Instructor's Introduction to As I Lay Dying

This blog is being put together to help those High School Juniors fortunate enough to read William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930). Aside from being a great read in and of itself, it's an excellent example of both so-called Southern Gothic and stream-of-consciousness writing.

We will analyze this book according to the fashion Mortimer Adler recommends in his How to Read a Book (1940), but where Adler recommends three readings for maximum understanding, I will only require one. Still, we will begin as he does by attempting to understand the structure and purpose of the book.

First, the title. As I Lay Dying obviously has something to do with death. Easy, right?

The second thing we do is flip through the book to see how the book is divided. Are there any logical divisions that pop out? As it turns out, the answer is a decided yes. There are 59 chapters, each with a character's name for the title. A brief scan tells us that the different chapters are narrated by those characters.

But that's not all they tell us. If we graph it out, we get the following totals:

Darl: 19, Cora: 3, Jewel: 1, Dewey Dell: 4, Tull: 6, Anse: 3, Peabody: 2, Vardaman: 10, Cash: 5, Samson: 1, Addie: 1, Whitfield: 1, Armstid: 1, Moseley: 1, MacGowan: 1.

Notice something? Darl has by far the most chapters. We might assume he's a fairly important character, and it turns out he is. However, just because the other characters don't narrate as much, it doesn't mean that they're unimportant. Jewel, for instance, narrates only once, but he is a central character continually referred by other characters. Another character who narrates is Addie, who is dead at the time! All this goes to show that we can't turn our brains off when we think we have something.

Why did Faulkner choose to have so many narrators? One reason might be to give a number (15!) of different perspectives on the events of the story. In doing so, a more "real" picture might be possible than if he had stuck with just one viewpoint. A famous example in film would be Rashomon, directed by legend Akira Kurasawa, in which an event is recalled by only four viewpoints (the hack!):



So when reading As I Lay Dying, be sure to take into account who is narrating at any point in time.

***As long as you're on this site, please take a moment and look around. Leave comments! Click onto stuff, such as the "FOLLOW THIS BLOG" thingie to your right.