Mortality and Existence in As I Lay Dying
Born in the poverty stricken South in the late nineteenth century, William Faulkner was one of the first authors to draw upon this environment for inspiration in his novels. His literary works did not go unrecognized; he won the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for his various novels and is regarded as one of the most successful southern authors. In As I Lay Dying, an 18th century novel set in the post-Civil War South, Faulkner utilizes the raw reality of America’s South to portray the harsh reality of our human existence. Through this rich environment, Faulkner is able to explore ideas of mortality and existence through the varying perspectives of Addie, Darl, Vardaman, and Cash in As I Lay Dying.
In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner is able to explore human’s relationship with death through Addie, the center character who barely has any lines but ties the entire novel together. Growing up in the poor South to less than loving parents, Addie was taught that “‘the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time’” (Hoffman 62). Since before her marriage, Addie steadily became more resentful of the life she was living; she firmly believed that life was suffering and the only treatment to this condition was death. Through her days as a school teacher, “[Addie] thought that [she] could not bear [life]” (Slaughter 18). To Addie, the apparent happiness of her students was an affront to her ideas and experiences from life (18). This nihilist
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Although he is deemed a social outcast, he proves to be the most thoughtful and provoking character of the book. Darl’s actions and thoughts present himself as the Dasein, or authentic existential being, under existentialist theory (Amjad and Kazemifar 63). Being an existentialist means one recognizes how he/she is thrown into an incomprehensible world surrounded by Nothingness. As the authors further