Faulkner is the most influential of twentieth-century American writers, but if you borrow the style and the concept (choral narration, disastrous family, impoverished setting) without the strangeness and the risk-taking, you will just get kitsch.

Faulkner consistently risks tastelessness, as when the boy Vardaman, convinced his mother is alive in the coffin, drills holes into it-and into her face-so that she can breathe. On the whole, though, the novel’s mordant nihilism and decadent lyricism are more Webster than Shakespeare.

Faulkner effectively reverses Shakespearean tragedy, wherein servants provide ground-level views of the royal disaster here, it is the more elite characters, including doctors and priests and urban pharmacists, who offer readers the stabilizing perspective on the too-big-to-judge calamity of the Bundren’s journey. The Bundrens are economically evoked (this would be a much longer novel if told more conventionally), not only through their own monologues, but through the perspectives of more normal outsiders. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated smattering of components-snuffings and stampings smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is.įaulkner combines this highly original form with a grotesquely comic Gothic story of a poor-white Mississippi family, the Bundrens, who try to fulfill their matriarch’s last wish to be buried in her distant hometown, a mandate that has them braving flood and fire with the coffin bouncing around slapstick-style and the corpse beginning to reek. For example, here is Vardaman, a five-year-old boy, encountering a horse in a barn: Rather, their essences speak, essences inflected with class and regional markers but generally granted a poetic grandeur heightened well beyond verisimilitude. Faulkner was faithful to the Joycean method in The Sound and the Fury, but this is a weirder, bolder novel its narrative voices do not sound like what its impoverished and uneducated characters would sound like. Joyce, at least in Ulysses, was a social realist in his modernism: the language representing the viewpoints of his characters is appropriate to their age, class, education, sensibility-no one would mistake Molly Bloom for Stephen Dedalus on the page.

It’s not just that the viewpoint alternates among the characters, who narrate in stream-of-consciousness prose derived from Joyce’s experiments in that mode. The formal idea animating As I Lay Dying is more audacious than it may at first appear.

As i lay dying book pages