Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s
major themes.
Pointless Acts of Heroism
As I Lay Dying is filled with moments
of great heroism and with struggles that are almost epic, but the
novel’s take on such battles is ironic at best, and at times it
even makes them seem downright absurd or mundane. The Bundrens’
effort to get their wagon across the flooded river is a struggle
that could have been pulled from a more conventional adventure novel,
but is undermined by the fact that it occurs for a questionable
purpose. One can argue that the mission of burying Addie in Jefferson
is as much about Anse’s false teeth as about Addie’s dying wishes.
Cash’s martyrdom seems noble, but his uncomplaining tolerance of
the pain from his injuries eventually becomes more ridiculous than
heroic. Jewel’s rescuing of the livestock is daring, but it also
nullifies Darl’s burning of the barn, which, while criminal, could
be seen as the most daring and noble act of all. Every act of heroism,
if not ridiculous on its own, counteracts an equally epic act, a
vicious cycle that lends an absurdity that is both comic and tragic
to the novel.
Interior Monologues
As Faulkner was embarking on his literary career in the
early twentieth century, a number of Modernist writers were experimenting with
narrative techniques that depended more on explorations of individual
consciousness than on a string of events to create a story. James
Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s In
Search of Lost Time are among the most famous and successful
of these experiments, but Faulkner also made a substantial contribution
to this movement.
As I Lay Dying is written as a series
of stream-of-consciousness monologues, in which the characters’
thoughts are presented in all their uncensored chaos, without the
organizing presence of an objective narrator. This technique turns
character psychology into a dominant concern and is able to present
that psychology with much more complexity and authority than a more
traditional narrative style. At the same time, it forces us to work
hard to understand the text. Instead of being presented with an
objective framework of events, somewhere in the jumble of images,
memories, and unexplained allusions, we are forced to take the pieces
each character gives and make something of them ourselves.
Issues of Social Class
In the American South, where Faulkner lived and wrote,
social class was more hierarchical and loomed larger as a concern
than elsewhere in the United States, and it is clearly engrained
in the fabric of As I Lay Dying. Faulkner proved
to be unusual in his ability to depict poor rural folk with grace,
dignity, and poetic grandeur, without whitewashing or ignoring their
circumstances. The Bundrens find willing, even gracious hosts at
neighboring rural farms, but their welcome in the more affluent
towns is cold at best: a marshal tells them their corpse smells
too rancid for them to stay, a town man pulls a knife on Jewel,
and an unscrupulous shop attendant takes advantage of Dewey Dell.
On the other hand, despite their poor grammar and limited vocabularies,
Faulkner’s characters express their thoughts with a sort of pared-down
poeticism. Exactly what Faulkner’s intentions were for his family
of rural southerners is unclear—As I Lay Dying has
been read as both a poignant tribute to and a scathing send-up of
rural southern values—but the Bundrens’ background unmistakably
shapes their journey and the interactions they have along the way.
