My essay is a fish.

Before any discussion of conventions in literature, and especially William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, may take place, the term "convention" must be defined. Convention is simply a mode of doing things which has come to be expected, and assumed by default. In literature, we commonly and repeatedly see the use of a typical "Hero's journey", or bildungsroman, or symbolism in the form of representational allegory - they are some of the phenomena of convention because they appear again and again; despite changes in the detail and implementation, and across entirely different books and genres and even languages, their basic nature always remain, and thus their use is the use of convention. What is important to note, however, is that in the world of literature, convention goes both ways; it is as much a descriptor for something used by the author as it a descriptor for something which the audience has come to expect or assume in reading. Thus, literary work becomes unconventional, not simply by the use of unconventional techniques by the author, but by forcing the audience to read and interpret the work in new and untypical ways.

Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying, explores an unconventional, multiple-perspective, stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narrative monologue style, which at the outset, seems entirely original. Northrop Frye in “The Singing School”, however, dictates that all literature, regardless of any and all perceived originality, is still rooted in the conventional forms of writing already established in the past. Though it is quite original and innovative, unlike any before it and still a pillar of originality today, Faulkner’s work here is no different – we can readily perceive the literary and stylistic conventions at work in As I Lay Dying. In this case, however, the use of convention does not make the work conventional, but in fact is the very thing on which the “unconventional” nature of the book relies upon. What makes the novel unique is the deliberate use of convention in all of the wrong ways; in this Faulkner creates all of the stock characters, environment, events and action that a reader is thoroughly familiar with, but then plays out each of these parts contrary to what conventional thought has come to expect.

Faulkner's complete contradiction of those expectations thus confronts the reader with this question: Has the conventional notion of this nature really captured the truth? At every step, and at every contemplative point, Faulkner takes the conventional notion and expectation of literary society, and societal mentality itself, and completely rocks it - whether realistic or surrealistic, the sheer plausibility created simply by the existence of thought running contrary to the norm throws the entire philosophy of life into limbo; readers must now come to question whether any of the ideals, any of the preconceptions of human nature and societal nature are indeed true, or whether they are simply machinations taken on faith by repetition throughout the ages.

To do this, Faulkner takes the reader through four distinct states of thought: plot, character, style, and philosophy. These four entities will appear familiar and conventional, because in actuality they encompass all of human consciousness. As Northrop Frye describes in "The Motive for Metaphor":

"We have three levels of the mind now, and a language for each of them... There's the level of consciousness and awareness, where the most important thing is the difference between me and everything else.... We can call it the language of self-expression. Then there's the level of social participation, the working or technological language of teachers and preachers and politicians and advertisers and lawyers and journalists and scientists. We've already called this the language of practical sense. Then there's the level of imagination, which produces the literary language of poems and plays and novels." (Frye 22-23)

Frye's discussion in "The Motive for Metaphor" is a bit limited; his focus is strictly on language, and thus he defines only three states while there are in fact four states of consciousness. Despite this, however, Frye has defined the very makeup of human thought: the consciousness of physical existence; the consciousness of interaction; the transmission of ideas, produced by the imagination, through the creation of fiction; and imagination itself. While the first three are firmly rooted in the physical world and constitute the forms of human expression, imagination is firmly and solely rooted in the mind of the individual, and not a form of expression at all. Imagination is composed of the thoughts reached by conclusion of the thoughtflow from existence, interaction, and transmission of thought.

In all literature, the modes of thought are represented in the general literary devices used to transmit them. Consciousness of physical existence takes the form of plot, wherein the reader realizes what exists - in human thought, it is "What is is, and what is is not?", and in the literary world of a story, it is who is or who is not, what is happening and what is not; the ideas represented here are purely of reality: What is going on, and why? Consciousness of interaction is represented in the characters which populate the world of the story, and are subjected to the existences, events, and action of it. Ideas here are taken from the reactions and thoughts and motive of the characters, which we relate to our own experiences in the consciousness of interaction. The analysis of literary style avoids the story altogether; its meaning is derived in the analysis of the motive of the author, specifically questioning "Why is it written this way?". What is missing from most conventional works of literature, however, is imagination. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is thus wholly in its own class in the world of literature because it brings the reader to consider every notion presented in the book philosophically, and think in the imaginative state of consciousness, challenging the preconceived thoughts, or conventions that already exist.

The reader is taken to the state of his imagination by transcending through each of the four levels of thought, one at a time. Like most all conventional literature, As I Lay Dying contains the three typical literary devices: plot, character, and literary style, and in addition includes the fourth device of philosophy, each of which, when reached, discards the previous level, and forms a new plane of consciousness that renders invalid any notions or conclusions developed previously. The reader's interpretation of the work begins with the basic existences and actions of the plot, progresses to the reactions and thoughts of the characters, then to the motive and meaning of the literary style (not how the characters react or think, but why they are presented in this way), and finally transcends to the philosophical pontifications of nature (in whatever instance) that is brought on by the complete dissolution of the validity of the entrenched conventions. The analysis is a continuous stream of thought for every reader - the reader must fully realize all that there is at one level, before he can realize its nature, and then understand its irrelevance in the realization of the existence of the next plane of thought.

Faulkner's progression for bringing readers to an enlightened state of philosophical indefinite is quite unique in the world of literature. It is not, however, unconventional in the domain of human reasoning, and its roots can be seen in the exact inverse of the developmental flow of the arts: the developmental flow of science. As Northrop Frye elaborates in "The Motive for Metaphor":

"On this basis, perhaps, we can distinguish the arts from the sciences. Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience... Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience: that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can." (Frye 23)

In conventional literature, or the "arts" as described by Frye here, it is the reader who begins with imagination: all of the thoughts and notions and preconceptions of human and societal nature already fill in the mind of the reader. The conventional story thus aims to provides a realistic world, a setting of characters, environs, events and action, which the reader then attempts to rationalize; analyzing cause and effect, speculating motive, interpreting significance of acts, and finding overall meaning or allegory and its application to real world life and society, are all staples of the typical literary analysis done by scholars and doled out by high school teachers every day. The difference between this typical story, and the original work in As I Lay Dying, is the relation of the work to imagination: whereas the typical work will take the conventions of imagination already existent in the mind of the reader, and apply those thoughts in analyzing the plot and characters and literary style of the story, much as the developmental flow of the arts, Faulkner's work begins with the reality at hand - the plot and characters of the story - and from there the reader builds and creates and defines and entirely new philosophy in his imagination, one that is different from the existing imagination based on conventions, but is instead a new imagination based on the philosophy concluded from the plot, characters, and literary style. The intention of Faulkner, and this unique progression of thought for the reader - from plot to characters to literary style to philosophy - runs exactly converse to the standard development of literature, but parallels the modern development of science, and the genesis of human consciousness, and it is this trait about the novel's form that is essential to reaching the philosophical stage of literature.

This "genesis of human consciousness" is detailed by Frye in "The Motive for Metaphor", where he proposes a hypothetical stranding on an uninhabited island. In this situation, as was the situation at the very first genesis of human, or is the situation at birth of every individual human, there are no preexisting conventions in place, at any of the four states of thought, and most importantly no preconceived notions in the imaginative state. Thus, human consciousness must be built up, first in the realization of physical existence, secondly in the interaction between individual and environment, thirdly in the transmission of thought, and fourthly in the development of the imagination. It is in this way that human imagination naturally develops, and it is only in this way that human imagination may develop free from the influence or restrictions of convention.

The natural development of the genesis of human consciousness is why most all conventional literature fails to prompt readers to consciously tap into their imagination. All readers necessarily have gone through a certain amount of education, and a certain amount of life to become literate enough to read and comprehend the work. As such, all readers undoubtedly have some amount of convention already instilled into their thought; their interpretation of the work is thus not of the natural human mind but interpreted through the lens of convention taken from society or life or education. For Faulkner to prompt readers to tap into their imagination, As I Lay Dying had to remove the crutches of convention which had allowed readers to interpret the plot, characters, and literary style with those reading conventions preexisting in their minds, and thus allow for the developmental flow of modern science/the genesis of human consciousness, which allows the individual to reach and consider the book within their imagination.

Paradoxically, in As I Lay Dying the crutches of conventional reading are removed from the reader by the deliberate use of convention. Faulkner begins by presenting the story as any other – the conventional and descriptive, dry narration of Darl Bundren in the first chapter lulls the reader into reading conventionally, analyzing at the existential state of consciousness of the plot – what is and what is happening. The introduction of the more lively Cora and opinionated Jewel in the next few chapters provide what appears to the reader as conventional character interaction and reaction to events. Despite the unusual multiple-perspective narrative style, the writing is still very much in a conventional form, readily digested by a conventional audience.

It is with Dewey Dell’s first narrative (p. 26) that Faulkner first introduces some confusion for the conventional reader. The chapter, or at least the initial part of it, breaks away completely from the fairly linear timeline and flow of the rest of the narrative thus far, which has focused on Addie Bundren’s impending death and Darl and Jewel’s upcoming trip to town. Instead, Dewey Dell begins discussing a promiscuous encounter she has had in the past, one that not only takes the narrative into a separate timeline, but also seems irrelevant from the main focus of the narratives thus far. It is in the beginning of this chapter that the reader first becomes confused (however slightly) with the direction and meaning of the book; in the conventional analysis of plot and character, the majority of Dewey Dell’s chapter describes nothing of the happenings of the plot, and represents nothing at all of her feelings toward Addie Bundren’s impending death.

As the story continues to progress, a style of narrative similar to Dewey Dell’s first chapter becomes more and more pronounced – subsequent chapters often bear no apparent relevance to the central story, while a very obvious and noticeable void is left in both descriptions of the plot and the characters actions and feelings. The most curious (for the reader) and most manifest presence of this trend is in the narrative of Darl Bundren, the novel’s most represented character. Beginning in the first chapter, he is descriptive, methodical, and dry – and thus the reader accepts him as he would the standard objective narrator in any other conventional novel. As the story progresses, however, Darl’s narrative becomes more and more bizarre, and runs away from the factual description introduced in the first chapter (although the audience still reads him that way). In just his second chapter, Darl breaks off from his normally dry style, and speaks of the actions of Jewel and Jewel’s horse, describing how “… Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings… they stand in rigid terrific hiatus… He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip…” (Faulkner 12-13) in an embellished and vivacious fashion. Like Jewel in the barn, Darl also describes the death of Addie Bundren (p. 47-52), despite not physically being present at the scene. The realistic impossibility of Darl’s knowledge and descriptions of both scenes entails a surrealistic nature into Darl’s narrative – in either case he is no longer a narrator of the realistic plot, but a narrator of his own imagination. In subsequent chapters, sections of Darl’s narrative seem completely out of place; he interjects seemingly nonsensical remarks such as “It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.” (Faulkner 39) which bear no apparent relevance to the scene at hand. He also begins omitting key parts of the plot; the entire trip that causes Darl and Jewel to be away during the death of Addie Bundren is barely represented in short sections going to and coming from the destination, and no reason is ever explained for the trip, nor is there from Darl anything but a frantic and wild chapter rescuing the animals while Mr. Gillespie’s barn is on fire – we only find out later, from Cash, that it was Darl who was the one who burned it down. Towards the end, entire narratives seem random and out of place; in Darl’s heated confrontation with Jewel about his father (p. 212-213), the narrative bursts in the middle between relatively calm scenes in which Vardaman wonders about the buzzards – the chapter lacks any context whatsoever, and seemingly comes out of nowhere; it could fit in as much at that point in the story as any other point, or could be a quasi-reality dream sequence altogether. Darl’s final chapter, in which he appears raving mad, is the final, and complete, dissolution of the objective narrator for the reader. While there have been numerous signs thus far hinting that the objectivity of Darl’s narration may not be as it seems, it is only here that his credibility is completely destroyed, and along with it, all interpretations of the audience based on the conventional reading of Darl’s character as the factual narrator.

As much as Darl’s narration is interpreted by conventional readers as a factual and objective description of the plot, most all of the other characters, and specifically those of the Bundren family, are taken initially by the reader as lenses through which character may be analyzed, partly because of their more subjective tones, and partly because the role of objective narrator has already been filled by Darl from the first chapter, and in the eyes of the conventional reader there may only be one. In this mindset of interpretation, still, as with Darl, rooted conventionally in believing the characters to be faithful descriptors of character, the reader is likewise misled into taking all that the characters say as the factual reality. For example, from almost every character’s description of Jewel, and especially Cora Tull’s, it would seem as if he was brash and independent, with a wild disregard for anyone else. In his single narrative, however, we find this to be only almost true; Jewel is reckless and acts without consideration, except that he does in fact care deeply for his mother Addie, perhaps more so than any other character, and perhaps exclusively so – no other character is as explicitly concerned with Addie as Jewel is in his one narrative. Similarly, the picture Anse Bundren paints of himself in his first chapter (p. 35-38) is that of a downtrodden and luckless man to be pitied, although it is quite obvious to the reader that Anse is in fact only self-centered and self-pitiful, and thus none of his narration can trusted. Other characters, such as Dewey Dell or Vardaman, narrate so frantically and in such a random and nonsensical fashion that the conventional reader can not rely on them or derive any meaning from their narration in any sense. In the line, “I got shut up in the crib the new door it was too heavy for me it went shut I couldn’t breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air.” (Faulkner 65) by Vardaman, the conventional reader is left to sort through the mish-mash of words and wonder the significance of the crib or the door or the rat, all of which are out of context in the chapter. Under a conventional interpretation, the line, and much of the rest of the book, makes no sense whatsoever.

By the end of the novel, the reader is thus brought to this conclusion: the narrators are not reliable in the ways the audience would reasonably and conventionally expect them to be. Taken at face value, Darl is not a faithful descriptor of the events of the plot – gaping holes are left in the events of the story; some descriptions are surreal, realistically impossible, and embellished; and by the end of the story Darl completely shatters the reader’s expectation of him as a dependable narrator when he falls into apparent madness. Similarly, taken at face value none of the other characters are true descriptors of the characters feelings, as a conventional reader would expect from the first person view (and subjective tone) – indeed, what they narrate is oftentimes not what they truly feel, what they claim is oftentimes not what is reality, and sometimes what they narrate is nonsensical to the point where no meaning may be derived. The reader now realizes that every character in the entire book has been an unreliable narrator, shattering the conceptions of plot and character established in the first reading in which the reader had read Darl (and a few others) as factual descriptors of the plot, and the other characters as genuine lenses into their personalities and motives.

In this way, Faulkner brings the reader to transcend the conventional interpretations of plot and character (existence and interaction, in the human consciousness). The failure with many readers, and the cause of their frustrations with the book, is their failure to appreciate the narrative style purely as the stream-of-consciousness of each character. Reading Darl and any of the other characters in a conventional fashion makes no sense at all; they are too inconsistent in their descriptions, attitudes, and style to function appropriately as characters telling a story. The reader’s use of conventional analysis is dispelled upon their realization that this perspective is leading them to nonsensical and contradictory conclusions, and only after it is cast off may the reader realize the streams-of-consciousness that the narratives actually are, and read from As I Lay Dying strictly as a realistic representation of the thoughts of characters as the story happens, and nothing more.

Once this realization occurs, the entire story – and the perspectives of each of the characters – makes much more sense. Darl is no longer forcibly placed into the role of sole narrator of the plot, but is now simply another Bundren coping with the death of his mother. Readers no longer attempt to make sense of the frantic and wild narratives of Dewey Dell or Vardaman, but take them as representative of the frantic and wild state of minds of the characters in the aftermath of their mother’s death, among other problems.

It is only after the transcension of the conventional interpretations of plot and character, and finally understanding what the plot is, and who the characters are, that the reader may then proceed to analyze the book literarily, interpreting the style and literary devices of the book themselves – much like in the genesis of human consciousness, in which consciousnesses of existence and interaction must be attained before the transmission of ideas may be considered. Whilst no different from many conventional books, what makes As I Lay Dying special, in following the genesis of human consciousness and the path to the imagination, is that the conventions in the reader’s mind must be dispelled before the plot and characters can be truly understood – unlike other books in which plot and character elements are readily digested using conventional forms of reading and interpretation.

As with plot and character, at the literary level the reader is once again confronted with what appear to be conventional elements and style. For example, the diction used frequently by Vardaman and Dewey Dell:

Vardaman

“Because I am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles. Why do flour and sugar and coffee cost so much when he is a country boy… God made me. I did not said to God to made me in the country. If He can make the train, why cant He make them all in the town because flour and sugar and coffee.” (Faulkner 66)

Dewey Dell

“The first time me and Lafe picked on down the row. Pa dassent sweat because he will catch his death from the sickness so everybody that comes to help us… And Cash like sawing the long hot sad yellow days up into the planks and nailing them to something.” (Faulkner 26)

The gibberish which the reader at first attributes to an uneducated Southern dialect, is in fact just that – gibberish, or at the very least, an excess of ideas which could be succinctly presented in only a few words. Much in the same vein, Faulkner makes liberal use of italics – in one of Darl’s chapters (p. 180-183), every line involving Jewel is italicized, composing not just words but lines and entire paragraphs, and little meaning may be derived from each individual use. In both cases, Faulkner uses a common literary device – regional dialect and italic emphasis – but does not employ it in a way familiar to readers, nor employs it in a way which contributes to the book; the dialect does nothing but add words and confusion, and the ubiquity of italics, like students highlighting textbook pages, renders the emphasis meaningless.

The narratives of almost every character are filled with out-of-place and nonsensical interjections. While by now the reader has come to expect this as the stream-of-consciousness of the character, the conventional literary reader is still coaxed by convention to find deeper meaning in the choice by the writer to place that particular line at that particular point in the book. Addie Bundren’s last words, “Cash, you Cash!” are puzzling, and as we progress into the book the lack of any sincere relationship between Cash and Addie (as opposed to Darl or Jewel) renders her last words insignificant and trivial. Perhaps the greatest example, however, and one of the most famous lines in the book is Vardaman’s one-line chapter:

“My mother is a fish.” (Faulkner 84)

The singling out of the line, and its presentation as its own entire page and chapter conveys a monolithic tone to the line, as if it were deeply revelatory, and somehow contained in it the essence of the entire book. In this, the conventional literary reader is trained to find meaning, signifigance, and symbolism. All the while, the quote, in itself, means nothing – it is simply demonstrative of Vardaman’s simplistic mind, and his crude equation of his mother to the fish for the reason that both are dead.

Perhaps most misleading – and most shocking – of all to the audience, however, is the story’s overall form, which heavily employs, but makes ironic twists to, conventional story and character structures. The arc of As I Lay Dying’s plot most closely resembles that of the hero’s journey tragedy: the righteous but tragically-flawed hero embarks on a noble quest, overcoming obstacles and conflict, to ultimately triumph, only to be led to downfall by the intrinsic and still-present tragic flaw. The ensemble of “protagonists” in As I Lay Dying embark on the quest to bury their deceased mother in her desired resting place, and surmount natural catastrophes and internal conflict to achieve it, following the typical fashion of the hero’s journey. What is unconventional, and ironic to the audience, is the final fate for all of the characters.

Cash, Darl, and Jewel are arguably the most intrinsically “good” characters. Each one, with varying degrees of expression, care about their mother, and is concerned with the completion of the journey to achieve its supposed goal: to let Addie Bundren rest in peace. Yet, despite their genuine nature, each one meets with a tragic end: Cash loses his leg, Darl is sent away to an insane asylum, and Jewel’s treasured horse is traded away.

Dewey Dell most often plays the role of the “damsel in distress”. She constantly worries over her pregnancy, and desperately seeks help, mentally pleading, “He could do so much for me if he just would.” to the doctor Peabody over and over again. Yet, contrary to literary convention, the “damsel in distress” is not saved in this story; instead she is coerced into a sexual favor by the quack pharmacist MacGowan, has the money for her abortion taken by Anse, and by story’s end is left still pregnant, and still without the father Lafe.

Vardaman, the youngest of the Bundren children, is the typical “innocent mind”; as a child he is supposed to be free from the taint of corruption, evil, and sin, and his mind is conventionally the purest of all humans’. Yet even a cursory glance at any of Vardaman’s narratives show a frantic and scared state of mind; Vardaman is continually devastated by his mother’s death throughout the novel, and is further traumatized as Darl becomes insane and is sent away to Jackson, as evidenced by his frantic last narrative in which he cries out for his brother. The glaring similarities between Darl’s last narrative (p. 253-254), in which he is “crazy”, and the style of Vardaman’s narratives throughout the story indicate that Vardaman’s continuous state of mind may be much like the insanity Darl experiences at the end. Despite being the prototypical pure child’s mind, Vardaman’s thoughts are scattered and random, and do not resemble a pure and clear consciousness in any sense.

Ironically, it is Anse Bundren, clearly the most flawed character of all, and the closest thing to an “antagonist” in the story, who is the only profiteer from the journey. Anse is self-centered and completely unaffected; upon the tragic death of his wife, which deeply resonates with all of the other family members, his only remark was “Now I can get them teeth.” (Faulkner 52) and to order Cash to finish up the coffin so that the journey can start. He is also deeply hypocritical, claiming that he never wants to be “beholden to no man”, yet relying on the help of others for the entirety of his life, and especially on the journey: he asks Vernon Tull to contribute his mule to a plainly doomed journey across the flooded river, stays over in several barns all along the way, trades away Jewel’s horse, and even needs to borrows a shovel at the end to bury his wife. Yet, despite all his flaws, he, unlike any of the other Bundrens, emerges from the journey not only unscathed, but better off than when the journey began, with the set of false teeth he has always wanted, and a new wife.

The very last line of the novel, “Meet Mrs Bundren” is a shocking twist, as Anse Bundren introduces his new wife, just moments after he has buried his old one. The line serves two purposes, both of which completely shake the conventional reading and interpretations of the book’s literary devices. Most readily perceived, Anse’s abrupt marriage is almost comical in that it renders the entire journey and story meaningless. Each of the Bundren children (with the exception of perhaps Dewey Dell) has strove to complete the journey, both so that their mother may rest in peace, and also so that they may bury that chapter of their lives, and move on. In pursuit of that, each of the children suffers some loss catastrophic loss – Cash loses his leg, Darl his sanity, Jewel his horse, Dewey Dell her chance to be rid of the baby, and Vardaman his innocence – only to have Anse reopen an entirely new chapter by remarrying, rendering his previous wife, and thus the journey to bury her, inconsequential to the lives of the Bundren.

Beyond this, however, the last line, representing the success of Anse, throws into disarray all conceptions that the audience has of good and evil, and right and wrong. A theme pronounced in almost all of literature is the ultimate triumph of good over evil, and it is this conventional message which readers have come to expect from all literature. Yet all of the characters, their nature and their ultimate outcomes, act in direct defiance of the conventional good/evil conflict. All of the good (Cash, Darl, Jewel, Vardaman) come to tragic downfalls, all of the innocent (Dewey Dell, simply as female) are taken advantage of, and it is the selfish and evil (Anse, Whitfield, MacGowan) who emerge as victors. Characters outside of the main Bundren family echo this same contradiction of good/evil literary convention; the preacher Whitfield, who would conventionally be expected to be pious and righteous, is revealed to be an adulterer, and takes advantage of Addie’s death as a sign from god that “He is merciful; He will accept the will for the deed” (Faulkner 179), allowing him to shirk his duty to reveal the truth and his sin. Addie, similarly, defies the convention of a caring matriarch, and reveals that she in fact, has deeply resented her children, for spite of Anse.

The sum effect of all these conventions – the archetypal stock characters, traditional hero’s journey and tragedy – used in ironic and twisted ways unfamiliar to the reader, is to completely dispel any conventions which the reader bears in mind. By the sheer existence in this book of good characters that don’t succeed, bad characters that do, and archetypal characters that don’t act accordingly, each of those conventional literary notions is shown as false, or rather, not necessarily true. In this, the reader transcends the level of literary convention, of the transmission of idea, and enters into an interpretation purely of the imagination.

J. Peder Zane, however inadvertently, hints at the true nature of Faulkner’s writing in As I Lay Dying in his essay “William Faulkner’s Literary Legacy”: “He challenged convention, suggesting that society and culture not only shape, but misshape people, preventing them from discovering their true nature and happiness.” (Zane). Free from the conventional interpretations of plot, character, and literary style, the reader is now enabled to develop an interpretation and conclusion in the imagination, based solely on their readings of the plot, character, and style, and the redevelopment of the consciousness of existence, interaction, and communication of idea forced by Faulkner’s writing. Having done this, then the world created by Faulkner becomes reality for the audience, and the reader comes to this conclusion in the imagination: as in the world of As I Lay Dying, the real world is nothing like the world typically presented by literature; good nature does not always lead to success, and self-consideration does in fact bring success; those in peril are not always saved, and the supposedly innocent and pure mind of a child are oftentimes muddled and confused, even more so than adults. Addie Bundren’s lone narrative describes the entire essence of the novel. To her, “people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words, too.” (Faulkner 176), resonating the book’s sentiment that what society presents, in words used to define the facets of human emotions and human natures and concepts, is nothing but words which do not, and can never, truly capture their meaning and essence, instead falsely ascribing them to the definition of the word. Taken together, Faulkner’s novel is that of ultimate questioning and cynicism; it dispels the cheery and cliché statements of conventional literature, and in its place rebuilds a world that is bleak, with no sense of the universal code of ethics or righteousness readers are conventionally used to, but which is in fact a more realistic picture of life than literature most often paints.

Bibliography

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage Books, 1930.

Frye, Northtrop. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.

Zane, J. Peder. “William Faulkner's Literary Legacy”, 1997