As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying was scribbled on the back of a wooden wheelbarrow until its publication while Faulkner worked at an electric company shoveling coal. He came up with the title the day after the stock market crashed on Wall Street. As I Lay Dying is often considered Faulkner's most accomplished work. It takes a simple plot and examines human nature on a journey both metaphorically and physically. Written as a series of inner monologues and thoughts by different characters, Faulkner takes the reader on an emotionally disturbing and sometimes confusing voyage not only through Yoknapatawpha County, but through the human psyche. Faulkner's lengthy sentences and disjointed writing and paragraphs often make his stories difficult to absorb at times, creating a divide between his readers.

Many social and cultural things insisted Faulkner to discover a new style of writing. As I Lay Dying hails not only as a voyeuristic eye into the rural slums of Mississippi, but as a pastoral novel and staunch examination of humanity under duress. Despite its mixed reactions amongst critics and readers, Faulkner's powerful novel delivers several universal messages including the fact that "Man's capacity to spend himself in a cause is always a remarkable thing and nowhere more so than when it springs from an unlikely soil" (Brooks, 94). Because of Faulkner's ability to express these themes in novel methods, As I Lay Dying hails as one of the classics of American literature.

Faulkner's literature is a great form of entertainment for all men, unfortunately it is only entertaining when the author is skilled in using the proper literary devices and writing styles that capture our emotions, and make it enjoyable to read their books. This story was thoroughly disappointing. It had a lot of hidden plot, symbolism, and a confusing writing style. The overall story was not compelling enough to maintain interest in discovering the symbolism or allusions. As well, the separate monologues for each character became boring and repetitive and it kept the characters from being thoroughly developed. The total effect is disappointing: the insufficiency of the characterizations does not capture the reader's sympathies and compassion's. It fails to make the reader see the full mental and physical being of each character because they are only presented in their specified chapter, and were not quite depicted in enough detail after their chapters and then-on through the rest of the book. The ending makes the reader feel as though we have been tricked into caring at all. The title of every chapter is a character's name in the story and that is the narrator until the next chapter...they are going to Jefferson to bury Addie (the mother)...and each character tells the story differently. It is the reader's job to find out which narrator to trust.

Faulkner makes the symbolism in this book really difficult to understand. "My Mother Is A Horse." (Faulkner, 79) The quote means that Jewel was somewhat distant from his family; he does not exactly fit into the family because he is ...