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Faulkner is a difficult writer. His style--the way he expresses things--is often closer to poetry than to prose. Like a poet, he tries to capture the emotion of an experience as well as the experience itself.
Faulkner deliberately withholds meaning to keep his options open, to keep his story in motion. In the opening section, for instance, he describes an odd competition between Darl and Jewel but never tells you whether it really is a competition or what it\'s all about. You have to read many more sections before you can make sense of that first one. In Addie\'s section [40], her thoughts jump from experience (her history) to ideas (her theory of the distance between words and deeds) and to unanchored impressions (\"the terrible blood, the red bitter blood boiling through the land\") whose meaning you must almost guess at.
The beauty of As I Lay Dying is that its structure permits Faulkner to create numerous voices. Dewey Dell\'s breathy rush of unfinished thoughts is one distinct voice. Vernon Tull\'s folk dialect is another, and MacGowan\'s wise-guy patter is still another. The repetitive structure of Whitfield\'s monologue [41] mimics Psalms in the Old Testament. In large part, this demonstration of Faulkner\'s virtuosity in handling a number of voices comfortably is what people are talking about when they call As I Lay Dying a tour de force, an expression of an author\'s technical mastery.
Keep an eye out for Faulkner\'s startling use of imagery. It would be useful for you to jot down the first ten images that make an impression on you and ask yourself why they are memorable. Much of Faulkner\'s imagery is visual (pertaining to sight). But his imagery can also be olfactory (pertaining to smell), tactile (touch), auditory (hearing), gustatory (taste), and even abstract in its appeal to the intellect.
The lyric description of drinking water from a cedar bucket [section 3] provides examples of these forms of imagery. \"Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells\" mixes gustatory, tactile, and olfactory imagery in one sentence. A paragraph later, Faulkner mixes auditory and tactile imagery: \"I could lie with my shirt-tail up, hearing them asleep, feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing....\"
It\'s Faulkner\'s abstract imagery that may give you the most trouble. \"I cannot love my mother because I have no mother,\" Darl says in section 21. \"Jewel\'s mother is a horse.\"
Faulkner makes imaginative uses of figures of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another (metaphor) or in which one thing is likened to another (simile). In section 21, Jewel shapes a horse in his imagination \"in a rigid stoop like a hawk, hook-winged\" (simile). Darl describes the floating log that topples the wagon \"upright... like Christ\" (simile), and later Cora calls the log \"the hand of God\" (metaphor). Extending the Christ image, Darl speaks metaphorically of \"the bearded head of the rearing log.\" Earlier Faulkner uses metaphor to suggest that Jewel\'s horse is Pegasus--\"enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings.\" What he is doing here, as elsewhere, is implying analogies between his characters and those from ancient myth.
In a consideration of style, it\'s important to remember that all the action is described through interior monologues thought processes presented as speech. Interior monologues play three key roles. They (1) move the action forward, (2) reveal the characters\' private thoughts, and (3) comment on what the other characters do. They also permit some of Faulkner\'s characters to use, in their unspoken thoughts, some highly sophisticated language. \"The lantern,\" Darl observes in section 17, \"...sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the boards and the adjacent earth.\" In section 13, the young boy Vardaman sees \"the dark... resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components.\" When they speak aloud, however, these characters are country folk through-and-through. \"You mind that ere fish,\" Vardaman tells Tull.
The folk dialect of Tull, Anse, and Cash seems to take some of the horror out of the journey. Tull describes Vardaman\'s boring holes through the lid of Addie\'s coffin: \"When they taken the lid off they found that two of them had bored on into her face. If it\'s a judgment, it ain\'t right....\"
As one reader says, Faulkner \"crosses farce with anguish\" in As I Lay Dying. And a lot of the farce, or slapstick humor, is in the language--Faulkner\'s style.
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