SOURCE: Slaughter, Carolyn Norman. “As I Lay Dying: Demise of Vision.” American Literature 61, no. 1 (March 1989): 16-30.

In the following essay, Slaughter provides a close examination of Faulkner's use of language in As I Lay Dying.

The criticism of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying manifests the heterogeneity, the ambivalence, and the outright contradiction that characterize Faulkner criticism in general.¹ Meanwhile the work continues to provoke ever more provocative commentary. Among traditional interpretations that even yet attempt to find meaning as statement, nontraditional readings are beginning to let the meaning lie while they follow Faulkner's strange experiments with time and space, with memory and imagination, with consciousness and unconsciousness.² Still, whatever the reading, it is usually expressed in terms of rationalist thinking, i.e., in negative terms, as disruption, disjunction, vacancy, and absence, as distortion and loss. The only novelty I hope to offer is that my interest is...