Modernism

Modernism was a global cultural and social movement that began in the early 20th century. It
was a time of questioning traditional values and seeking new ways to live in an industrial world.
A movement about rejection. What's beauty? What's true? Does it depend on the eyes of the
holder?
Characteristics
 Rejection of tradition: Modernists rejected traditional writing norms, such as rhyme and
rhythm.
 Experimentation: Modernists experimented with new forms of writing, such as free
verse poetry and prose.
 Alienation: Modernists believed in alienation from traditional morality, optimism, and
convention.
 Change: Modernists wanted to change how people interact and live together.

Some key concepts and techniques

 Juxtaposition – fragmentation
 Suggestive language rather than assertive: images > statement
 Truth is seen as a product of the mind's…
 Modernist literature is especially self-reflexive: awareness over the compositional
process

Poetic speaker or lyrical voice to refer to the writer of a poem

James Joyce
Writer of Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories full of religious references and that
opens and closes with the same motif: death.
Joyce's divide the collection into childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life.
Exploration of the "stream of consciousness" or "interior monologue" technique. An unbroken
flow of perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind.
 As I Lay Dying
The text is fragmented into 59 segments voiced from 15 different perspectives.
The title is a quote form Homer´s Odysses, by doing this the author is saying that sometimes
families are not ruled by love.
The story begins in media res with Addie Bundren's impending death and her request to be
buried far from her home, in Jefferson. As the family embarks on their journey to honor this
wish, they encounter numerous obstacles, both physical and emotional.
The journey in literature usually means a journey to discover themselves, their own identity.
There are a lot of secrets among the Bundren family. This impact with how they communicate
with each other.
The family is very poor, the father doesn’t work (the excuse is that if he sweats, he dies)
The father, Anse, is self-serving. Even before Addie dies, he demonstrates his lack of empathy by
sending his sons (Darl and Jewel) on a delivery job that will give them $3, and quite probably
deny them the chance to be present for their mother’s final moments. Darl is Anse’s foil: he cares
deeply, and though he begrudgingly agrees to the delivery, he agonizes over his absence at his
mother’s deathbed. Meanwhile, the eldest son, Cash, demonstrates his commitment to hard work
and duty by building his mother’s coffin. Jewel, the third son, is angry that Cash is building a
coffin in Addie’s sight, which demonstrates his fierce loyalty to his mother and his unwillingness
to accept her coming death. Dewey Dell, the only girl, eagerly anticipates her mother’s death,
since the trip to Jefferson is an opportunity for her to get an abortion. And Vardaman, the
youngest (his age isn’t revealed, but probably five or six), struggles to make sense of the entire
scenario.
What obstacles do they face during the journey?
The bridges break because of the flood
Mules drown
Cash breaks his legs and later loses it
Jewels trade his horse for another set of mules
The fire in the barn
No spade to dig the hole
 There are two sides inside the novel: the recounts from the inside (Anse and the kids), and the
recounts from the outside (friends and neighbors). The author produces the "traffic" between the
inside and the outside through multi-narrator technique (15 different narrators), so we have
multiple truths. The reader is the only one who knows all the secrets of the characters, so it is up
to them to make sense of the actions of the characters.
There is almost no trace of the author. The figure of the author disappears the moment he
gives voice to the narrator/character, and we know it by the dialect variation, the style of each
character. The focus is placed on the reader´s ability to interpret the given story, this has to do
with modernism, this has to do with modernism and the turn of linguistics in the 20th century.
Jewel – treasure
Chas – money, the only one who brings income to the house
Darl – darling. The one who needs more caring for. The darling of how? The mother and
father do not care for him. Therefore, he is the darlingless.

Technique
The text is a free-play field.

The Journey as a Symbol in As I Lay Dying

The journey is a powerful literary motif often used to represent a character’s path toward self-
discovery or awakening. One of the most famous examples is The Odyssey, in which Odysseus
(Ulysses in Latin) takes ten years to return home. Similarly, in As I Lay Dying, the Bundren
family embarks on a journey that lasts ten days, though with far less heroism.
The novel’s journey begins with Addie’s request to be buried alongside her family in
Jefferson. However, unlike traditional narratives of heroic quests, As I Lay Dying subverts
expectations by presenting an antiheroic protagonist. Anse Bundren, far from embodying
heroism, is portrayed as lazy, useless, stubborn, and cheap. Along the way, the family encounters
numerous obstacles: bridges collapse due to flooding, mules drown, Cash breaks his leg, a fire in
the barn, and they didn’t bring shovels to dig Addie’s grave. Ultimately, the journey exacts a
heavy toll—Jewel loses his horse, Cash loses his leg, and Darl loses his freedom.
All this makes it seem like the story is a mock-heroic journey.
 This journey is not only significant for the living but also for Addie herself. In death, she is
being returned to her homeland.

Motivation for each character to take the journey

Anse longs for a set of teeth
Dewey Dell, who is pregnant, wants to get an abortion drug
Cash joins the journey to buy a gramophone
Jewel and Darle are the only ones who do not travel for personal reasons, but the journey
revels their rivalry concerning their relationship with their mother.

Motherhood
It takes three days to start the journey to Jeffersons.
The narrative revolves around the corpse. And the presence of the body disrupts the lives of
the people around it.
In the novel it is represented by the dead body of the mother: absent mother
Physical memoir prevails over spiritual memoir
While is "physically" blurred, as she is in the coffin, the corpse´s odor infects the whole novel
as does its influence

Addie Bundren
The wife of Anse Bundren and mother to Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman.
Addie is a mostly absent protagonist, and her death triggers the novel’s action. She is a former
schoolteacher whose bitter, loveless life causes her to despise her husband and to invest all of her
love in her favorite child, Jewel, rather than in the rest of her family or God.
Cora's religious knowledge is based on what she was taught. She never questioned anything,
unlike Addie. Addie is paralyzed in a marriage and life she never wanted. They are both
paralyzed into their situations.
In Addie chapter, the reader learns that she is a feminist and learns about her relationship with
her children. It turns out that motherhood wasn’t what she’d hoped for. She resented her husband
Anse and hated/rejected Darl because she never wanted a second child. She ended up cheating on
him with Whitfield, the minister, and had her son Jewel. Then she bore Anse two more children
out of a sense of duty but not love. Of all the children, Jewel is the one she loved most, in part
because he was born out of her defiance of a social order which she held in contempt.
We don’t know how, but Cora knows about Addie´s affair.
Addie, like Darl, has a think for words in a metalinguistic way: “He had a word, too. Love, he
called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others:
just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any
more than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let
Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter”.

Anse Bundren
The head of the Bundren family. Anse is a poor farmer afflicted with a hunchback, whose
instincts are overwhelmingly selfish. His poor childrearing skills seem to be largely responsible
for his children’s various predicaments. Alternately hated and disrespected by his children, Anse
nonetheless succeeds in achieving his two greatest goals in one fell swoop: burying his dead wife
in her hometown of Jefferson and acquiring a new set of false teeth.
In his first monologue, he complains of a road being made near his family’s residence because
he believes it brings bad luck such as Addie’s ill health. He considers a man as an upright
standing creature and a road as a thing stretching sideways. In his view, a thing stretching
sideways is suitable for motion, for example, on a road people are always walking. So, he
complains about Addie’s lying sideways because her sickness disables her from doing family
chores and costs him medical care. He shoulders his responsibilities toward the fact that a road,
which stretches sideways, is made in front of their house and they cannot live calmly. “Putting it
where every bad luck prowling can find it and come straight to my door, charging me taxes on
top of it.” (AILD 26). He regards Addie’s lying in bed as a financially inconvenient condition for
him; “Making me pay for it. She was well and hale as ere a woman ever were, except for that
road. Just laying down, resting herself in her own bed, asking naught of none.” (AILD 37)
Anse is compared by others to birds in a negative way: owl, scarecrow, a tall bird, a somewhat
deformed, hunchbacked.
He doesn’t see that he has done anything wrong and considers himself an unlucky person.
 There is only one line in the whole story that shows he is a little sad about his wife impeding
dead: “Pa,” he says, “is ma sick some more? / “Go wash them hands,” I say. But I just can’t seem
to get no heart into it”
Based on his personality, the readers can interpretate that Anse, a lazy and selfish person, is
willing to fulfill his promise to Addie only because he will get something out of it: a new set of
teeth.
He never goes beyond himself to help others, even if it´s his children or wife. He only does it
for himself.
He is the only character that doesn’t lose anything during the journey towards Jefferson
actually, he gains a new set of teeth and a new wife. He is so self-centered that he is not afraid of
stealing his own kids for his own benefit (Cash money, Jewel's horse, Dewey Dell´s money).

Cash Bundren
The eldest Bundren child and a skilled carpenter. Cash is the paragon of patience and
selflessness, almost to the point of absurdity. Cash's inner nature as a careful, pragmatic, and
detail-oriented craftsman, as well as his role in the family as a man of great charity and self-
sacrifice. He refuses ever to complain about his broken, festering leg, allowing the injury to
degenerate to the point that he may never walk again. Cash emerges as one of the novel’s few
consistently stable characters. As a carpenter, he is a pragmatic person
When Darl is being taken away, Cash says he is not a judge to claim who is sane or crazy.
This helps raise doubts about whether Dar is truly insane, because while burning the barn was
wrong, Cash understands that he may have done it to finally bury their mother and end the
journey. This allows the reader to ultimately decide whether he was truly insane or just the sanest
of them all.

Darl Bundren
The second Bundren child. Darl is the most sensitive and articulate of the surviving Bundrens
and delivers the greatest number of interior monologues in the novel. As the family encounters
disaster upon disaster during the trip, Darl’s frustration with the whole process leads him to try to
end things decisively by incinerating his dead mother’s coffin.
 Darl is the most enigmatic character. He makes everybody uncomfortable with the way he
gazes at people. He also knows when his mother died, even though he wasn’t here. His excessive
dependence on language could be interpretated as a results from his anxiety about the secret in
his family structure, in brief, Jewel’s birth. Darl is a kind of clairvoyant and knows that Jewel is
in fact his half-brother; he says to Vardaman, his little brother, “If pa is your pa, why does your
ma have to be a horse just because Jewel’s is?” (AILD 101) His family structure is not stable
enough to certify his identity, and so he tries to make sure of his existence by describing
comparisons between him and things around him. In his first monologue, he obsessively
mentions two things which make a pair; “… a single broad window in two opposite walls giving
onto the approaches of the path… In the wagon-bed are two chairs.” (AILD 8)
Darl’s language is an extreme case of conventional language. He constantly chooses a single
word to express things, and finally his language sounds unrealistic and poetic. He is focused on
the side of language that gives abstract existence to things, not material existence; words and
doing are irreconcilable. He constantly mumbles about words and their meaning, for example
with the verb "be": "And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon
is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren
must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I
am not emptied yet, I am is." The “consistency” of his superficial theory makes sense only by
ignoring the rules of English grammar and the verbs’ meanings. Darl does not use the words,
“was” and “is” to represent a man’s existence in the past and the present, but he forcibly makes a
man’s existence adaptable to the aspects of time expressed by “was” and “is.” As long as he uses
language to grasp a concept of time, it is impossible for him to recognize the continuity of time.
Darl tries to adapt his existence to language-represented aspects of time and breaks off the
continuity of time.
He also tries to emancipate the family from the burden of taking the mother to Jefferson, that’s
why he burns down the barn.
Has a trouble relationship with his mother, he has trouble accepting her death. The reason why
he burned Gillespie’s barn is unknow: it could be because he can take it anymore of the journey,
out of respect for her mother, or to help her lay down her life.
 Darl has a rivalry with Jewel, as he knows Jewel was loved by their mother and not Darl, that
is why, at one point, he starts bothering Jewel, asking if his mother was a horse: “I cannot love
my mother because I have no mother. Jewel’s mother is a horse.”
In his last monologue, he uses the third person to refer to himself and laugh while he is being
taken away. This could be related to madness, as he is laughing in a circumstance that he
shouldn’t.
Before crossing the river, Darl is anticipating to us that something bad is going to happen
through saturation (a lot of words that belongs to a semantic field): “the thick dark current”
“murmur become ceaseless and myriad”, “silent, impermanent” “something huge and alive
waked”.

Jewel Bundren
The illegitimate child of Addie and Whitfield, the minister. Though Darl seems to understand
him, Jewel remains the novel’s greatest mystery and is the least represented in many sections.
Jewel has a proud, fiercely independent nature that most of his family and neighbors confuse for
selfishness. His passionate, brooding nature, however, reveals a real love and dedication to his
mother, and he becomes a fierce protector of her coffin.
Jewel is angry and in denial with her mother impending death. He sees himself as an outsider
and imagines him and her mother in a high hill throwing stones at his siblings (biblical passage).
He is the only one who willfully and consciously gives up his possession, the horse. This is a
noble attitude.

Dewey Dell Bundren

The only Bundren daughter. Dewey Dell is seventeen, and a recent sexual experience with
Lafe has left her pregnant. Increasingly desperate, she finds her mind occupied exclusively with
her pregnancy and views all men with varying degrees of suspicion.
The sexual relationship between Lafe and Dewey Dell is open to interpretation (rape or not
rape). But being an unmarried girl pregnant was a problem. Unspoken communication with Darl.
The brother knows that she is pregnant.

Vardaman Bundren
 The youngest of the Bundren children. Vardaman has a lively imagination, and he views his
mother’s death through the same lens with which he views a fish he has recently caught and
cleaned. Although his ramblings at the beginning of the novel border on the maniacal, Vardaman
proves to be a thoughtful and innocent child.
Vardaman is struggling to understand Dead. He struggles to understand what it means to be
dead, the cease to exist.
 James Joyce’s The Sisters and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying are two modernist texts that
revolts around the death of a parental figure: Father Flynn in the former, and Addie Bundren in
the latter.
Both stories begin when said figures are about to died, creating an atmosphere where their
absences basically structure the narrative. In The Sisters, the boy narrator reflects on Father
Flynn’s death with a mixture of fear, fascination, and vague guilt, his thoughts haunted by the
word “paralysis.”, which echoes throughout the story, initially as a physical diagnosis, but
quickly taking on a more symbolic weight. It comes to represent a kind of moral and cultural
stillness.
On the other hand, in As I Lay Dying, death is anything but quiet. Addie Bundren’s death
initiate an absurd journey, during which her family attempts to honor her wish to be buried in
Jefferson. Yet this journey is less an act of love than a parade of dysfunction, driven by selfish
motives. Here, Faulkner uses death to expose another kind of paralysis: emotional, ethical, and
even existential. Although the Bundrens are constantly in motion, the journey itself is a kind of
paralysis, a failure to confront truth or meaning. Each family member is locked in their own
struggle: Anse obsesses over a new set of teeth, Dewey Dell over her pregnancy, Jewel and
Vardaman struggle to accept their mother´s dead, and Darl over a reality that ends up in madness.
Religion is also another factor found in both texts. In The Sisters, Father Flynn once was the
embodied spiritual authority of the community, but by the time the story begins, it seems that he
has already fallen into disgrace. There are rumors of mental instability, of a broken chalice, and
maybe even of impropriety. Also, at the end of the story, there is a moment where the boy is
offered some cream crackers and sherry (symbolism of the communion) and he only accepts the
drink, which could lead the reader to believe that he is somehow half-accepting/half-rejecting the
religion his mentor taught him. And because of the ellipsis and reading between lines, we, the
readers, can only draw conclusions as to why: could it be that the relationship between mentor
and disciple was not good? Could it be that the rejection was made in an unconscious, unharmed
way?
Meanwhile, in Faulkner’s novel, religious language and symbolism are everywhere: Cash is a
carpenter, he is patience and selflessness (to the point of sounding too ridiculous) like Jesus;
Jewel at the beginning imagines him and her mother in a high hill throwing stones at his siblings
(biblical passage); Cora Tull, a neighbor, recites scripture with certainty, but its effect is undercut
by irony. Addie, who had an affair with a minister and openly disdains the word “love,” sees
religion as another false structure, a set of empty words imposed on lived experience. In her only
chapter, her reflections suggest a radical rejection of inherited values.
As I mentioned before, the figure of paralysis appears in both works, more in a metaphorical
way than physical. For instance, In The Sisters, the first manifestation of paralysis is in the priest,
Father Flynn, who suffers from physical paralysis due to a stroke. Then, the boy narrator is
paralyzed in the way that he is unable to act, to speak, or maybe even process his complex
feelings: “I knew that I was under observation, so I continued eating as if the news had not
interested me.” Joyce also created a society that seems unable to grow or move forward, for
instance, the sisters of the deceased economically depended on him, as unmarried women
shouldn’t support themselves without any male help. The narrator’s aunt is another example of
paralysis, as she cannot dare to say the word “dead” when referring to Rev. Flynn.
In As I lay Dying, paralysis appears more in a metaphorical way, so to speak, because even if
the characters are in movement, they are suspended at a moment they are obsessed with: get an
abortion, buy new set of teeth, buy a gramophone… it seems that only Jewel and Darle are the
only ones who do not travel for personal reasons, but the journey revels their rivalry concerning
their relationship with their mother. Paralysis also appears in a more symbolic way: Cora Tull has
a religious knowledge based only on what she was taught, meaning that she never questioned
anything, she is paralyzed in a belief, unlike Addie. And Addie was paralyzed in a marriage and
life that maybe she never wanted but force to accepted it because it was expected of a woman in
that time.
One of the characteristics of modernism is the profoundly self-reflexive, and both texts
explore the unreliability of language. In The Sisters, the narrator fixates on certain words,
“paralysis”, “gnomon” and “simony,” which he does not fully understand but senses are
important. His failure to grasp them reflects his internal confusion and the larger ambiguity
surrounding Father Flynn. Here the language is suggestive, not explanatory.
Faulkner creates his story through multiple narrators, each with a distinct voice. One thing to
highlight is that genuine dialogue between the Bundrens is rare and they almost never lead to any
mutual understanding or compassion. Also, language is important for Darl and Vardaman in
order to come to terms with their mother's death. For example, Vardaman's desire for a substitute
for his mother's presence comes about through language ("My mother is a fish") and provides
him with averbal means of representing the mother's body he misses so much.
Darl, on the other hand, is mostly haunted by ontology and abstract verbalization. He
constantly thinks about words and their meaning, for example with the verb "be": "And since
sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is
was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or
I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is."
And lastly, Addie, like Darl, has a think for words in a metalinguistic. In her only chapter, she
reflects on the emptiness of words: “He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used
to words for a long time. (…). So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter”.
Meaning that to her, love is just a shape to fill a lack. Language, once thought to reveal truth, is
here shown to be inadequate, if not outright deceptive.

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a modernist novel fragmented into 59 sections, each
delivered by one of 15 narrators. This polyphonic technique invites the reader to piece together
the whole story through multiple truths. There is no objective narrator, in fact, Faulkner
disappears behind his characters, whose dialects, tones, and rhythms create distinct voices. This
aligns with modernist concerns about the instability of language and the idea that reality is not
singular, but fragmented and subjective.
The novel opens in media res, with Addie Bundren on her deathbed, asking to be buried in
Jefferson, her hometown. Her wish launches a ten-day journey that parodies Homer’s Odyssey.
Yet while Odysseus is heroic, Anse Bundren, the patriarch, is a selfish and lazy man. With this,
Faulkner subverts the idea of the noble quest: the Bundrens face flooded rivers, dead mules, a
Cash’s broken leg, a burning barn, and even the absence of a spade to bury the body. As the
journey drags on, what becomes increasingly evident is not the nobility of honoring the dead, but
the grotesque unraveling of a dysfunctional family.
Each family member has personal motives for making the trip. Anse is the most cynical:
though he claims to be fulfilling his wife’s dying wish, he’s really after a new set of false teeth.
He repeatedly presents himself as a victim of circumstance, even blaming a new road for Addie’s
illness: “Putting it where every bad luck prowling can find it and come straight to my door,
charging me taxes on top of it” (AILD 26). His complaint reveals how he views life’s events only
in terms of personal inconvenience. “She was well and hale as ere a woman ever were, except for
that road. Just laying down, resting herself in her own bed, asking naught of none” (AILD 37).
Ultimately, Anse completes the journey having lost nothing but gaining both the teeth and a new
wife.
Cash, the eldest Bundren child, is a skilled carpenter, the epitome of patience, precision, and
selflessness, almost to the point of absurdity. As a craftsman, he is pragmatic and detail-oriented,
traits that shape both his personality and his role within the family. He builds Addie’s coffin
beneath her window as she lies dying, an act of duty that Jewel finds unbearable but that
exemplifies Cash’s quiet commitment. During the journey, Cash breaks his leg and endures
severe pain, infection, and inadequate treatment, yet he refuses to complain, allowing the injury
to deteriorate to the point of losing his leg. His stoicism becomes a moral counterpoint to the
self-interest and emotional volatility of his siblings.
Cash is also one of the novel’s few consistently stable figures. When Darl is institutionalized
for burning the barn, Cash reflects on the situation without condemnation: “Sometimes I ain’t so
sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain’t. Sometimes I think it ain’t
none of us pure crazy and ain’t none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-
way.” (AILD 142). In other words, Cash says he is not a judge of who is sane or mad. This
moment invites the reader to reconsider Darl’s mental state:was he truly insane, or simply the
only one who understood that the journey had to end? Through Cash’s quiet empathy and refusal
to pass judgment, Faulkner opens space for ambiguity, allowing us to see Darl’s actions as both
tragic and possibly rational.
Darl, the second son, is the most articulate and introspective of the Bundrens. His internal
language is poetic and abstract, to the point of alienation. He reflects obsessively on existence
and time: “And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is,
because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren
must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I
am not emptied yet, I am is.” Darl’s obsession with the verb “to be” reveals his attempt to
understand being through language. His psychic overload culminates in the burning of the barn, a
desperate act that we may interpretate as to put an end to the journey and perhaps to grant Addie
rest. When he is taken away at the end, he begins to refer to himself in the third person and
laughs: this helps to raise the question of whether he is truly mad or simply the only one who can
see clearly.
In Addie’s own we discover that she was a former schoolteacher and that she expresses a deep
skepticism toward words, claiming that language itself is false: “Words go straight up in a thin
line, quick and harmless.” Unlike her neighbor, Core Tull, she thinks instead of only following
the rules that were learned. She also resents the role of wife and mother that society forced upon
her, and her loveless marriage to Anse. Addie basically expresses that she loved only one child,
Jewel, because he was conceived not out of obligation, but from a moment of rebellion and
perhaps love. Her hate for Anse and the hollowness she sees in motherhood speak to her
rejection of social order.
Jewel, the child Addie had with the minister Whitfield, is marked by intensity and silence.
While others misinterpret his behavior as selfish, his love for Addie is fierce. He is not only
angry that Cash builds the coffin in Addie’s view, but also at his other family members for letting
Cash's inappropriate behavior, passively "sitting there, like buzzards.” By contrast, Jewel sees
himself as possessing a truer sense of duty to his mother and a desire to act heroically, unlike the
underlying selfishness of the Bundren family members. He even expresses how he would ideally
like to spend Addie's last days: "It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the
rocks down the hill at their faces.", which is a biblical, symbolic fantasy.
Dewey Dell, the only daughter, is pregnant and desperate to have an abortion. Her internal
monologues are fragmented and anxious, reflecting her fear and shame. Darl, her brother, knows
of her condition without her ever telling him. Their silent exchange could be a sign of both the
intimacy and the tension among the Bundren siblings.
Vardaman, the youngest child, offers one of the most famous lines in American literature:
“My mother is a fish.” After watching a fish die, he uses this logic to process Addie’s death. His
fragmented thoughts reflect his inability to grasp the finality of death. Though his perspective
may seem absurd, it poignantly captures a child’s emotional disorientation.
Throughout the novel, the corpse of Addie—first silent in life, then present in death—
becomes a grotesque centerpiece. The body rots, it stinks, and it influences the physical and
moral space around it. The fact that it takes three days to begin the journey and ten to complete it
makes her physical presence inescapable. Faulkner uses this decomposition as both a literal and
symbolic device. The novel’s world revolves around a maternal absence that paradoxically
dominates the narrative.
Ultimately, As I Lay Dying explores the failure of language, the decay of family, and the
ambiguity of truth. Each character presents their version of events, their wounds, their
justifications. The reader is the only one who knows all the secrets, all the betrayals—and must
decide who, if anyone, deserves sympathy. The journey ends with Anse smiling with new teeth
and a new wife, while his children—wounded, traumatized, silenced, institutionalized—are left
behind. The Bundrens may have reached Jefferson, but what they’ve truly buried is far more than
a body.
 Postmodernism
1950, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or
relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in
asserting and maintaining political and economic power.
Language is not enough to express our lives in a metaphysical way.
Antiformalist revolt that reaffirms presence and process in open forms.

Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

“A country road. A tree. Evening.” The place is not specific, it can be any place in any country
road. This has to do with Becket removing his artificial world those tangibles (… recuperar del
PPT)
The play is identified as existentialism (depicted as anguish and loneliness of facing the void,
they describe the emotional despair of dealing with the absence of a felt or verifiable moral
order). In Beckett’s terms one feels one can’t go on, yet one must go on because one is
condemned to be free.
Mind simply is.
Absurd: the defiant rejection of language as the main vehicle of the dramatic action, the
onslaught on conventional logic and unilinear conceptual thinking in the Theatre of the Absurd is
by no means equivalent to a total rejection of all meaning.
In the Theatre of the Absurd, the action does not go from A to B, but travels form an unknown
premise X (spectators?) towards an unknowable conclusion Y

Act 1: What are the main events? What happens?

Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot. Pozzo and Lucky appear, but they just talk.
Nothing happens. In words of Estragon “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it´s
awful!”. They don’t know who Godot is, why he is going there or what he is going to do once he
arrives. Life is pointless.
Vladimir and Estragon are poor, and have nicknames for the other (Gogo, Didi).
 Estragon used to be a poet, is kind of dumb, forgetful. In first dialogue, Estragon is the one
who says, “nothing to be here”.
Vladimir is the intellectual of the group, always questioning and thinking, he answers the
questions. They complement each other, two sides of the same coin.
Hat Boot analogy: meaningless action, taking of the boot, looking inside the hat.
Body-mind pleasure: bodily comfort vs intellectual comfort. Estragon wants Lucky to dance,
and Vladimir wants him to think.
Constant needs to reassure the physical presence of them (Estragon and Vladimir) being there. In
fact, they cannot bear silence while waiting, since it corroborates the emptiness of their actual
existence. In Act I, they even consider suicide as a way to pass the time.
The thing about time is already mentioned in the title waiting. In the play, how much time
actually passes? Does time matter?
Time (as a consequence of the endless waiting) is a major theme in WFG.

Things happen, but do things change?

A country road. A tree. Evening. (Act I) / Next day. Same time. Same place. (Act II)
There is a circular structure, repetition of:
 Scene
 Motifs
 Words
 Events

Lucky´ think is a stream of thoughts. It doesn’t have coherence or meaning (personal God
quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time). Language is being emptied.
Howl – Allen Ginsberg
 Fleeing of jumping from one perception to another.
 The heroic individual versus a hostile society (hostility lies in its indifference and apathy)
– image of Moloch
 Free verse, line breaths. The line breaks when the thought breaks
 Auto poesy: poetry of the self and a vagabond poetry composed in a moving vehicle,
automobile
 The first person I (I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness) removes himself from the beginning – who – reader
 Anaphora and repetitions = “psalmic” feeling (or mantric repetition)
 New semantic units: “hydrogen jukebox”, “unshaved room”, “ashcan ranting”, etc.
 A lot of nominal sentences, a lot of meanings

Part II
Moloch: Canaanite god. Associated to child sacrifice.
Paratactic sentences, unexpected cuts, discordant chords.
Part II uses a great deal of metaphor and symbolism to make social and political points. It gives a
very specific name for these social forces: Moloch. The use of the name “Moloch,” a name
traditionally associated with specific gods or rituals from ancient Middle Eastern and
Mediterranean religion, is most commonly used to denote a power or force that demands great
sacrifice.
Moloch represents the values of capitalism and has the power to give to certain persons and to
take away from others. It also represents the immoral power of government. The United States
government, a body ultimately “of the people” and “by the people” does not collect the people’s
hopes and ambitions as much as it collects their sorrows and inability to advance.
Moloch is also the soulless dominance of industry and corporate power.

Part III
Here we find the poem’s most direct address to Carl Solomon, the person to whom the poem is
dedicated.
Ginsberg names the mental institution Rockland, and the refrain of the third part of the poem is
Ginsberg crying to Solomon that: “I’m with you in Rockland!”. The pronoun “you” is used to
distinguish the author from Solomon. This then moves into a perspective from within
“Rockland,” the mental institution, and the reader begins to understand some of the conditions
that might drive a person crazy.

The footnote in Howl, instead of being a reference, explanation or comment, in this case, it
would be like another poem that expands or explains something that was mentioned before. This
poem was born out of experiences. Ginsberg begin with a single word, “Holy,” said in succession
fifteen times. So, the theme is the sacred and it is meant to offer a competing vision to the one of
destruction that was presented in Part II.
The source of Holiness is in the body of the human being. In other words, while Moloch is a
force that destroys the world, there is a holiness in mankind that offers the hope of salvation.
Howl and Holy have the same sound.
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

The book is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel. The story represents the fight between
society vs human nature.
Has a structure like a Christian cycle structure:
-Sin
-Punishment
-Redemption

The narrator, Alex, is considered an antihero and unreliable narrator. The reader is interlocking
with Alex and become the only friends of Alex, and ultimately, an “armchair therapist”.

Sur – Ursula K. Le Guin

What would have happened if women had been the first people to reach the South Pole?

Sur presents a fictional narrative set against the backdrop of an all-female expedition to
Antarctica in the early 20th century. The story is framed as a true report written after the
expedition was concluded by an unnamed narrator that recounts the journey. It’s generally
considered a feminist text, as, for example, the idea to go started by the question: “Well, if
Captain Scott can do it, why can’t we?” This leads to the idea that women can be a more
important figure in society than only a primarily domestic one. While heroism belongs to mean,
this expedition full of women shows to be competent, adventurous, and capable of undertaking
challenging tasks. This journey was “to go, to see—no more, no less”, meaning, they weren’t
looking to conquer, like perhaps a group of man would have done (Julius Cesar: Veni, vidi, vici"
["Vine, vi, vencí"]). The hero is not complete until his deeds are recorded for posterity, but these
women do not what to care for fame or recognition for that they have accomplish, in fact: “But I
was glad even then that we had left no sign there, for some man longing to be first might come
some day, and find it, and know then what a fool he had been, and break his heart.”. This go
along with the conception that the new culture is a sub-culture, established in contrast to the
dominant culture, that of the hero.
 Another difference was that there wasn’t a hierarchy between the group. Everything was
decided in a democratic way, instead of by a leader: “the nine of us worked things out amongst
us from beginning to end without any orders being given by anybody, and only two or three
times with recourse to a vote by voice or show of hands”.
“Though every prospect pleases, And only Man is vile.” Reference to the poem Greenland´s
Ice Mountains by Bishop Reginald Heber.
Once the reach the South Pole, the women were unimpressed rather than jubilant over their
achievement: “We discussed leaving some kind of mark or monument, a snow cairn, a tent pole
and flag; but there seemed no particular reason to do so. Anything we could do, anything we
were, was insignificant, in that awful place.” They were more interested in the journey, the
beauty and the strangeness of the land, and their friendship in adversity, than in an empty
geographic accomplishment.

Recitatif
The story of a black and a white girl. It doesn’t explicitly say which one is who.
The point of this story is that by avoiding naming either character's race, it shows that the
relation between race and class is unimportant. In reading the story, it becomes difficult not to
speculate on the race of Twyla and Roberta. For example, readers often admit to assigning their
own race to Twyla because readers tend to identify most with the central character of stories.
Even the clue that the girls are referred to by the nickname "salt and pepper" doesn't specify
which is which. Every hint can logically lead to many conflicting conclusions. No matter what
one believes about each character's race, a believable argument exists for the opposite view.
In other words, what’s important is to explore human nature, memory, and the influence of race
on perception and identity. Through the ambiguity in the race of the main characters, Twyla and
Roberta, the author invites the reader to reflect on how their own beliefs and prejudices can
shape their understanding of others.

First encounter
Twyla and Roberta spend 4 months together in St. Bonny´s.
If Twyla is black and Roberta is white
 The possibility of friendship across race and class lines, where a poor African American girl
befriends a richer white girl
If Twyla is white and Roberta is black
Subversion of stereotypes about race and class (White are generally wealthier than African
American)

Second encounter
60s – Twyla is working at Howard Johnson´ (working-class). Roberta comes in with two male
friends
If Twyla is black and Roberta is white
Twyla works for a living and Roberta seems economically and culturally independent (counter-
culture). Irony lies in Jimi Hendrix (a black musician).
If Twyla is white and Roberta is black
Combating stereotypes: Twyla as working-class white person, not directly associated to racial
struggle but a class struggle

Third encounter
Twyla and Roberta meet in a grocery store at Newbourgh and share what’s happened in their
lives.
If Twyla is black and Roberta is white
Long-standing African American presence in upstate New York, experience of working class
African American experience gentrification
If Twyla is white and Roberta is black
White working class as also exposed to economic inequality (gentrification), African American
as able to join the socioeconomic elite

Fourth encounter
They face each other from the two sides of the issue (historical self).
If Twyla is black and Roberta is white
Twyla supports busing (believes it can fight racism) and Roberta think it will endanger her kids
(racist attitude)
 If Twyla is white and Roberta is black
Twyla is non-racist and believes in this policy, whereas Roberta thinks it will disrupt African
American communities.

Fifth encounter
Twyla and Roberta meet in a coffee shop on Christmas Eve; they discuss their moments of
Maggie.
What do we know about Maggie? What do they know? Did they also bully her? What
does Maggie represent?
She represents the issues of discrimination and victimization while keeping the ethnicities of
any characters discreet so readers can reflect on personal bias and connect with Twyla’s and
Roberta’s inner turmoil with their past.
 Maggie is an outsider, much like Twyla and Roberta, symbolizing exclusion and
voicelessness.
 Maggie's memory is distorted over time, leading to conflict between Twyla and Roberta.
 The story ends with Roberta grappling with the question of what truly happened to
Maggie.

Radical ideology and prejudices as a source of harm (race prevents us of talking about the
“side” problems: social, cultural, economic).
 Minimalism and Dirty Realism
Sometimes considering a variety of literary minimalism, dirty realism is characterized by an
economy with words and a focus on surface description. Writers working within the genre tend
to avoid adverbs, extended metaphor and internal monologue, instead allowing objects and
context to dictate meaning. Characters are shown in ordinary, unremarkable occupations, and
often a lack of resources and money that creates internal desperation.

Why “dirty” and not just “realism”?

Because Dirty Realism deals with a type of everyday realism. The dirty part must have been
because it
It writes about the belly-side of contemporary life with a disturbing detachment, at time
verging on comedy.

Key features of Minimalism by Barthelme

1. Omission of big philosophical ideas
2. Not enough history if historical sense
3. Lack of (wrong) political posture
4. Insufficient depth of character
5. Commonplace description too realist on brand names
6. Drabness of style
7. Moral poverty

The Bath
Why the title? The parents are the ones who take a bath in the house instead of the hospital
(time for themselves or an excuse which what allows the narrator to tell us that the phone [the
baker] always rang when the father or the mother are at home).
It is narrative from a point of view external, not one of the characters. Some degree of
objective, as we need to discover which details, diction, or syntax reveal the narrator´ or speaker
´s perspective.
The baker didn’t wish to talk anymore. He just gives the necessary information.
Feeling of threat or sense of menace (the baker or the boy´s destiny)?
 City of Glass
Written by Paul Auster (postmodern, deconstruction).

It is a postmodern detective story that explores themes of identity, language, reality, and fiction,
all set against the backdrop of a chaotic and isolating New York City.

The question is the story itself

The first paragraph deals with the principle of existence: being/not being