Name: As I Lay Dying BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
Start: 2025-01-05T16:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-01-05T18:00:00-05:00

Here’s the discussion questions:
1. Is Faulkner controlling your closeness to some characters and not others? How is this done, given the seemingly equal mode of presentation for all voices?
2. Is placing Addie’s narrative on page 169 one of the ways in which Faulkner shows Addie’s continued “life” in the minds and hearts of her family?
3. Let’s discuss the realistic representation of Faulkner’s characters.
4. What are the sources and meaning of Darl’s madness?
5. Anse Bundren is surely one of the most feckless characters in literature, yet he alone thrives in the midst of disaster. How does he manage to command the obedience and cooperation of his children? Why are other people so generous with him? What is the secret of Anse’s charm?
6. Some critics have spoken of Cash as the novel’s most gentle character, while others have felt that he is too rigid, too narrow-minded, to be
sympathetic. Does Cash’s carefully reasoned response to Darl’s imprisonment seem fair to you, or is it a betrayal of his brother?
7. Jewel is the result of Addie’s affair with the evangelical preacher Whitfield (an aspect of the plot that bears comparison with Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter). How would you characterize the preacher?
8. What are some of the ways in which Vardaman insists on keeping his mother alive, even as he struggles to understand that she is dead? In what other ways does the novel show characters wrestling with ideas of identity and embodiment?
9. What are the ways in which loyalty is betrayed?
10. How did the characters in the town contrast with the country people?
11.

I’ll add more later. These are from this link:
[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/48374/as-i-lay-dying-by-william-faulkner/](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/48374/as-i-lay-dying-by-william-faulkner/)

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As I Lay Dying 
BY WILLIAM FAULKNER

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