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  • Essay / Style of Storytelling in As I Lay Dying - 1296

    With most writings preceding the Modernist movement, the telling of stories was fairly simple; they were usually narrated by a main character or by the author as a third person - and that was that. However, as writing styles began to change, so did the style of storytelling. One of the most striking examples of different storytelling is As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. In his novel, Faulkner reinvents the traditional expectation of having a single narrator by having several. Through this tactic of employing multiple narrators, Faulkner is able to modify the traditional storytelling style, allowing readers to receive greater breadth, rather than depth, from his novel so that independent conclusions can be drawn for each reader, instead of a concrete and universal vision. meaning - throughout the use of emotion and reliability of events, different perceptions of time through the modification of verb tenses and the method of switching between stream of consciousness and colloquial prose. Throughout his novel, Faulkner presents several narrators who all give somewhat different accounts. versions of emotions and events that cause the reader to question their reliability. Because it departs from the traditional practice of having a single narrator, each narrative is completely subjective to the teller, and therefore a wide range of events are then left for the reader to decide who and what is the most truthful. Readers must sort through the different interpretations of events and the emotions of each character, because they can no longer accept the story that is usually told by a reliable narrator. Due to this style of storytelling, there is no final truth or final universal meaning in the novel, because everything that happens is open to middle of paper......only narrated novels. With all of these different internal thoughts and external conversations from each narrator, readers have even more to decipher on their own individually, instead of being able to follow the collective ideals set forth by a single traditional narrator. Faulkner's choice to move away from the traditional formula of having a single, reliable narrator allowed him to broaden the scope of his novel by allowing for multiple perspectives of emotions and events, the distortion of time, and the ability to see both sides of each character. rather than just a few. Because of this wide range of people, events, and thoughts, his novel has no real universal meaning, as it simply touches on all of these things, leaving the reader to individually interpret what it presents to them -even..