A Modernist Study Of As I Lay Dying In Light Of Perspectivism

Since the advent of As I Lay Dying, approaches applied in its analysis vary radically. While brilliant research outcomes have been yielded successfully, and a considerable number of them focus on its modernistic characteristics, few literary critics and professionals have probed this work of high-modernism from the vintage point of Nietzsche’s theory of Perspectivism. Although the novel is tagged as Faulkner’s “tour de force”, which means in writing the work he has not changed a word of it and it undergoes little re-examination and has not suffered any editorial modification, and hailed one of his very best, generations of scholars and critics find it“subtly unreadable”. This research believes that all this “unreadableness” is due to Faulkner’s modernistic writing technique, and more importantly, with his philosophical thinking regarding Nietzsche’s Perspectivism. Thus this research is to justify that this prototypical modern masterpiece is Faulkner’s literary expression of Nietzsche’s critical thinking of Perspectivism. The research examines the burial of Addie Bundren in the novel from the perspectives of each Bundren family member,including Anse the father, Addie the mother and the five children. The analysis over sense and force of each family member indicates that each of them has a unique sense of the mother’s burial and each sense materializes under the influence of a peculiar force. The result of this research is that As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s aesthetic articulation of his critical thinking of Perspectivism, and in giving birth to this novel Faulkner himself makes possible the reunion of art and philosophy. This research is the very first endeavor to offer an insight into the novel in light of Nietzsche’s Perspectivism.