He makes us actually think about what we’re reading, rather than just allowing us to read it and not necessarily think twice on it. His form has been linked to that of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as he made a huge contribution to the experimental movements of the time. Can it?”įaulkner is very experimental with his writing and word use. “Then mine can be a fish, can’t it, Darl?” I said. A conversation between Vardaman and Darl goes as follows: Vardaman has his crazy, manic ramblings, while Darl has his language quirks, arguing the case of whether something “is” or “was”. Faulkner really demonstrates each character’s personality and writes each person so differently. There are no chapter numbers, but the chapters are titled with a character’s name and their narration follows in first person. The form of the novel is a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues. The shortest chapter in the book simply reads: “My mother is a fish”. The remainder of the novel follows the family carrying the coffin in a wagon, facing the weather and each other in a fight to bury Addie at her final resting place. It is clear that he does not understand the concept of death. When they taken the lid off her they found that two of them had bored on into her face.” “And the next morning they found him in his shirt-tail laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger broke off in the last one. Once the coffin has been completed, built by the eldest son, Cash, Vardaman sneaks out and puts two large holes in the top of the coffin, believing that his mother cannot breathe in there. He associates his mother with the fish, to the point where he believes she is actually a fish. The youngest son, Vardaman, is five years old and has caught and killed a fish the same day that Addie dies. The book centres around her family and how they react when she dies. Their mother, Addie, dies very early on in the novel and her one wish was that she must be buried in Jefferson, Missouri, a long way for the family to take her coffin. Although the book is about Addie and her death, she is not the main focus. The novel follows Anse Bundren, and his five children, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman.

Having never read anything by Faulkner before, I think I was quite surprised at the modernity of it, after I found out it was written in 1930. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this novel.

Books like as i lay dying