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Lin, Jinxian Campbell Student ID: 2084281 Dr. Lauren Holt ENG 101-03P: Southern (Dis)Comfort-Fall 2013 Response Paper #3 1 November 2013 As I Lay Dying is a novel written by William Faulkner that presents a story about a Southern family. After Addie, dies, her husband, Anse and her children, Darl, Jewel, Cash, Dewey, and Vardaman try to transport her coffin and bury her. However, on their journey, they encounter many troubles. Throughout the story, it displays the misfortune of the old South that many Southerners were once bounded to, such as poverty. Unlike other novels whose chapters are mostly based on different events or contexts, As I Lay Dying is written with a narrative device called stream of consciousness. The author mainly composes the story through the thoughts and feelings of the inner minds of characters. In As I Lay Dying, different chapters are written in the first person voices of different characters. Through monologues, they present the story from different perspectives. Since different family members have different personalities and characteristics, they show disparate attitudes to the event and sometimes the reliability of their narration can be questionable. Reading As I Lay Dying, a stream of consciousness novel is a brand new experience or even adventure for me. It is my first time to see that I in the same book can represent different people. So, when reading, I feel like I am on the stage acting out all the roles. Such switching among actors and actresses allows me to walk into different characters shoes to understand how each person thinks and interprets things differently. However, because the novel is primarily based on internal thoughts, there are a few places where the narrator says very strange things without the authors explanation. Given that the stream of consciousness requires the story flows as the narrators thought goes, I usually need to guess the

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meanings depending on the context instead of expecting further information from the author. For example, when Addie is compared to a horse, it is very confused to understand what feeling the narrator is trying to express. Because such comparison of human to non-human is unusual in our daily life, it requires me to go back and forth to look for clues (Faulkner). Another interesting thing is that the length of each chapter varies a lot. While one chapter can be four to five pages, another chapter can be as short as just one sentence. Because of such dynamic change, it also causes difficulty to comprehend the function of that short chapter. Yet, such variation in length is another distinctive feature of stream of consciousness. Moreover, there are difficulties when I try to follow the logic and connections among sentences. Sometimes, one sentence just does not make sense after the one before. They seem to talk about totally different things. Yet, later I know that this is exactly the important feature of stream of consciousness that words and sentences are not usually rationally connected but emotionally connected.

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Works Cited Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage, 2011. Kindle.