Guest Blogger: Sarah S.

In this last unit, we have been talking a lot about the ideology behind the type of narration that the three books we have been reading have used. In Turn of the Screw, we discussed how Henry James used the governess to create ambiguity and also help us to believe the governess more readily, despite all of her ethereal claims. It was because of his choice to do so that she didn’t seem so crazy. In Ethan Frome, we talked about how Ethan himself couldn’t have narrated his own story. He wasn’t curious enough or articulate enough to explain everything to us in a complete fashion. That’s why we needed the narrator Edith Wharton chose to find out Ethan’s story for us and relate it back to us. Both of those books included only one character narrating.
Now, we have all recently finished As I Lay Dying. This book, unlike the other two, has 15 different narrators, all of whom talk differently, understand the events differently, and give us as the readers a glimpse into all of their minds. I looked up online how many narrators there are, and while doing so, I found a quote from Cash in the book that really explains, indirectly, the thinking behind having many narrators well: “Sometimes I ain’t sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. […] That’s how he can’t see eye to eye with other folks. And I reckon they aint nothing else to do with him but what the most folks says is right” (“As I Lay Dying Narrator…”). To me, this really describes how, especially in this book, we needed all of those perspectives. When members of the Bundren family describe what is going on, it is easy to see they are a little different than other families. Even when the Tulls talk, it shows how they are different than most other people. For the “puzzle” activity we just did in class, my group focused on the five narrators that had either never seen the Bundrens before, or in Peabody’s case, have rarely seen them. It is from these five perspectives in six different chapters that we really get a glimpse into how queer the Bundren family is. For example, Mosely (who ran the drug store) describes the sensation the family made in his town: “It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folks were scared would fall all to pieces before they could get it out of town, with that home-made box and another fellow with a broken leg lying on a quilt on top of it, … and the marshal trying to make them get out of town” (Faulkner 203-204). Clearly, Mosely and the other townsfolk find their situation an abomination. As both Rachel, Samson’s wife, and Lula, Armstid’s wife, say, “It’s an outrage!” (Faulkner 117 and 187). Without these other viewpoints, we, the readers, would never see to what extent how odd the Bundrens are. We see how socially awkward they are, how peculiar their journey is, and how others see them as lazy (especially Anse) and queer. No one understands why they are making this long, and apparently smelly, trip to Jefferson. With Faulkner’s choice to include all of these narrators, we get great glimpses that help to get the full story from many people’s point of view. We get a fuller picture, and really see how the Bundrens themselves, and their trip, are so strange.

Works Cited:
“As I Lay Dying Narrator: Fifty-nine sections comprised of fifteen different first person narrators.” Shmoop University, Inc. 2010. 10 April 2010. .

*Note: The quote I took from this website is found in our books on page 238, but the version from the website is a different. I chose to use that version, rather than our version, because I think it explained how point of view makes a big difference better than our book.