William Faulkner, Pylon

Pylon (1935) differs significantly from Faulkner’s other novels released in the 1930s.  It is not set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, but rather in a fictionalized New Orleans, New Valois, and rural Ohio during the heyday of the “barnstormers,” acrobatic biplane flyers who would do dangerous (and often fatal) stunts and races for the entertainment of the crowds who would follow them from town to town as they staged their shows.  In addition, Pylon revolves around the interactions of six characters who are part of these shows:  the reporter, whose recounting of events within the flying troupe serves ultimately to divide them; Laverne, the mechanic who is romantically involved with two of the troupe; Jack, Laverne’s son, who is easily angered whenever questions of his parentage arise; Roger Shumann, the main pilot of the barnstormers, who may or may not be Jack’s father; Jack Holmes, the show jumper, who has also been involved with Laverne; and Biggs, another mechanic who quirks and alcoholic binges help fuel the tragedy that concludes Pylon.

Faulkner had long had interest in flying and he himself took part in some air shows in the mid-1930s.  Through many of these characters’ comments, both in their internal thoughts and in their dialogues with others, there often is a connection between the freedom of flying and the attempts of the characters to liberate themselves from the shackles that they encountered when they would land after their last acrobatic feat.  It feels more personal than just an author attempting to get into the skin and discover the soul of the characters.  Certainly the first paragraph tries to capture this quality of freedom juxtaposed with mundane reality:

For a full minute Jiggs stood before the window in a light spatter of last night’s confetti lying against the windowbase like spent dirty foam, lightpoised on the balls of his greasestained tennis shoes, looking at the boots.  Slantshimmered by the intervening plate they sat upon their wooden pedestal in unblemished and inviolate implication of horse and spur, of the posed countrylife photographs in the magazine advertisements, beside the easelwise cardboard placard with which the town had bloomed overnight as it had with the purple-and-gold tissue bunting and the trodden confetti and broken serpentine – the same lettering, the same photographs of the trim vicious fragile aeroplanes and the pilots leaning upon them in gargantuan irrelation as if the aeroplanes were a species of esoteric and fatal animals not trained or tamed but just for the instant inert, above the neat brief legend of name and accomplishment or perhaps just hope.

Faulkner tells the interconnected stories of these daredevils in an episodic, seven chapter format, that moves across time and space.  There is a wealth of detail here, with aural and visual descriptions used to complement and reinforce the thematic connection between flight (and freefall) and human desire to escape fate.  One example of this can be seen in the public address announcer’s description of a show jumper’s fall from the plane:

“–still gaining altitude now; the ship has a long way to go yet.  And then you will see a living man, a man like yourselves – a man like half of yourselves and that the other half of yourselves life, I should say – hurl himself into space and fall for almost four miles before pulling the ripcord of the parachute; by ripcord we mean the trigger that –” Once inside, Jiggs paused, looking swiftly about, breasting now with very immobility the now comparatively thin tide which still set toward the apron and talking to itself with one another in voices forlorn, baffled, and amazed:

“What is it now?  What are they doing out there now?”

“Fella going to jump ten miles out of a parachute.”

There is something terrifyingly beautiful about watching stunts.  Knowing that if anything goes wrong –  even if the timing were off by a split second, that there could be a horrific crash or a body flattened by the ground due to a malfunctioning parachute – adds to the excitement of the viewer (and the participants, of course).  These reckless stunts serve as the perfect metaphor for impulsive, irresponsible relationships such as the ones Faulkner describes here in Pylon.  Just as what happens when the stunts are not executed properly, there are casualties in these type of relationships.  We see it through the belligerence of young Jack, who does not know if Roger Shumann or Jack Holmes is his father (or if anyone else is).  Laverne’s dithering between Roger and Jack (not to mention implied flirtations with others) creates dissension among the barnstorming troupe.  Roger’s unwillingness to settle down and (as it can be inferred although not proven in the text) be a father strikes sparks between him and others close to him.

It is this combination of high-flying stunts and risk-taking relationships that make Pylon a gripping read.  It is hard not to get caught up in the drama unfolding, as the characters seem destined for a messy, explosive denouement. Faulkner does a good job in laying out these characters’ flaws and how they combine to create a tragedy.  Yet there are places in the novel where the dialogue feels a little forced, as if the characters have been slotted into predetermined roles and that outside of Jiggs and the reporter, there is not as much character development as could have been done.  It is as though Roger, Laverne, and the elder Jack have their triangle subsumed into the concrete metaphor of the race and the pylon/tower around which they must make their sharp breaking turns.  The conclusion suffers due to this, as there is not the full, visceral punch to the gut that might be expected from the setup leading into the final two chapters of the novel.  This is despite a very elegant final paragraphs that attempt to show just how tragic the events leading up to the tragedy were.  Faulkner here had the makings of a remarkable novel, but due to the uneveness in the character portrayals, Pylon instead is relegated to a merely good yet lesser novel of his.


Originally posted in February 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels  reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.

William Faulkner, Light in August

Light in August (1932) read like a nuclear bomb, detonating in my synapses, dispersing vivid, quick, and powerful images as I read this novel over the past two days.   It is perhaps the most troubling and moving Faulkner story that I have read.  Set during the late Prohibition period in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi setting, Light in August addresses issues of isolation, determinism, racism, and sexism in such a fashion that readers may find themselves dwelling upon the import of its scenes and characters for days or weeks after finishing the final page.

There are four main point of view characters in Light in August:  Lena Grove, a young, unmarried pregnant girl who walks from her home in western Alabama in search of her one-time lover, Lucas Burch; Gail Hightower, a disgraced former minister who dreams of the glories of his Confederate cavalry-leading grandfather; Byron Bunch, an industrious thirty-five year old man who fears idleness as much as he does the devil’s other tools; and Joe Christmas, the enigmatic itinerant worker who is haunted by memory of his adoptive parents and the revelation that he contains “nigger blood.”  In each of their stories, Faulkner moves back and forth between the literary present and the past through long, stream of consciousness-filled flashbacks that serve to create a composite image of not just themselves, but of the town of Jefferson and its peoples.  At first, these extended flashbacks distract from readers wanting to know more about why Lena walked alone for days to reach her destination or how Joe Christmas (whose name appears to be one of several possible allusions to the Christ’s sacrifices) came to work in Jefferson and partner up with the mysterious Joe Brown, his driving (and possibly other?) buddy and one time fellow mill worker.  Yet as the story unfolds, connections, both plot and thematic alike, appear between these characters that create a narrative tapestry that is devastating and yet, in some small yet vital sense, optimistic alike.

Hightower serves as the grounding element in this novel.  His cuckholding and the events that follow it have ostracized him from his community.  He dreams of gallantry, yet is acutely aware of the hypocrisies and latent violence in his neighbors.  He is the one who acts as a quasi-guardian to Lena, providing a necessary check on her guileless view of humanity and her wandering lover.  He is also a mentor to Byron, counseling him to be wary of coming too close to Lena, echoing then-prevalent social attitude regarding “impure” women.

In this can be seen a painful echo not just of his own failed marriage, but also that of Joe Christmas’ birth mother (whose identity is revealed late in the novel).  Without directly stating it, Faulkner here appears to be making a withering condemnation of the rigidity of those gender conventions  and the approved violence directed by men (such as Christmas’ adoptive father, his biological grandfather, and even in Christmas’ own relations with women) toward women simply because they choose (or are forced by circumstance) to behave outside of their demanded roles.  Hightower’s warnings are not simply a confirmation of this attitude, but instead are admonitory comments about the sufferings involved in gender relations.

Lena serves more as a symbolic antithesis of Christmas.  She is innocent and trusting, even when her beau has skipped town and moved to another state.  She seeks shelter and understanding, yet is not embittered by the sidelong glances she often received from men who noticed her pregnant state.  Her character complements Byron’s in that while he searches for a “good” woman to marry, she represents the imperfect perfectness of this desire.  Their motivations and actions act in diametrically opposite fashion from that of the shiftless Brown or the vaguely sinister Christmas (an initial reading which may possibly be in conflict with the later plot).

Christmas represent the darker, existential searches for meaning in a world that seems determined to sort people based on the color of their skin and not on the content of their character, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous quote.  He appears to all extents “white,” if one defines that by how one is received by segregationalists.  He is abused as an adopted child (his biological grandfather removing him from the house, with the moniker of “Christmas” being in reference to his approximate birthdate and deliverance into adoption), informed that his mother was practically “a whore” and that he had “nigger blood.”  This triggers a years-long search for identity which expresses himself in violent sexual interactions with women, where he voices his black heritage to white prostitutes when he can’t pay them (in order to outrage them and perhaps lead to his own beating by local toughs) in the South and a role reversal when he wanders out of the South following whatever trade he may find for a spell.  He feels he is cursed and in a flashback sequence with the Carpetbagger-descended Joanna Burden, this curse is shown in a different light, as she recounts what her father told her:

‘Remember this.  Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of.  A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race’s doom and curse for its sins.  Remember that.  His doom and his curse.  Forever and ever.  Mine.  Your mother’s.  Yours, even though you are a child.  The curse of every white child that was born and that ever will be born.  None can escape it.’

This view of racism as being as much an ‘original sin’ for the whites who demean and maltreat blacks as it is a burden and curse for the blacks who have to endure such evil treatment is revisited later in some of Faulkner’s other fiction.  It is a troublesome topic, because on one hand he does not directly condemn this shameful discrimination while on the other the implications of these words hint at a fatality that conjures images of fire and brimstone looming over this cursed society that has deprived a significant portion of its community of basic human rights based on the color of their skin.  Faulkner elaborates further on this contentious issue when Hightower reflects on the ominousness that lurks behind even worship:

The organ strains come rich and resonant through the summer night, blended, sonorous, with that quality of abjectness and sublimation, as if the freed voices themselves were assuming the shapes and attitudes of crucifixions, ecstatic, solemn, and profound in gathering volume.  yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.  It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so  by means of the praise itself.  Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood:  that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it.  Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear:  their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable  And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.

As the story unfolds, we see this violence, this bloodlust that masks itself in piety and justice.  As much as Brown and Christmas represent illicit sin and violence, the townspeople, from those who shunned Hightower to those who later do their own version of “crucifixion” to a poor soul, are just as “cursed” to replicate these horrific acts in sanctioned ways.  It is not easy to read; one may find him or herself despondent after reading that passage and the scenes that follow.  Yet there are glimmers of hope, represented in the relationship between Lena and Byron.  They represent, if not quite innocence, charity, toward each other and toward the world around them.  They do not by themselves symbolize the removal of the stain of deterministic racism and sexism in the world, but their characters crystallize within themselves the hope that these evils can somehow be ameliorated.  It is fitting that Light in August closes with them, as they are the metaphoric “light in August,” that fleeting time in which the oppressive summer heat lifts for a moment and memories of coolness and freshness emerge before they are submerged again for a while.  Light in August discusses some rather depressing and harsh truths about human society, yet that germ of hope buried in this soil of suffering, confusion, and hatred provides this weighty novel with just enough “lightness” to make reading it a worthwhile experience.

Originally posted in February 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels  reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.

William Faulkner, Sanctuary

Despite the latter praise novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), it wasn’t until Sanctuary (1931) was published that William Faulkner began to receive the commercial attention that he desperately sought.  Although much was made of Faulkner’s later claim that he wrote Sanctuary solely to achieve commercial attention, this novel contains several layers to it that make it as much of a sensational read in 2012 as it was upon its initial publication over eighty years before.  What is noticeable, however, is that Sanctuary does not rely upon experimental narrative techniques in crafting a complex weave of human fears, doubts, violence, and hypocrisy that brings into focus the concept of what might constitute “sanctuary.”


Sanctuary opens with a Memphis-area lawyer, Horace Benbow, fleeing a troubled marriage and career to return to his native Jefferson, Mississippi (the fictional locale of most of Faulkner’s stories).  He stops at a watering hole, where he is confronted by the ne’er-do-well, Popeye, who is protecting a house run by a local bootlegger, Lee Goodwin.  As Popeye consults with a woman sheltered there, Ruby Lamar, several skeins in the overall narrative thread are woven together for the first time:

“He came here?”

“I found him at the spring.”

“Was he trying to find this house?”

“I dont know,” Popeye said.  “I never thought to ask.” The woman was still looking at him.  “I’ll send him on to Jefferson on the truck,” Popeye said.  “He said he wants to go there.”

“Why tell me about it?” the woman said.

“You cook. He’ll want to eat.”

“Yes,” the woman said.  She turned back to the stove.  “I cook.  I cook for crimps and spungs and feebs.  Yes.  I cook.”

In the door Popeye watched her, the cigarette curling across his face. His hands were in his pockets.  “You can quit.  I’ll take you back to Memphis Sunday.  You can go to hustling again.”  He watched her back.  “You’re getting fat here.  Laying off in the country.  I wont tell them on Manuel street.”

The woman turned, the fork in her hand.  “You bastard,” she said.

“Sure,” Popeye said.  “I wont tell them that Ruby Lamar is down in the country, wearing a pair of Lee Goodwin’s throwed-away shoes, chopping her own firewood.  No.  I’ll tell them Lee Goodwin is big rich.”

Several key events are foreshadowed here.  Here we are introduced to Ruby, who appears to have been a prostitute working in a Memphis criminal district.  We see her staying at Lee Goodwin’s place as a sanctuary from the “hustling” that she previously had to do.  Popeye apparently has connections to these same Memphis criminal elements, which is made even more explicit in the novel’s second half.  Goodwin’s place is another place of sanctuary, this time one for the runners and bootleggers who are evading Prohibition laws.  All this while Benbow, who comes to represent a sort of legality and morality in the midst of corruption, remains outside this room, shut off from his initial attempt to find his own personal sanctuary.

Faulkner quickly introduces the other key players in this human drama:  Tommy, the near-idiotic worker at Goodwin’s place; Lee Goodwin himself, whose character is much more complex than what might be suspected from a bootlegger who employs some local toughs to protect his illegal business; Narcissa Benbow Sartoris; Horace’s widowed sister with whom he stays upon his arrival in Jefferson; Gowan Stevens, a vainglorious self-labeled “gentleman” whose belligerent drinking lands him and others in trouble; and Temple Drake, daughter of the local judge and an Ole Miss student whose story becomes a crucial part of the story.

Each major character has their own idealized “sanctuary” to which they retreat when conditions become too rough for them.  Besides the already-mentioned ones, we have Narcissa retreating into a cocoon of social standing (in some regards, she is similar in attitude to Emily from “A Rose for Emily”); Gowan using his University of Virginia education as a crutch to excuse his rampant alcoholism and ultimate cowardice; and Temple, whose name hearkens to a concept of purity and chastity, both of which are belied by later events.  She is sheltered, first by her father and then by her social standing, and it is the stripping away of her own sanctuary that makes Sanctuary such a fascinating and unsettling read.

Sanctuary received a lot of attention upon its release for its depiction of violence and rape.  Faulkner does not skimp on showing how violence can result from individuals who either willingly choose to remove themselves from the dominant social structure or those who are forced out of that own sort of social sanctuary.  Popeye menaces others throughout the novel (near the novel’s end, we learn why he was rejected by society at a young age).  The quoted scene above hints at his connections to a criminal underworld vaster than just running moonshine during Prohibition.  He threatens Goodwin and Ruby, he leers at many women, he seems to have some sort of authority over the operator of a Memphis brothel.  We see two murders that he commits, each of which affect Temple.  Popeye is not just lacking a sanctuary, he is the destroyer of the illusions that others have about their own safe places.

Temple is the antithesis, at least at first, of Popeye.  She enjoys a good, sheltered life, yet she is constrained by this.  Her reputation for “loose morals,” however, is a problematic theme in this novel.  Although Faulkner never states directly (nor is it definitely implied) that Temple “deserved” what happened to her, there certainly are some interpretations of the novel that could support this assertion.  Those interpretations would take the readiness in which she hooks up with first Gowen and then later with a small-time gangster nicknamed “Red” and the seeming willingness she has to have sex with Red.  Yet I cannot help but think that Faulkner’s “fade to black” description of her rape was not intended to be a condemnation of Temple’s character as much as it appears to be a symbol of the ripping away of innocence and security in the harshest, most vivid way possible (the way in which she was raped, described only by a brief forensics admission in a late court scene).   In this light, Temple’s later actions are not meant to trivialize the horrific scene, but perhaps are best examined as a plausible attempt of a violated person to recreate a sense of sanctuary by any means necessary, even if it means violating previously-held social conceptions of honor, justice, and honesty.

These two characters, Popeye and Temple, lie at the heart of Sanctuary.  Popeye is a destructive, violent force that obliterates others’ previously held assumptions.  His assault on Temple and the subsequent acts that result from that horrific act serve as concrete metaphors for the dangers that lurk outside of personal conceptions of sanctuaries.  Temple’s violation and the changes it wrought in her life serve as another example of how sanctuary removal can affect people and how they interact with the world.  At first, her ultimate actions in the novel seem to be almost inexplicable, as she condemns the mostly innocent through perjury, yet when viewed in light of the other characters (minus Benbow, who serves to underscore the futility of honor and justice), her actions make a strong statement about the self-deceptions that people will do in order to preserve some sense of security in the world.

It is a troubling theme, one that convinced several readers at the time that Faulkner reveled in the sordid and violent acts of humanity, but yet there is another layer to this.  One could argue that in showing humanity at its worst that Faulkner was doing more than just making a point about the futility of the characters’ belief.  Yes, terrible things have happened and our delusions have been forcibly removed, but what next?  That is an issue that Faulkner explored in several subsequent novels and stories, including his 1932 novel, Light in August.  Here in Sanctuary, we see the horrors of existence in its full non-glory and with its devastating conclusion, Faulkner makes readers reassess their convictions in a way that may horrify but never titillate readers.  Humans are funny, fallible creatures and here, we see the worst, whereas elsewhere Faulkner covers the other aspects.  Eighty-one years after its initial release, Sanctuary still shines a powerful light on our views of life and security, making us blink and reconsider.  Its power cannot be understated and when read in light of his other works, its almost unrelenting darkness serves to highlight the other aspects of life that he explores elsewhere.  It is an essential, albeit unnerving, part of his authorial output and is a novel that readers ought to read if they think they have Faulkner “figured out” after reading a novel or two or some of his short fiction.



Originally posted in January 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Jewel stops at the spring and takes the gourd from the willow branch and drinks.  I pass him and mount the path, beginning to hear Cash's saw.

When I reach the top he has quit sawing.  Standing in a litter of chips, he is fitting two of the boards together.  Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade:  a good carpenter, Cash is.  He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box.  He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze.  A good carpenter.  Addie Bundren could not want a better, a better box to lie in.  It will give her confidence and comfort.  I go on to the house, followed by the

Chuck.           Chuck.         Chuck.

of the adze. (Darl, p. 4)

***

It's because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box.  Where she's got to see him.  Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See.  See what a good one I am making for you.  I told him to go somewhere else.  I said Good God do you want to see her in it.  It's like when he was a little boy and she says if she had some fertilizer she would try to raise some flowers and he taken the bread pan and brought it back from the barn full of dung. (Jewel, p. 11)

William Faulkner polarizes many readers these days.  There are those who hear how brilliant his works are, yet are baffled by the experimental prose in several of his novels, notably his 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, which I plan on covering late this year.  Or maybe their first exposure is through his short fiction, such as "A Rose for Emily" (1930) or "Barn Burning" (1939) in a high school or university American literature anthology and they struggle to understand the techniques and motifs Faulkner employs, needing guidance from instructors who often use a checklist to denote what Faulkner is doing here or exploring there.  I once was that 18 year-old university freshman who had to endure the instructor telling us what Faulkner was doing rather than being able to decide for myself what it was about his fiction that might appeal to me.  I chose to devote the Fridays of 2012 to discussing Faulkner's fiction, both novels and short stories alike, because despite being considered one of the 20th century's greatest writers, relatively little is said about him in a non-academic setting.  As I Lay Dying (1930) was chosen to lead off this commentary series because its structure, characters, and themes provide an excellent point of entry for those readers who have either never read Faulkner before or they found other works, possibly the ones listed above, to be incomprehensible or not what they expected.

As I Lay Dying was one of the first novels to utilize heavily a multiple point of view, stream of consciousness narrative approach.  For readers accustomed to a primary narrative voice, this switching back and forth between 15 different narrators over 59 short chapters was a novelty unlike most anything they had read.  This continual switching of narrators, however, is essential to making As I Lay Dying work as a narrative.

The story revolves around the death of Addie Bundren, the matriarch of a Mississippi farming family in the early 20th century who struggles to make a hardscrabble life.  Addie is dying of a long-term ailment and she makes her family of four sons and one daughter and her husband to promise to bury her in the town of Jefferson, a few days' horse travel away from their farm.  Although this request, mysterious as it is to characters and readers alike at first (we soon learn the reasons behind this dying wish), is on the surface a straightforward plot (get Addie where she wants to rest for eternity), Faulkner's use of multiple points of view, replete with their own passing thoughts and conjunctures, turns this novel into a tragi-comedy that reveals much about ourselves.

In the passages quoted above, we experience two of the Bundren children's (the second son Darl and the third son Jewel) thoughts on what the third son, Cash, the eldest, is doing as he joins and sands the boards that will constitute their mother's coffin.  Darl's slightly detached narrative is the one that is repeated most, as he is the one who is simultaneously closer to the other characters and most distant from their mother.  His is the voice that grounds the narrative in the difficult, trying times where despite the toils and pains of subsistence farming, families there tried to honor the wishes of the deceased.  We see through him the narrative equivalent of a cinematic pan-out, with his brothers', sister's, and father's actions placed in a larger perspective.

Despite Darl receiving the most point of view chapters, the key passages in As I Lay Dying turn around the "close ups" of the other characters.  As Addie is dying, we see the youngest son, Vardaman, a mere lad of around seven or eight, thinking of the fresh-caught fish that had just been gutted and skinned.  His reaction to his mother's death is the short but resonating observation, "My mother is a fish."  This observation, when combined with Darl's earlier observation of Cash's dedication to building the best coffin for their mother and Jewel's irritation that Cash is doing so where Addie can hear (and if she is able to move, see) the coffin making, creates a memorable composite experience.

Faulkner easily could have settled for just making a strong statement on familial bonds, but in the second half of the novel, as the family is moving Addie's body to Jefferson, we encounter more.  Peering into thoughts of Addie's husband, Anse, and their daughter Dewey Dell, we see ancillary concerns that help recast the events transpiring into something more universal than just a single family's honoring of the dead's request.  It is here where the stream of consciousness, with Anse thinking of his desire to pick up some false teeth and Dewey Dell's fretting about the pregnancy that she has not revealed to the other characters, that we see the petty concerns and desires of humans even when tragedy is unfolding around them.  It would have been easy to condemn these characters (or the sons for their conflicted attitudes toward bearing their mother for days toward her grave site) for being self-centered, but Faulkner instead presents these as common, perhaps typical responses to such events.  In doing so, the narrative opens up and as we experience a few key point of view chapters near the end of the novel, we begin to see that in letting us believe that one sort of tale was unfolding, Faulkner actually is telling a second composite narrative behind the first.

As I Lay Dying works because the characters construct a narrative that is deceptive in its simplicity.  We are not "told" about the characters' qualities, but instead through the views of others and then their own self-images, we begin to get a composite portrait of each character, including Addie, who is the heart of this tale.  As I Lay Dying reveals a host of truths to readers, some of them comic in the classical sense of commedia, others more tragic, but what Faulkner accomplishes here is creating an epic tale in the space of barely 170 pages through a masterful manipulation of character perspective.  Here he has refined the stream of consciousness approach that he utilized in his previous novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), and he makes it more "personal" and yet more universal through the seemingly simple decision to let the characters speak for themselves and through them allowing readers to take from the narrative what they may.  The result of this is a brilliantly-constructed story where each character point of view joins tautly with one another to create a complex, composite narrative whose appeal ranges far beyond the early 20th century setting to move readers over eighty years later.

Originally posted in January 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.