Space & Time in As I Lay Dying essays

Space & Time in As I Lay Dying essays The Concepts of Space and Time in Faulkners As I Lay Dying Space and time come together in As I Lay Dying through a pattern that provides the background upon which the Bundrens journey through a perpetual landscape. The two phenomena merge and dispel into each other in the novel, creating an element that cannot be easily separated, but better understood through a cyclical symbolism. The circle implies the adjoining nature of not only space and time, but also life and death, where both sets of binaries deny the existence of fixed boundaries. There is a lucid air of the expanding circle of impact of the Bundrens' venture, an effect that corresponds with the circular, multiple perspective, technique of the book with its recurring images of the circle: all from circling buzzards to the wheels of the wagon. It is primarily through Darls monologues that the nature of time and space are opened up and the difference between the two becomes of common nature. His consciousness is a fluid body that leaps over barriers, and lacks the boundaries that the rest of the family members share within their thoughts. Darl seems to possess a gift of clairvoyance, which allows him to narrate in the way that he does, foreshadowing events and reading other characters minds. Effusive and insightful in his thoughts, he is as much of a protagonist as the novel has: it is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between. (Faulkner, 139) As Darl looks out over the river before they cross with their dead matriarch, he sees it in a manner in which he disregards its mere physical c omponents. Darl shows signs throughout the novel of an ego at odds with itself (Wadlington, 57). Lacking a specif...