With All Eyes on You: Distantiation Through Multiple Perspectives in As I Lay Dying

In the novel As I Lay Dying William Faulkner portrays the Bundrens, a Southern family that has decided to travel to Jefferson, Mississippi in order to bury their matriarch. The novel gives an account of the modern American family on the verge of collapse and is told from the eyes of fifteen different narrators, seven are the Bundrens while the other eight are made up of citizens from either the rural land or city. Although novel centers on the Bundrens, the majority of the chapters are allotted to non-Bundren narrators. One of the main purposes of emphasizing non-family narrators is to create what this paper refers to as distantiation- a distancing effect, which illuminates how different forms of space, whether they are geographical, social, or personal, play into lives of individuals. Through an examination of the characters in the novel, this paper considers how, through the different forms of distantiation used by both Faulkner, and the characters he creates, it becomes possible to see how the Bundrens self-destruc