Addie as Odysseus? - William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
- The chapter told from Addie’s perspective in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying came as quite a big surprise to me. Sure, reading a chapter narrated by a dead person was strange, but it was more so the contents of the chapter themselves that took me aback; Addie Bundren was nothing like she had previously been made out to be. In the chapter narrated by Addie, she comes off as a callous, detached, spiteful woman who hates her life and everything in it. Whereas any depiction of her from before this point from any of the characters showed her as a quintessential representation of motherhood. Such a false representation of Addie’s character goes to show just how effective Faulkner’s modernist style of narration is in emulating real life, where you’ll almost never know the whole truth about a person. What makes Addie’s chapter even more interesting is the way that it much more overtly parallels Homer’s The Odyssey. By subtly revealing that Addie had been unfaithful to Anse, Faulkner recreate...
