I finished my essay on Addie's monologue from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It was only a short assignment (my piece comes in at 922 words, including the direct quotes ... so there's maybe 800 of my own words). Nevertheless I couldn't find my way in for days and if I can't see the way in I have no chance of getting out again. So it's a day late, which means two points lost before anyone starts to count. I had no choice though. Yesterday I had nothing but fragments.
Here's how I finished:
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| "My mother is a fish" |
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Addie’s passage is, therefore, pivotal to many ways of
reading Faulkner’s novel: as an, at times, horrific re-working of Homer’s epic
tale of the return home, suffused with absurd and darkly improbable humour; as an
exploration of the tensions within and contradictions between public and
private constructions of identity illustrated through variations of voice,
tone, register and syntax among characters inhabiting the same, precisely
delineated fictional world; as a cautionary fable concerned with the
destructive and alienating effects of Modernity; as a recognition of ways in
which the unmodern – in particular, death – persists (if not triumphs) in life;
and as a writing experiment to demonstrate the author’s Modernist concern with
the limits of language as a vehicle to express or explain meaning and truth.
We'll see.
Illustration by Nate Olsen at
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