An Analysis Of Addie Bundren's As I Lay Dying

William Shakespeare said, “The eyes are the window to your soul.” In the Postmodern literary world, characters’ souls battle loss, alienation, isolation, and purposelessness. William Faulkner made a career out of exploring the darker side of life in the rural South and gave readers a glimpse of the social, economic, and racial prejudices his characters endured and hopelessly struggled to escape. This state of hopelessness defines the plight of the Bundren family in Faulkner’s classic As I Lay Dying. Dying matriarch Addie Bundren’s worn eyes, which “look like lamps blaring up just before the oil is gone” (45) reflect life’s losing battle she has come to embrace. Addie’s expected role in early 20th century society for a wife and mother leads to her desire for isolation, which ultimately …show more content…
Addie Bundren arises from a family with a clear answer to the philosophical inquiry surrounding the meaning of life. In the beginning of her solitary chapter, she provides the reader with this credence from her father, “I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” (169). Just as the statement is juxtaposing living with dying, Addie recounts this memory in correlation to her memories of going down a hill to be alone after the school day in the early spring of her teaching career. She claims that early spring was the best time for “the quiet smelling of damp and rotting leaves and new earth” (169). This imagery reveals the contrasting aspects of nature; whereas even in the season of new life, death is an ever present force. This mirrors Addie’s own conflicting