As I Lay Dying Essay -- essays papers

As I Lay DyingIn As I Lay Dying William Faulkner uses sixfold points of view to explore the al-Qaeda of existence as a stable and meaningless cycle. The cycle is motionless because it is inescapable and unchangeable. One can never leave the cycle of liveliness and death. People perpetuate the cycle by creating flavour, but in creating life they argon creating death, for life irrevocably leads to death. Faulkner depicts existence as meaningless. Nothing very changes in the story. On the surface the characters appear to change, such(prenominal) as Addie dying, Darl firing crazy and Anse getting a new wife, but none of these changes are genuinely as relevant as they enchantm.By using multiple points of view Faulkner lets us into separately characters mind. We see how each person thinks about the cycle of existence. This insight could be accomplished with an all-knowing narrator, but Faulkners way is much more effective. Faulkner allows us to see a ten-year-olds stance on lif e and death from the perspective of a ten-year-old, instead of from the perspective of some all-knowing narrator that doesnt really know what its like to be a ten-year-old. Also, the essential sequence of narrators is in a cycle. We dont just peck all of Darls point of view, and then Anses, and then Peadead bodys. Faulkner cycles through his characters, returning again and again to people like Darl and Dewey Dell and Vardaman, while having characters such as Jewel and Addie speak only once.Addie Bundren is in m any shipway the central character of the story. The plot revolves around her as her family tries to get her body to Jefferson for burial. Her single monologue comes in the exact middle of the book, making her geographically the central character. Most importantly howeve... ...and what his place is in life, and the fact that he goes crazy is simply the next step in his identity crisis. Again, it is because we are given Darls thoughts that his craziness makes sense to us. We are brought into his confused mind, and so when it finally cracks we infer why.So nobody in the story really changes. They are all in a motionless state of existence, pathetic slowly towards death. Faulkners use of point of view helps us understand how the characters feel about their cycle of existence, and how much of it they truly understand. If Faulkner had told this story any other way, we would not understand the cycle as well as we do. We wouldnt feel a part of they story and the characters. We would be aloof from their emotions and thoughts. But as it is, we feel like a part of everyone in the story, and we can relate to and understand their thoughts.