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How Does Faulkner Use Language In As I Lay Dying

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Darl then questions the consistency of his being; to be able to assure of his identity, there must be a certain consistency that is maintained for a certain length of time. The verb to be now carries multiple functions; it is not a word that promises one’s existence but a word that endangers one’s identity. Even if anything “was” present in the past, it does not guarantee its presence at present; rather, it stresses the discontinuity of one’s being from the past to the present. The verb to be also connects the beings not as a marker of equivalence between beings but as a connective chain between existences; Jewel’s being is connected to Addie’s being, which again is connected to Darl’s being, and that is how he is able to have a self to empty …show more content…

The text performs its own undoing through its medium by constantly unravelling its own inherent contradictions. The novel turns out to be a contesting site for the warring forces of signifiers and consequently disseminates into an indefinite range of self-conflicting significations. It is to Faulkner’s credit, the absolute artist that he is, could produce a sublime reading experience of it. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner pushes language to its limit through Addie’s and Darl’s unconventional use of language. Their agrammatical, asyntactical, apertinent, and asemantic language questions and destabilizes the established orders embedded within the major language. The reader listens to the voices that cannot be heard in reality. A dead woman speaks of her unusual desire to merge with other human being(s) and her frustration with language, with its impotence. The reader listens to Darl’s inner struggle to maintain his Cartesian self that is apt to dissolve into multiplicity. Listening to Addie’s and Darl’s “foreign” language, the reader learns their language. The reader is requested to translate the untranslatable. Hearing the impossible voices, the reader, as Darl hears Addie’s voice in the end, also experiences a delirium only a great literature can

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