Death And Doubling In A Furious World: Narrative Strategies In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

This thesis intends to explore the meaning of Faulkner's "old story" and the use of his "best methods" in his major work As I Lay Dying. The cosmos is traditionally constructed by the hierarchy, but chaos easily intervenes with the collapse of order. The strife in the universe is response to human nature which generates doubling with the death instincts. Characters in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying are doubled with two personas: the victimizer and the victimized. Under the scythe of Father Time, they rupture with the maternal tie and become the same waiting sacrifice. In this sense, the Bundrens are a group of people who "lay dying" in alienation and disillusionment. But they are also incarnated into Furies as well. In thirsty for blood, they take revenge on each other in unaware of their own fate as the next prey. Patricide, matricide, fratricide and infanticide prevail in the fictional lives and turn their world as a metonymy of T.S. Eliot's waste land. Thus the title As I Lay Dying is dedicated not to any single man, but to all human beings in the modern world.The world is not ended with a bang but a glimpse, a whimper, a way of slow disintegration of old virtues. As an attempt to analyze the "best methods" in Faulkner's narrative strategies, I resort to narratological perspective which emphasizes the investigation of narrative focalization, narrative voices and characters. These techniques not only involve the double-decoding on the planes of "story" and "discourse", but also invite other concerns on psychological and social critical framework, especially on Lacan's theory.The thesis falls into three chapters. Chapter I discusses the exploitation of perspectives, especially on Darl's focalization. Dart's perspective plays the role as the first person internal perspective, the first person external perspective, and the third person internal variable perspective. His glimpse shatters the family hierarchy and creates a dreamy, grotesque atmosphere in the text. In the violation of the principle of verisimilitude, Darl's perspectivesprove the doubling of his personality: the victimizer and the victimized. The second chapter examines different voices in AS I Lay Dying: the phenomenal voice, mimetic voice and psychic voice. Phenomenal voices define the character's relation to the world, while mimetic voices transcribe the Mississippi farmer's colloquial talk. The Southern humor and biblical usage are adopted mainly on those not-Bundrens. To portray characters' inner thought, Faulkner also exploits different discourse patterns including soliloquy, free association, and interior monologue. And since all young Bundrens concentrate on Addie and her death, their interior monologues achieve harmony by the flux of consciousness and shared secrets. The discussion of "different characters" in chapter three focuses on the Bundren family. Greimas's actant model shows the inter-relative connections among them. The young Bundrens seek a psychic return to the imaginary union and substitute the maternal void with different substitutes. Yet in the symbolic stage, the paternal force intervenes with a symbol of time. Thus everyone becomes the inevitable victim. Dart's doubling proliferates, Cash, Jewel and Dewey Dell also have doubled to be both victimizer and victimized.In the whole, death and doubling are products of entangled social forces, tinged with post-war disillusionment and Southern loss. As a result, the two motifs in William Faulkner's major works have transcended the restriction of time and transformed his Yoknapatawpha series into the old story "which haven't changed too much since man first found how to record".