Fifteen narrators alternate, delivering interior monologues with varying degrees of coherence and emotional intensity. The structure of As I Lay Dying is powerful and innovative. He ends up being put into an asylum, with his older brother Cash musing on the definition of "insane." Evaluating "truth" becomes an equally tricky enterprise, with Faulkner depicting a truth as mutable and violent as the river the Bundrens cross midway through the novel. Darl, who emerges early as the novel's most important narrator, is eloquent but considered strange by his family and neighbors. Objective reality does not exist in As I Lay Dying we have only the highly subjective interior monologues of fifteen different narrators. Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness narrative to explore perception and thought as the basis of experience. In both of these novels, Faulkner built on a tradition begun by modernist authors like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
The Sound and the Fury is widely considered to be among the greatest of the modernist novels, and is hailed as a masterpiece of 20th century literature. As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, immediately following the work that many consider to be Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury.
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