As I Lay Dying Language Analysis

As I Lay Dying, a novel written by William Faulkner, illustrates the harrowing journey of a family as they travel across Mississippi to bury their dead mother. Faulkner introduces multiple characters throughout the book, each with definite personalities and mannerisms. The complicated portrayal of each indivdual is achieved through the unique stream of conciousness style of speech that accompanies every character. Faulkner uses specific language and stylistic choices to characterize the various family members and define their personalites.
Addie, the mother of the family, and the driving force behind the deterioration of her family’s world, has a bitter perspective of love and existence. Her internal thoughts, which appear only once in a chapter later in the book, reveal her complicated emotional view towards her painful situation. Her language is dark and cold, and she often reiterates the idea that “words are no good” (page 171). Addie’s voice is of a woman who has only known the empty love of her father, and of Anse, and the hardships of motherhood. Words have never been true to her, and therefore she cannot understand their importance. Her morbid and angry voice is most present when she expresses a want to injure her students, and murder her husband. Her hatred for humanity is clear when she compares them
Her thoughts slowly deteriorate as the novel trudges onwards, her pregnancy eating her away with anxiety. Her overwhelmed state is presented in her twisted view of motherhood and children. Similar to Addie, Dewey Dell views pregnancy as an obligation, rather than the beginning of a new life (this perspective is evidently caused by the misogyny surrounding childbirth in the 1920’s). She sees herself as a “tub of guts” (page 58), and identifies with a moaning cow that needs to be milked. Her saddened, grim language intensifies as she falls farther into the reality of her situation, and loses the hope of an