ASSIGNMENT 22:
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Along with T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Faulkner's 1930 novel is certainly the most challenging reading assignment you will face in English 252. A disorienting aggregate of voices, As I Lay Dying poses remarkable challenges to readers trying to determine what relationship these characters/speakers have to each other, what action defines the novel's plot, and what is the point of it all: Why are they so intensely bent on burying the dead matriarch of the Bundren family, called Addie, in the (fictional) town of Jefferson, Mississippi?

This first assignment on Faulkner will ask you to approach these challenges in a different way. Instead of discussions about and questions on the text as we have done for prior assignments, here you will proceed in a more intuitive, inferential manner, building from your own confrontations with the novel's difficulties.

This assignment requires two activities. The first is to keep a journal of your responses to the first 29 pages of the narration, encompassing 18 of the novel's monologues (there are 59, overall) by nine different characters (there are 15 who speak, by novel's end). Of these first 18 monologues, the greatest number (six, in all) are spoken by Darl, the second child of Anse and Addie Bundren, and a character who seems to teeter on the brink of insanity (why?, we must eventually ask). The second requirement will be to re-read your own journal entries and draw some provisional conclusions from what you have written.

What should you write in keeping your journal? For now, let's not impose any restrictions at all. One helpful way to begin making entries is to voice, on paper, your own feelings of confusion and disorientation as those feelings are prompted by the details and turns of the narration itself. Your entries should be specific, about particular phrases and aspects of narration, that prompt the responses. Also, you may want to respond by explaining what the different narrative points of view are beginning to disclose to you about the who, what, where, and when of the story. In short, your journal can become a record of how your confusions and disorientation are resolved in the course of reading.

Your journal entries will thus provide a record of what you came to know during the reading, and how you came to know it. You might even begin with Faulkner's title. Who is the "I" that is dying? And, anyway, how can a speaker speak about his or her dying except after the fact, in short from the grave itself? Does that make any sense, or at least any realistic sense?

Go on from there. Does the "I" of the title have to refer to just one person? Could it involve others, for instance those addressing us during the course of the opening monologues? Who are they in terms of the familial and communal relations that define and contextualize them for us? And where are they? That is, how do the details of setting--inside and outside the Bundren house, and the house in its greater geographical setting-add to our understanding of the "Dying" referenced in Faulkner's title?

Part of what lies "Dying" for readers of Faulkner's novel is any reliance on the conventions of traditional fiction. Your journal entries may, if you wish, begin to reflect upon those conventions. That is, how does Faulkner's writing frustrate any attempts to know what's going on by its refusal of traditional devices of storytelling, such as an omniscient or at least a consistent narrator whose vision and guidance can provide a single skein of (usually) unified episodes. Using any of the novels we have read in the course of our studies, you can make useful comparisons and begin to draw conclusions about the tradition of novel-writing that Faulkner resists.

Having completed that part of your assignment, take a break; re-read your journal, perhaps glance back through the sections of As I Lay Dying to which the entries respond. Then, in an essay response of about 300-500 words, summarize the conclusions you can draw from the journal page's themselves. During your responsive reading, what issues, problems, resolutions, narrative techniques, and themes have emerged as important or as primary matters for a critical understanding of Faulkner's text? In other words, what did you learn? How?

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