Sense of Alienation in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Abstract

William Faulkner in his novel As I Lay Dying deals about the funeral journey of the female protagonist Addie from the hill of Yoknapatawpha to Jefferson. The Bundren family carries the dead body of Addie to the town, Jefferson for her cremation that is quite difficult. Faulkner hasn’t used fixed narrator and composed of different characters to reveal their inner thoughts and emotions. In this context, we can see the subjective description of each character that is totally different among each other. In the novel As I Lay Dying, communication gap, proper awareness of mutual family relationship and the impact of modernization exist constantly and that led them toward alienation. In the novel, Anse, Addie, Darl, Cash, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman are the characters from the same Bundren family however they do not have similarity in their expression. As a result, alienation grows in their family. Similarly, the use of narrative technique in this novel is equally important through which it becomes easier to expose the sense of alienation in the psyche of the Bundren family.