Stream of Consciousness

As I Lay Dying is a modernist novel using stream of consciousness style narration. Stream of consciousness is when an author writes down character's thought processes instead of telling the reader what a character is thinking and doing, and is a hallmark of modernist literature, and more specifically Faulkner. Stream of consciousness narration means that the reader is interpreting a character's interpretation of the world around them. This can be very confusing, which is why I find reading Faulkner so hard. For example, part of As I Lay Dying is narrated by Vardaman, the youngest of the Bundren family. Vardaman is very young, and as such, doesn't comprehend the world in the same way that most people do. A shining example is Vardaman's perspective on his mother's death. Vardaman doesn't understand truly understand death, so he tries to understand it through the fish that he had caught earlier. This was confusing to me at first, but I eventually came to understand what Vardaman was doing. The main problem that stream of consciousness results in for me is that sentences or passages will often have random interjections in the middle, making it harder to follow the story. For the most part, however, it isn't to difficult to follow the story. In fact, there is a major benefit from stream of consciousness.

Thanks the narration style, as a reader, I get a unique look at the way the characters look at and interact with the world. Characters' chapters are each narrated in their own unique point of view, so each chapter gives insight into the different characters. Darl, for example, has a very clear conscious and so it is easy to focus on what he is thinking. It quickly becomes clear that Darl sees almost everything. He even knows that his sister, Dewey Dell, is pregnant, even though she never tells her. Another character, Jewel, is filled with hate. His sections are full of angsty words, making it clear that Jewel is angry with the world. These are just two observations that the reader can make about Darl and Jewel thanks to stream of consciousness. Like Darl and Jewel, much is revealed about the other characters in the novel through their style of narration.