For Faulkner, meaning and the reality of each person is "mutable." In this regard, the novel deals with the themes of identity and existence and the intentions and motivations behind each individual's reasons for undertaking the journey to bury Addie from many different points-of-view.
The images of death and dying tend to add to this search for meaning and identity; for example, Addie's slowly decaying corpse. The death of the mother motivates the family to begin the journey to not only bury her but also as a personal search for meaning. The theme of death also tends to stress that view that we are all in the process of dying and this emphasizes the importance of finding meaning and significance in life.

The novel uses symbols and image to convey its deeper intentions with regard to life, death and identity. e see this aspect in Vardaman's attempt to understand his mother's…...

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Works Cited

Allen, Sharon Lubkemann. "Dispossessed Sons and Displaced Meaning in Faulkner's Modern Cosmos." The Mississippi Quarterly 50.3 (1997): 427+.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury & as I Lay Dying. New York: Modern

Library, 1946.

Holland-Toll, Linda J. "Absence Absolute: The Recurring Pattern of Faulknerian

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying The classic 1930 Novel by William Faulkner, “As I Lay Dying” is a demonstration of the evolution of modernist literature that incorporates an in-depth psychological aspect. The psychoanalytic novel displays the intricacy of the human psyche by attempting to unravel what lays in human minds. The novel presents an emotionally, psychologically and physically distressing journey of a family characteristic by selfishness as they embark. The novel entails a critical inquiry of the psychoanalysis of human minds and their response to tribulations. The novel’s richness in human emotions echoes human nature of self-centeredness that results in divergence in human behavior.
Group dynamisms is vividly and richly drawn in the novella which covers multiple psychological complexities by the characters. The story is narrated in multiple perspectives and covers several human complexities that include characters psychological development, mechanisms of defense and the mourning dynamics. The novella incorporates the inevitability…...

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References

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Print

Dying
illiam Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying tells the story of a family living in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The matriarch of this family, Addie Bundren, is approaching death and her family prepares for this event through various means based upon the personality of that character and the particulars of their relationship with this family member. Upon her death, Addie asks her son to allow her to be buried in Jefferson, Mississippi and a large part of the plot concerns the efforts that the Bundrens must undertake in order to fulfill their mother's dying wish. Addie is at the center of the story and all of the actions of the children, and her husband also, are reflections on this matriarchal figure. More than this, literary scholars have argued that the story is an extended metaphor for the American south in the period following the Civil ar and up to the…...

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Works Cited:

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner, First Encounters. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983. Print.

Fargnoli, A. Nicholas., Michael Golay, Robert W. Hamblin, and A. Nicholas. Fargnoli. "As I

Lay Dying." Critical Companion to William Faulkner: a Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2008. Print.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

Dying is a unique novel in that there is no discernable protagonist. In lieu of the protagonist is a corpse, Addie, who is dead for most of the book. The novel is written in the first person, from the perspective of Addie and her family, although the perspective shifts for most of the chapters between Addie's self-interested family members with Addie herself only contributing one chapter. Addie's dying wish is to be buried in Jackson, and the story is about how she makes it there. Although Addie is not alive for much of the novel, her son Jewell reflects her interests after she's dead and acts as her legacy.
That the novel is the story of a dead person whose ends will not be met until she reaches her grave is typically thematic of voodoo cultures that existed in Mississippi's colorful history. Another theme is that of the oral tradition…...

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Bleikasten, Andre. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1973.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Modern Library; 1946.

David P. Shuldiner. Folklore, Culture and Aging: A Resource Guide; Greenwood Press, 1997

In the opening paragraph, his detailed physical description of Jewel and him walking on the path exhibits what we soon see is a strong faith that language makes memory, perception, and action real. (Lockyer 74)
She also notes that Darl is the character who speaks the most in the novel, thus showing his adherence to the value of language in his actions as well as his words. In doing so, she says, "he displays the omniscience, verbal range, and responsibility for interpretation that we associate with a narrator" (Lockyer 74). hat Darl says also solidifies the view that Addie has been isolated and has also been deceived by her former faith in words. Faulkner develops a range of views of language and its use and of the degree to which different characters express their own relationship with language.

Lockyer discusses this further and cites Mikhail Bakhtin on the novel to the…...

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Works Cited

As I Lay Dying (August 1998). Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan. November 22, 2008.  http://www.lib.umich.edu/spec-coll/faulknersite/faulknersite/majornovels/dying.html .

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel." In the Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259-422. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage, 1930.

Guerard, Albert J. The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner. New York: Oxford, 1976.

1). For Lester, the novel is a novel of migration and the ambiguous benefits of Southern culture and traditions: when Addie demands that her family lay her body "to rest forty miles away, in Jefferson, where her relatives are buried" her "request places a burden on her family, who subsist on limited means as small farmers and occasional wage laborers in rural Northern Mississippi in the late 1920s" (Lester 2005, p.1). he burden upon the family of social obligations is a heavy one: they must honor the past and custom, but Addie's body becomes a heavy weight to bear, just as the ties that bind them together are heavy and strangle one another, physically, emotionally, and economically.
Marc Hewson of he Mississippi Quarterly offers a feminist reading of the book. he centrality of Addie and her profound influence upon her sons forces the reader to question Southern patriarchal norms: "he trip…...

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The time period during which Faulkner was characterized by a great deal of insecurity about Southern culture, which was undergoing a profound shift, according to Cheryl Lester: "When Faulkner published As I Lay Dying in 1930, the modernization of the South had already begun to propel a spatial and social dislocation that would amount by century's end to the departure from the region of not only 29 million Southerners" but also the influx of Northern culture into the South, as the nation gradually became more connected by radio, cars, and railroads (Lester 2005, p.1). For Lester, the novel is a novel of migration and the ambiguous benefits of Southern culture and traditions: when Addie demands that her family lay her body "to rest forty miles away, in Jefferson, where her relatives are buried" her "request places a burden on her family, who subsist on limited means as small farmers and occasional wage laborers in rural Northern Mississippi in the late 1920s" (Lester 2005, p.1). The burden upon the family of social obligations is a heavy one: they must honor the past and custom, but Addie's body becomes a heavy weight to bear, just as the ties that bind them together are heavy and strangle one another, physically, emotionally, and economically.

Marc Hewson of The Mississippi Quarterly offers a feminist reading of the book. The centrality of Addie and her profound influence upon her sons forces the reader to question Southern patriarchal norms: "The trip to Jefferson thus becomes for her boys a form of education in her ways. By mourning her and contemplating their relationships with her, Cash, Darl, Jewel, and Vardaman learn to emulate her and adopt her suspicion of patriarchal constructs" (Hewson 2000, p.1). Addie ties her boys to the land and their common mother, even in death. Her maternity is a source of self-realization and identity for herself and her sons. The piecemeal nature of the work exemplifies how all of her sons make up different pieces of Addie, who lives on in all of them.

However, Cinda Gault offers a 'reverse' feminist understanding of the text: according to Gault,

It is thus that he helps to establish the truly tragic abstractions that characterize the family's individual experiences. here a broad, unilateral overview of the story might direct the reader's focus to the burial plot, an objective set of narratives articulated by the character's themselves suggests that Faulkner intends the story more as a lamentation for the living.
In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner delivers a treatise on the American condition too often unconsidered in either the literary or the public forums. The Bundrens can be considered less a family comprised of actual individuals as a unit of caricatures. The characters are altogether conflicted by selfishness and emotional ambivalence, divided by an unrefined sense of loyalty and an incapacity to truly experience mourning and relentlessly driven to their goal even as they are guided by cloudy ambitions. In this regard, it is difficult to even determine that Faulkner finds redemption…...

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Works Cited;

Faulkner, W. (1930). As I Lay Dying. Vintage.

Levinger, L. (2000). Prophet Faulkner: Ignored for Much of His Own Time and Then Embalmed in Dignity by the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner Spoke to the Violence and Disorder of Our Time. The Atlantic Monthly, 285.

McHaney, T.L. (2004). First Is Jefferson: Faulkner Shapes His Domain. Mississippi Quarterly, 57.

Mellard, J.M. (1995). Something New and Hard and Bright: Faulkner, Ideology

But since their sense of righteousness is flawed, their plans fall apart and the ending is quite disastrous as owe explains: "When they reach town, the putrescent corpse is buried, the daughter fails in her effort to get an abortion, one son is badly injured, another has gone mad, and at the very end, in a stroke of harsh comedy, the father suddenly remarries" (138).
Addie and Cora represent two different versions of right. For Cora faith is on lips all the time and she expresses righteousness through words, for Addie, actions are more important and thus she appears vain compared to Cora but has a deeper and more accurate sense of right and wrong. While Cora appears with utterances such as "I trust in my God and my reward" (70) and "Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for e can see into the heart." (7) Addie…...

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Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975.

William, Faulkner. As I Lay Dying. New York: Random House, 1985.

John Gledson, the Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis (Liverpool, UK: Francis Cairns, 1984).

WWI and Literature
World War I was certainly one of the most productive periods in literature with millions of poets and authors emerging on the scene and each one contributing tremendously to the growth and progress of literature. It is quite strange that while WWI was a deeply disturbing and a largely horrifying experience for most countries, it inspired writers and poets around the globe and this resulted in significant growth of world literature.

In England alone, more than 2000 poets emerged during this period as Harvey (1993) elaborates: "From the very first week, the 1914-18 war inspired enormous quantities of poetry and fiction. The claim that three million war poems were written in Germany in the first six months of hostilities is difficult to substantiate, but Catherine W. eilly has counted 2,225 English poets of the First World War, of whom 1,808 were civilians. For example, William Watson (then an esteemed…...

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References

A.D. Harvey, First World War literature. Magazine Title: History Today. Volume: 43. Publication Date: November 1993.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Hemingway, Ernest. Complete Poems. Lincoln: U. Of Nebraska, 1983.

Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War. Publisher: Biblo and Tannen. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1967.

It shows the selfishness of Dewey Dell, who is only concerned about her pregnancy and gives other family members little thought. It shows the long-suffering, to the point of self-immolation, of Cash. It shows the rivalry of Darl and Jewel, both vying for their dead mother's affection. And it shows the innocent simplicity, bordering on mental instability, of the young Vardaman. Each of these family members was affected in different ways by this destructive family dynamic.
Anse, in one of the most telling passages in the book regarding his relationship to the family, goes down the list of family members and whines about how each has cost him money in some way, further complaining that he has to work, when he does so, even though he doesn't have any teeth (35-37). Wadlington argues that because the story is set in the south and Anse is the "master" of the house,…...

When pushed too far, when too greatly damaged, when the soul has been taken away, when the resilience is gone, all that is left is the act of birth, the cold and empty soul, and a generalized feeling of resentment and anger coming from mother and directed at life and history and the self. Faulkner's Addie's rotting body is an act of revenge, Eva's burning of her son is an act of insanity, both seek the harm of those closest to them, because their disappointment in life is so profound, and they are so utterly trapped in their surroundings, that being a good and wholesome person, being a healthy, nurturing mother, is simply no longer possible. This, then, is the nature of the South for both authors, and it is that nature which tells us that until the bodies are buried, and the souls put to rest, and the…...

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References

Davis, Anita Price. Toni Morrison's Sula. New York: Research and EducationAssociates, 1999.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Penguin, 1982.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Vintage, 2004.

Baldanzi, Jessica & Schlabach, Kyle. What Remains?: (De)Composing and (Re)Covering American Identity in "As I Lay Dying." The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 36, No. 1, Thinking Post-Identity (Spring, 2003), pp. 38-55.

Dickson had to deal with a few close relationships end in death, including that of her father, (Crumbley, 2000). Due to her nature of solitude, a death hit Dickenson hard. In her writing she tends to obsess over the act of dying. Much of her poetry features a first person narrator speaking about the actual experience of dying, "I hear a Fly buzz - when I died," (Dickson, 111). The grief she feels from the death of a loved one in a very personal way, so much so that she envisions experiencing her own death over and over again in several of her poems. She internalizes the grief of death into an obsession with the act of dying, "And then the indows failed - and then / I could not see to see," (112).
illiam Shakespeare presents a King who had his Queen killed, and the devastating affects of overzealousness…...

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Works Cited

Crumbley, Paul. "Emily Dickinson's Life." 25 Apr. 2008. Modern American Poetry.  http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickinson/bio.htm 

Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest. Back Bay Books. 1997.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International. 1990.

Shakespeare, William. A Winter's Tale. Penguin. 1999.

high degree of misinformation I had received from traditional teachings about the church and the beginning of Christianity. Moreover, I was struck by the notion that most other people in the Western world receive this same degree of intentional misinformation, so much so that I have even heard people defend the idea that knowledge of the historical church is irrelevant to modern Christianity. Reading through the class material, I was struck by how critical this historical information was to the understanding of the actual church. One critical piece of information is the idea of Jesus as the head of the church, despite him not establishing Christianity as a separate religion. Another critical idea was that prophets could play a continuing role in Christianity, when my traditional understanding had suggested that after Jesus there would be no more Jewish prophets. I also found myself wondering about the very obvious and…...

stand proud as you can see, I've survived and thrived and lived
Sometimes I have erred but other times I did succeed

I've reached a level in my life where there is less want and need

There are good memories behind me and many sad ones too

Things that I've regretted and moments I stood tall

A life is made of both, harshest times and all

Everyone I think of had issues just like mine

Maybe different circumstances and others they've done wrong

Harming people harming self and forgetting all along

If I be you then maybe I can understand my self

Or perhaps there is no understanding only something else.

I see others walking all around their phone clenched in their hand

No one's talking to each other and I cannot understand

Inhumanity is normal; a robot; a machine

My nightmares every single night; what is the dream I dream?

Response:

When reading the poems, the line from "A Lower East Side Poem" which…...

Childhood Home
The house I lived in when I was a child lay quietly shaded by forty acres of trees. In the springtime, we would hear the soft tapping of the newly sprouting leaves in the wind. The summer would come with the pervading squeal of tree frogs that could be heard when eating a Popsicle on the deck or answering the phone, when we would have to cover up one ear to help stop the noise. In the autumn, the leaves of these trees would drift lazily down to earth by the dozens. And even in winter, when the leaves were under the snow and it seemed that even the trees great lives were stagnant, their shadows would loom over and calm the glare of the bleach-white snow.

Although everyone lived amongst them, we, the children of the neighborhood, owned the trees and woods. At least that was how it…...