With pen, writers create stories and characters to convey their perspectives towards the world. Every writer has his unique writing style and opinion. Among them, for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”, William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949 and two Pulitzer Prizes for A Fable and Reivers. His masterpiece is The Fury and The Sound, a renowned representative work of stream of consciousness. Similar to The Fury and The Sound, As I Lay Dying is known for its stream of consciousness writing technique, multiple narrators, and varying chapter lengths.
This novel depicts a mother dies and her family starts a “noble” or selfish journey to fulfill her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. Disasters steps one after another during the ten days’ journey: the coffin is almost washed away, the mule is drown，the body is almost half burnt, Cash loses one leg, Karl goes crazy, Jewel loses his beloved horse and Dewey Dell fails the abortion, however, their father, Anse Bundren, “got them teeth” and gets a new “Mrs Bundren” back home.
The work’s charm firstly comes from its unique structure. Narrated by 15 different persons, this novel is constituted of person’s subjective monologues. Different from the bulks of turgid paragraphs of consciousness description in The Fury and The Sound and Ulysses, the monologues is much clearer and closer to human’s stream of consciousness dealing in daily life and its dramatic effect is like 15 actors performing on the stage, speaking out what he is their feelings. Rarely writers chose this style, while Faulkner chose it and managed it well. Faulkner always uses “tour de force” to describe this work, which means that the structure is ingenious and unique. When was asked, Faulkner used to say that “I tend to like As I Lay Dying most.” Distinctive structure is a kind of stock for the writer---it includes risk, but it pays.
Monologues moulds out narrators’ characters through their flow of consciousness: Cash’s numb carpenter thinking in one chapter the whole of which is in the form of a numbered step-by-step list, Jewel’s (who is an adulterine of Addie and Whitfield who is a similar church man to Dimmesdale of Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne) arrogant and oblivious attitudes towards his family and his wired affection to his beloved horse, and “My mother is a fish” by Vardaman, which presents his illogic and the naivety.
Meanwhile the theme is deep. It seems easily to read, but the more you read, the more confused you are. At first, I thought I have grasped the theme, such as the selfishness and ugliness of the family because anybody has his personal selfish motivation during this journey, not for the affliction of lose of Addie, but later I found that my summery is not comprehensive. Just as Bedient said, “As I Lay Dying is to be “seen”, not understood; experienced, not translated; felt, not analyzed.” This critique is exactly right. It is Jewel, an arrogant son, who saved his mum’s body twice from destructive disaster; it is he who saves Cash’s precious tool box in the water; and it is he who sacrifices his beloved horse to buy “the team”. It is Cash, a numb carpenter, who loses one leg for saving his mother’s coffin, and it is he whose compassion towards Darl is so obvious that it adds the personal charm of him. The characters are developing and changing as the plot develops. Such a selfish family also can unit to confront obstacles sometimes. This is the fact of life. People are not stable; oppositely, they will seem totally different towards some issues. It is human daily multi-dimensioned consciousness, which is hard to tell and to grasp. Therefore there are still critiques in 80th that this work is one of Faulkner’s “most complex and confusing” novels.
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