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As I Lay Dying (The Collected Works of William Faulkner)As I Lay Dying (The Collected Works of William Faulkner)William Faulkner
 

As I Lay Dying (The Collected works of William Faulkner)

by William Faulkner

Faulkner's distinctive narrative structures--the uses of multiple points of view and the inner psychological voices of the characters--in one of its most successful incarnations here in As I Lay Dying. In the story, the members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, to the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each of the ... (read more)

Top tags: fiction,  classic,  classic literature,  classics,  american literature (all tags)

Discussions

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  • Hillary H

    hillary h said:

    “the story is actually narrated by 11 (i think) different narrators. Each chapter moves from one to another, with each of the children having several chapters. The mother herself has only one chapter but it is a very important and enlightening one.”

    posted Wednesday, May 21 2008
  • nutmegballs

    nutmegballs said:

    “Read this in college, like 12-13 years ago, and thought it was good. Someone was asking about the voice in the story. If I remember the story correctly, was it not the mom, as she lay dying? (or dead) I seem to remember a long drawn out discussion of this in one of my college lit classes.”

    posted Wednesday, May 21 2008
  • Marita F

    marita f said:

    “Finally read this one last summer --- prior to all the conversations about "multiple perspectives" in literature...”

    posted Tuesday, May 20 2008
  • Ben

    ben said:

    “I'm going to have to echo the 'difficult' comments. It isn't just the fractured narrative that makes the book more challenging than most, it's the (presumably accurate) Southern vernacular. I suspect it wouldn't have been easy for the average American reader to understand back in 1930, let alone a British reader nearly 80 years later. That said, it's a beautiful book and one of my favourites.”

    posted Friday, April 25 2008
  • uplandpoet

    uplandpoet said:

    “it has to be a tribute to all the high school English teachers, this is the highest ranked Faulkner on the classic lit tag!”

    posted Friday, April 25 2008
  • Mik S

    mik s said:

    “This is one of my all time favorite books---I re-read it every couple of years”

    posted Thursday, March 27 2008
  • Stephen R

    stephen r said:

    “Faulkner is difficult and this one is among his more challenging, but it's very powerful. Faulkner, it seems, was a force of nature. He's influenced Marquez among others. It's been years since I've read his work. I'm trying to get the courage to go back and reread some of the major novels. Cormac McCarthy is the closet thing we have to Faulkner among living writers. I've slowly reading "The Road."”

    posted Saturday, March 8 2008
  • uplandpoet

    uplandpoet said:

    “cant say this is one of my favorites. it is excellent, but to me the malet, wild palms, light in august and go down moses absolom oh absolom stand apart from his more "middle work."
    With the exception of the sound and the fury, i do not find him a hard read, only a delicious one, but then i am a mississippian, maybe he speaks my language:)

    ”

    posted Thursday, December 27 2007
  • greatworkteam

    greatworkteam said:

    “gotcha.

    I think that one of the big explorations in the book is the relationship between the poor rural, and the middle class town-folk. I think that part of it is showing the exploitation of the sharecropping system, but I think that there's more to it than that. I really like the part where Darl, in the train, sees his family in the middle of the noise of the town, sitting in their wagon, eating bananas (someone pointed out to me that this is a Darwin reference). "Why are you laughing Darl?"”

    posted Friday, November 30 2007
  • uplandpoet

    uplandpoet said:

    “marsh, good luck, i think if someone reads this faulkner tale and doesnt get it that it is a great tale, but something else is going on, there is little hope they will grasp some of his other works. a shame, because he has possibly the greatest american writer”

    posted Thursday, November 29 2007
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