Literature Teaching Sequence 7: Fiction (Faulkner)

As I Lay Dying Teaching Sequence

Day One: The reading assignment will have taken the class up to, but not including, Addie's chapter just past the halfway point of the book. I'll begin with a mini-lecture on Faulkner and Modernism. I'll keep this as brief as possible, but I feel it is important to contextualize the novel with a bit of history so that its radical experimentation will be seen as more than gimmickry I suspect that a lot of time in this first class session will have to be spent on establishing who the characters are and their relationships to one another. Once we have a cast of characters on the board, we will begin to focus upon the advantages and problems raised by Faulkner's internal monologue technique. The question that will drive this discussion is an investigation of how character is created in narratives such as this one which combine an individual's internal and often secret thoughts with external observations and judgments by others about that individual. Does Darl's identity consist of Darl's perceptions about himself, or others' perceptions of him? And what happens when these conflict?

Day Two: The students will have response papers due on this day. They should have read the remainder of the novel, from Addie's chapter until the end. I anticipate that everyone will have thoughts about the idea of a dead woman speaking and that many of them will have written about it. To allow all the various interpretations of this device of Faulkner's to be voiced, I will administer the collaborative exercise that addresses first this chapter specifically. I hope to present this central chapter of the novel as raising questions about the "center" of this complicated family, and the second question of the collaborative exercise will ask the students to construct different visual representations of the novel and its people. When we reconvene as a class and we hear the responses to the first question and see the drawings of the family asked for in the second, I hope to push the class toward an evaluation of this "family" in terms of their associations with the word. We will discuss selfishness in the novel, what it means to have a vision of oneself and motivations that drive the individual while also existing within a framework that limits this self or perceives it differently. It is hard to predict what sort of answers the students will bring out of the group activity. I think it has the potential to open up dimension of the book and characters I hadn't anticipated.

Day Three: I will prepare a handout that extracts some of the most promising ideas from their response papers. I will use these as springboards for our discussion and conclusion of the novel. My intent will be to push these preliminary ideas into potential thesis statements through our discussion. I envision that the issue of Darl's sanity will arise in their writing, and this topic will provide a means of evaluating the end of the novel. I plan to leave some time for discussion on this final day of issues the students' writing have shown to be most compelling to them, but I hope also to evaluate the ending of the novel, the ending of the family journey, which replaces the dead Mrs. Bundren with a new Mrs. Bundren, in order to investigate a vision of the world that the novel seems to put forth. Has the family grown? Has the journey taught anyone anything? What have we as readers learned about families, selfhood, sanity, time, and so on by our observations of them along the way.

Collaborative Exercise

As I Lay Dying - Group Work

Break into groups of four. Select a note taker who will report back to the class when we reconvene in thirty minutes. Discuss, for 15 minutes, each, the following questions:

1. Despite the fragmented nature of the novel to this point, and despite the possible extra-sensory perception and communication between Darl and Dewey Dell, we have been reading narrative that has been arguably "realistic" and believable. Now we have to contend with Addie's chapter, a voice from the grave. Why do you suppose Faulkner chose this unrealistic device, a dead narrator? Is he sacrificing the believability of his novel by doing so? Might this authorial decision offer the novel a dimension that it would otherwise lack without our hearing Addie's perspective and history? Discuss the pros, cons, and general effect of this bit of narrative experimentation.

2. On the basis of your understanding of the family's relationships with one another, create in your group a drawing, in terms of spatial relationships, of the Bundren family. that is, who do you see at the center of the family, holding it (however loosely) together? Addie? Anse? Darl? No one at all? Position all the members of the family around this center (or void) and draw connections between these members as well.