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As I Lay Dying Setting Analysis

602 Words3 Pages

Andre Bleikasten asserts the setting of the novel As I lay Dying is an integral force on the same standing of the characters and constitutes more than an inactive scenery for them to perform their action. People lose their foundations and meld into the setting, as the setting sprouts into animated existence and places within the movement. As a result, boundaries between the setting and man are fluid, and the distinction between them blurs. Bleikasten contends the fable’s world is trapped in a continuous pendulum between activity and stagnation. Physical animation takes place within the animated existences of the novel, and the setting. This animation takes place through the Bundren’s traveling wagon, Jewel’s horse and the buzzards flying over; nature engages in related animation by the agency of a storm, river and a flushing rain. Although the novel’s journey is an active physical migration, he contests Faulkner juxtaposes mobile components in the novel as immobile. He denotes that …show more content…

The world is not locked, all is brief and running. The sphere of the fable and the characters are subject to transubstantiation. Water is the representative of the potential change demonstrated by Darl’s interpretation of the river as a dormant beast posed to perpetually rouse and be dormant. This is representative of Bleikasten’s assertion of quiescent life being personified into live beings and human qualities obscuring with beasts and objects. This is further illustrated by entities such as floating timber, buzzards and Jewel’s horse all described to have human-like qualities and alacrity while humans are characterized as animals. He continues on to observe a distinction between the world’s elements as intertwined beings and change as the uniting

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