Class in As I Lay Dying
The title comes from a scene in Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the underworld and encounters Agamemnon, who tells him: Upon the Sword, raised up my hands to smite her,And shamelessly she turned away, and scornedTo draw my eyelids down or close my mouthThough I was on the road to Hades' house.Here Agamemnon complains of the unfulfilled mortuary customs that leave him unreleased by his culture and family into peaceful death.So much of the work this term has been about unresolved matters-the inability to have a tragic vision, with its sense of purification (catharsis), restoration, and progress: in Twain, tragedy gives way to farce; in Hemingway, trauma replaces tragedy. Over and over again, we see in this class that writers judge their culture by how that culture treats its dead. Du Bois, say. Here Faulkner is no different. For Faulkner's target in some crucial ways is the New South, the vision of a progressive and modernized southern culture in the wake of the first world war, a vision that is severely compromised and undone by the great depression. Industrialization without prosperity. And Faulkner's book is about the fallacy of progress-and about the destructive e
He moves but for every step forward he takes two backward. No reader can declare the Bundrens either heroic or idiotic; and this inability to take their measure is part of the effect, I think, that Faulkner is after. "why ain't I a town boy pa?" Vardaman asks Anse on page 66. No controlling point of view; no trust in the authenticity of this or any other stories that people tell about their world. On returning to Oxford, MS, Faulkner led people to believe that he had fought in the war; he also wore a uniform around town. " His resentment of the road partakes of the hyperbole and miseducation the novel generally associates with poor whites; yet on the other hand Anse is right-the highway is killing his family's way of life, signaling the urbanization and modernization of even the agrarian South. Here the fact that Faulkner names his book after a monologue from the Odyssey is significant: Odyssey is a story about circular movement, about not being able to go forward. As if haunted by the specter of decline, Faulkner himself tried, like Hemingway, to enlist in the US Army, only to be thwarted because of his height; he then joined the Canadian RAF, but although he went through basic training, by the time he was combat ready the war had ended. Stream of consciousness aims to reveal those buried aspects of personality of which a person himself is unaware. The exaggerated perspective that one gets when one sees from within a mind not mediated or mitigated by other minds, a shared reality, is similar to the exaggerations of the form of the tall tale itself. And like H, Faulkner began to write about the war in his fiction-his first novel was called Soldier's Pay. If He can make the train, why cant He make them all in the town?" Even as a young child, Vardman has internalized the dominant culture's devaluation of rural locales, and his anxiety intensifies his position as a consumer, "shining with waiting" for the toy he desires.
Common topics in this essay:
Anse I'd,
Cora Tull,
Faulkner Faulkner's,
Redneck Odyssey,
Odyssey Odysseus,
Bundrens They're,
Dewey Dell,
God God,
TULL Cora,
MS Faulkner,
white trash,
lay dying,
poor whites,
circular movement,
war faulkner,
stream consciousness,
tall tales,
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Acceptance Essays
