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    As I Lay Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
    As I Lay Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
    As I Lay Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    As I Lay Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

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    As I Lay Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by William Faulkner
    Making the reading experience fun!

    Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: chapter-by-chapter analysis
    explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
    a review quiz and essay topics
    Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSparkNotes
    Release dateAug 12, 2014
    ISBN9781411473997
    As I Lay Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

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      Book preview

      As I Lay Dying (SparkNotes Literature Guide) - SparkNotes

      Cover of SparkNotes Guide to As I Lay Dying by SparkNotes Editors

      As I Lay Dying

      William Faulkner

      © 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

      This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

      Sparknotes is a registered trademark of SparkNotes LLC

      Spark Publishing

      A Division of Barnes & Noble

      120 Fifth Avenue

      New York, NY 10011

      www.sparknotes.com /

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7399-7

      Please submit changes or report errors to www.sparknotes.com/.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Contents

      Context

      Plot Overview

      Character List

      Analysis of Major Characters

      Themes, Motifs & Symbols

      Sections 1-6

      Sections 7-12

      Sections 13-19

      Sections 20-28

      Sections 29-33

      Sections 34-39

      Sections 40-45

      Sections 46-52

      Sections 53-59

      Important Quotations Explained

      Key Facts

      Study Questions & Essay Topics

      Review & Resources

      Context

      W

      illiam Faulkner was born

      in New Albany, Mississippi, on September

      25

      ,

      1897

      , the oldest of four brothers in a southern family of aristocratic origin. Faulkner spent much of his life in and around his beloved hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, where he worked various odd jobs and wrote in his spare time in the years leading up to his literary fame. Stints in New York and Paris introduced Faulkner to the culture and major figures of the Modernist literary movement, an early twentieth-century response to a world marked by rapid and often bewildering technological development. Modernism in literature was characterized by experimentation with language and literary conventions, and Faulkner became one of the movement’s major figures. In

      1924

      , Faulkner published his first book, a collection of poetry titled The Marble Faun. Faulkner published his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, in

      1929

      , and though The Sound and the Fury is often considered his masterpiece, it was his sixth novel, Sanctuary, in

      1929

      , that finally won him an audience and a literary career. The Sound and the Fury, however, marked the beginning of Faulkner’s use of experimental narrative techniques to explore the psychological complexity of his characters and their interactions more thoroughly than a traditional style would have allowed.

      As I Lay Dying, originally published in

      1930

      , is one of the most vivid testaments to the power of this new style, with Faulkner’s usually complex and lengthy paragraphs trimmed down with a conscientious economy to form a clear, unified plot. Much of this clarity can be attributed to the intensity of Faulkner’s vision for the work and the careful planning and outlining he did before sitting down to write. Whereas Faulkner conceived many of his other works in a scattered fashion, he fully imagined the innovative concepts of As I Lay Dying ahead of time, furiously scribbling down his revelations on the back of an upturned wheelbarrow. This organization reflects the great hopes that Faulkner pinned on the novel—he had recently married his high school sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and hoped his saga of the Bundren family would finally ensure a steady income for his family and a greater literary reputation for himself. The result is a novel of some daring, one that forgoes the unified perspective of a single narrator and fragments its text into fifty-nine segments voiced from fifteen different perspectives. In writing As I Lay Dying in this way, Faulkner requires his readers to take an active part in constructing the story, allows for multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations, and achieves remarkable levels of psychological insight.

      In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner first introduces Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional rendition of his native Lafayette County, Mississippi, which became the setting for most of his best-known works. The novels set in Yoknapatawpha County can even be read as one intricate story, in which the same places, events, families, and people turn up over and over again. For example, Vernon and Cora Tull, who appear in As I Lay Dying, also appear in The Hamlet, a later novel. Before Faulkner, the American South was widely portrayed in American literature as a backward, impossibly foreign land. The complexity and sophistication of the Yoknapatawpha novels changed many of these perceptions, and it is largely due to Faulkner’s influence that the South is now recognized as one of the country’s most fertile literary regions. Faulkner himself, however, did not fare well financially, and he was eventually forced to take work as a screenwriter in Hollywood to supplement his dwindling income. His fortunes were revived, however, with the

      1946

      publication of The Portable Faulkner, which featured a large and varied selection of his writings. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in

      1949

      , and a pair of Pulitzer Prizes followed in

      1955

      and

      1962

      . Faulkner continued to write about Yoknapatawpha until his death in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July

      6

      ,

      1962

      , at the age of sixty-four.

      Plot Overview

      A

      ddie Bundren, the wife

      of Anse Bundren and the matriarch of a poor southern family, is very ill, and is expected to die soon. Her oldest son, Cash, puts all of his carpentry skills into preparing her coffin, which he builds right in front of Addie’s bedroom window. Although Addie’s health is failing rapidly, two of her other sons, Darl and Jewel, leave town to make a delivery for the Bundrens’ neighbor, Vernon Tull, whose wife and two daughters have been tending to Addie. Shortly after Darl and Jewel leave, Addie dies. The youngest Bundren child, Vardaman, associates his mother’s death with that of a fish he caught and cleaned earlier that day. With some help, Cash completes the coffin just before dawn. Vardaman

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