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Interior Monologue In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

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In the novel, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Faulkner uses interior monologue to show the different perspective each character has. By using interior monologue The reader can tell what goes through people's mind. Moseley, the town pharmacist, sees Dewey Dell and is told to “ wait on her” (199). After asking her what she wanted he notices that, “ She stopped and looked at [him]. it was like she had taken some kind of a lid off her face, her eyes. it was her eyes: kind of dumb and sullenly willing to be disappointed all at the same time. But she was in trouble of some sort; I can see that” (200). By using an interior monologue here, it shows what's going through Moseley’s mind. It also shows how Mosley is able to easily read people. Moseley …show more content…

As a druggist he is able to help people to the best of his abilities, but he knows that he cannot solve everybody’s problems. Moseley can see that Dewey Dell knows this as well and is not expecting much from him either. Later on in that chapter, after Dewey Dell leaves the store, Moseley sees a commotion by a wagon, noticing an eight-day old “home-made box” that, “must have been a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill” (203). Then, Moseley proceeds to recognize, “another fellow with a broken leg lying on a quilt on top of it, and the father and a little boy sitting on the seat and the marshall trying to make them get out of town” (203-204). By have Moseley’s thoughts, we are able to see how judgemental he is. Mosley is making fun of the Bundren’s by criticizing how they are unable to buy their own casket. A good example of how, by being inside Moseley’s mind we can see that he is judging their family based on the looks whereas throughout the novel we already know that the Bundren is poor. Without interior monologue we would not be able to read what a pharmacist would be thinking and how the Bundren’s are perceived by an

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