfish, lazy Anse has a new set of teeth and a new wife. It could be argued that this is in some way deserved as he has travelled so...
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As I Lay Dying
Darl has always been my favorite character in As I Lay Dying and I think it is because he is the only character with whom we might sympathize without pity. Vardaman is pitiful as is Cash. Dewey...
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As I Lay Dying
Darl is suspected and accused of being strange on several occassions in the novel, yet he is also identified as the only member of the family to show any natural feeling toward Adie as she dies....
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As I Lay Dying
Stubbornness and an apparent unflappability combine in Anse. He is seemingly helpless against his own laziness or finds a way to communicate a sense of helplessness anyway. To say that Anse is...
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As I Lay Dying
The buzzards can be argued to represent Vardaman's struggle to accept the fact that his mother has died. He keeps vigil over the coffin and chases the buzzards away just as he chases away ideas of...
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As I Lay Dying
This is a very difficult question. The answer is not necessarily "out there" to be found, as Faulkner's use of italics in this novel are not entirely consistent. We can see some relationship...
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As I Lay Dying
It's true that a stylized fish symbol is widely used today as a symbol for Christ or Christianity, but I'm not sure that I see Christian symbolism in Vardaman's statement in As I Lay Dying. Rather,...
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As I Lay Dying
The fate of the Bundren family is determined by one man's ironic belief in his own doom, which he uses to manipulate those around him for his own eventual gain. Anse Bundren gets what he wants...
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As I Lay Dying
Modernist literature often concentrates on a “personal relationship with the past”. The overwhelming subtext of As I Lay Dying deals directly with this concept, focusing thematically and...
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As I Lay Dying
While William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying did not originally receive good reviews, it has become one of his most popular novels, probably because nowadays its subject matter is more accepted...
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As I Lay Dying
This topic is actually a quite rich one in relation to As I Lay Dying. One way to read this novel is to see it as an exploration of several types of love or modes of the expression of love. Love...
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As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner's darkly comic novel, As I Lay Dying, all of the action of the narrative finds its focal point in the death of Addie Bundren. Thus, the motif of death is recurrent throughout the...
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As I Lay Dying
Dewey Dell and Darl share a trait: both have the ability to "talk without the words," although Darl possesses the trait more acutely than his sister. When he sees Dewey Dell, he knows she is...
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As I Lay Dying
This is a stream-of-consciousness novel. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a particular character, and the syntax of the sentences, the words they choose, the voice of each character...
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As I Lay Dying
Have them focus on the language each character uses. It is so distinct that even if the chapters were not labeled with the characters' names, students should be ablet to detect the owner of the...
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As I Lay Dying
Dewey Dell may be the character with the most obvious development in As I Lay Dying. Many of the characters possess psychological depth, but Dewey Dell faces challenges within the narrative that...
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As I Lay Dying
Darl is the most perceptive and intuitive of the novel's narrators, and the reader hears his voice more than any other character. The other characters are in some way limited in their narrations...
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As I Lay Dying
Cora and Addie are discussing the relative challenges of womanhood, and it is here that we think Cora realises that Addie has a secret she will not reveal. Cora grumbles about Addie that- You’d...
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As I Lay Dying
Typically, when writing an essay on a novel, it is best to focus on one major theme (or two very similar themes) analyzed through the use of three different literary elements. This will give you...
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As I Lay Dying
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying does not rank high on the social issues pecking order, but here are a few: Lack of education: Sex education is non-existent; Dewey Dell doesn't know how she got pregnant....
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As I Lay Dying
This is an interesting question. I have always enjoyed and been intrigued by Darl's character and his clairvoyance. I read it, ultimately, as a trait that sets him apart from everyone, not just the...
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As I Lay Dying
I was always under the belief that Anse knew but chose to remain silent. The very fact that Jewel is so extremely different from anyone else in the family is enough to put his parentage to...
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As I Lay Dying
Darl's narration on page 97 of As I Lay Dying is a recursive account of Jewel's cursing rant. It echoes his only narration on page 14 in which he likewise curses about Cash building the coffin:...
