As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Positive Family Values Essay Example

of human happiness.

The further decay in family is a response to fact that the lack of love on Addie's lacks a loving attitude toward her family. Addie's idea of happiness is not related o her domestic, matriarchal and matrimonial life but she looks for it somewhere else: "In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them . I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. " (Faulkner, 1990)

Faulkner juxtaposes this inadequacy on part of Addie with the positive attitude of other mothers and depicts that Brundens’ irritated, unpleasant, pathological is not due to some inherent flaw in their family pattern but it is the result of individual and collective. This realizes the reader about the impact of positive values on the emotional and psychological development of family. Faulkner further depicts through the Brundens’ journey from town to Jefferson that community's modernization requires transformation in family patterns but this does not change the family values.

In a post publication comments, Faulkner narrated the basic concept in As I lay Dying about family values, "Bundren family pretty well coped with theirs [their fate]" (Meriwether, James B. 1968. p. 254). So novel clearly describes the positive values as the first pre-requisite of a family ad Faulkner has illustrated this theme through different means and employment of various methodologies i. e. he characterizations, depiction of negative values to realize the importance of positive values and motifs.