As I Lay Dying Analysis

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As I Lay Dying “A mother’s love is instinctual, unconditional, and forever.”- Anonymous. The novel, As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner is about a family, the Bundren’s journey across the Mississippi river in order to bury their beloved mother, Addie, who resented the life she lived. Although Addie is dead throughout most of the story she remains as important and constant as she was alive as she is deceased. Addie wasn’t the best example of a mother. Out of all her four children Addie loved Jewel the most, which is the child she conceived with another man. “I said you’d just let her alone. Sawing and knocking the air always moving mast on her face that when you’re tired you can’t breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less.…show more content…
She hated her husband, Anse and wanted no connections to him what so ever which was why she wished to be buried in Jefferson with her family rather than his. “Motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.” Addie describes how that life is miserable and only offers great opportunities to those who are given it rather than those who earn or deserve it. Woman had it rough during the 1920s. Addie had very little opportunities and felt trapped in the world she lived. “She watches me, I can feel her eyes. I have seen it before in women. Seen them drive from the room them coming with sympathy and pity, with actual help, and clinging to some trifling animal to whom they never were more than pack horses.” Being a woman in the 1920s, Addie is expected to do nothing but give birth to her husband’s children. Because of this Addie became an aggressive person. Addie wants to be a strong, independent woman but society prevents her from doing so. Addie is the most important character in this novel because she is the reason her family comes together but at the same time she is the reason why her family isn’t a close knit. She made known that she regretted her life, her children rivaled against each other for her love and she had hopes that were never meant to
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