Literary Techniques
Throughout the novel, Faulkner presents fifteen different points of view, each chapter narrated by one character, including Addie, who, after dying, expresses her thoughts from the coffin. In 59 chapters titled only by their narrators' names, the characters are developed gradually through each other's perceptions and opinions, Darl's predominating.
Like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner stands among the pioneers of stream of consciousness. He first used the technique in The Sound and the Fury, and it gives As I Lay Dying its distinctly intimate tone, through the monologues of the tragically flawed Bundrens and the passers-by they encounter. Faulkner plays with the narrative technique by manipulating conventional differences between stream of consciousness and interior monologue. For example, Faulkner has characters such as Darl speak with far more intellectual diction than he realistically possesses in his interior monologue. This is directly playing with conventions of interior monologues because as Dorrit Cohn states in Narratives Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction that the language in the interior monologue is "like the language a character speaks to others...it accords with his time, his place, his social station, level of intelligence..." The story helped found the Southern Renaissance and directs a great deal of effort as it progresses to reflections on being and existence, the existential metaphysics of everyday life.
The one chapter narrated by Addie Bundren may raise feminist issues, as her voice might be expressed only after her death (though this chapter may reflect her thoughts before she died.) Except for Jewel and Cash, Addie either dislikes or acts dismissively toward all her children. Jewel and Cash are profoundly affected by her regard for them.
Read more about this topic: As I Lay Dying (novel)
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