Perhaps with the exception of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying remains the most baffling of his works. As an account of a somewhat pathetic family of southern poor whites compelled to undertake a journey beset with hardships, in subject matter it resembles The Grapes of Wrath. But Faulkner’s novel is much more complex than Steinbeck’s, its subject matter much more inclusive. In moving from the consciousness of one character to that of another, Faulkner is concerned not so much with a pattern of events as he is with a pattern of individual existences. His intention in this respect is closer to that of Joyce and Henry James than it is to that of Steinbeck. That is, for Faulkner, as for Joyce and James, the emphasis on inner awareness reflects an interest in the intensity of human experience, not in its order of succession.
In As I Lay Dying the Darl of event is not the Darl of consciousness, for the former is presented primarily through the eyes of others. Similarly with each of the other characters—their existence as participants in a journey is generically different from their existence as living, experiencing beings. What Faulkner offers us is the ironic quality of the difference.
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