The Unfinalizability Of As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a masterpiece of modern American literature. With its multiple narrative perspectives and the extended stream-of-consciousness monologues, as well as the grotesque story, it has long baffled common readers, who would find it hard to get the essence of the novel in all that uproarious voices of the text. The novel's complexity in theme, characterization and narrative perspective make it open to various interpretations and, at the same time make it impossible for the reader to reach any finalized or finalizing conclusion. This thesis attempts to approach As I Lay Dying from a dialogic perspective so as to shed a new light on the study of this novel.In the introduction, we first take a brief glance at the social unrest of America in the late 1920's and the early 1930's, when Faulkner wrote this novel, and point out the transitional nature of the American South in this period. This could help us to understand how Faulkner's polyphonic literary vision took shape. We will also review, in the introduction, traditional discussions on its generic ambiguity among critics, which fail to account for the characteristic complexity of As I Lay Dying as a polyphonic novel. By applying Bakhtinian dialogism, the author intends to throw a new light on the study of this novel and reveal its unfinalizability.The first chapter discusses briefly Bakhtin's dialogic theory so as to create a theoretic framework for the following analysis of the multi-leveled dialogic relationship in As I Lay Dying.The second chapter offers a detailed analysis on the ambiguity of the title. Our discussion mainly focuses on two problems: first,there is no way to find out the tense of the verb "lay" in the title; second, "as I lay dying" as a dangling clause has not an explicit main clause to depend on. And the "I" in the tide, also the central figure of the story-Addie Bundren, is an enigmatic figure, who suffers from intense inner conflicts and is lingering in the ambiguous zone between being and nonbeing.The third chapter concentrates on the heterogeneous "voices" of various characters, by means of which we intend to reveal their mind movements and how one consciousness unfolds to the reader through its dynamic interaction with others'. We are mainly concerned with two types of dialogue: the dialogue among different narrators and that within one's own discourse. The latter can take either the character's inner conflicts or other's consciousness as its rejoinder.The conclusion emphasizes that As I Lay Dying, as a polyphonic novel, is dialogic by nature. The key to a good comprehension of this novel is to understand its multiple voices. When we make our own judgment or interpretation, we should take all the complexities and contradictories in the novel into consideration. In a pluralistic world, dialogue exists universally and it is also a basic existing manner of things.