ng has many instances of time obsession. The main theme of the story is getting things done in time to arrange for Addie’s body to be buried in Jefferson. Some members of the Bundren family care about this time pressure more than others. Some only care about money or reputation. However, throughout this novel, time is an issue. Darl is very impatient, and he is always making comments on how things won’t be done in time, everything won’t be ready. However, is Darl really impatient for his mother’s sake, or is he more concerned about money?Ironically, Addie is the one voice in As I Lay Dying that is the most concerned about time. She has a short but impacting chapter, and she spends all of it talking about the past, tying up everyone else’s stories. She simplifies time, making it seem much easier to deal with:“I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are not his and not mine. And then I could get ready to die.” (Page176)This sums up almost her entire life in just a few sentences. In this way of time simplification, she makes a world where time is not a pressure, but it is something that can be manipulated.When asking the question of why to read Faulkner, this is the answer I came up with. It is important to look deeply into a Faulkner novel to see its true life. Faulkner’s works demand a lot of thinking from his readers. His issues with time are complex, but in the end, he is dealing with a complex world that can be reflected on. He makes his readers think long and deeply to understand his stories. He portrays the conflict with the old south and the new south, so time is always an issue for his characters. His experimentation with sporadic segments of time, multiple narrators, and stream-of-consciousness passages come together to create a complex drama. His multifaceted p...
