Isolation: An Unconquerable Spiritual Predicament

On one side, William Faulkner was a regional writers; he had planted his roots in his native land, the South. One the other side, William Faulkner was the greatest experimentalist among the twentieth-century novelists. He built on the tradition of the modernist writers and also made innovations. Modernist techniques are used not in "art for art's sake" but for "art in the artist's sake": William Faulkner aimed at articulating spiritual predicament of people in modern society. Perhaps no other modern writer in any country has succeeded quite so well as Faulkner in combining an intimate knowledge of traditional rural life with the themes and experiments of literary avant-garde. His novel As I Lay Dying could be the evidence of this success. The modernist techniques are suffused with this novel, in which Faulkner deals with the southern poor whites, a group of people, long associated in the popular mind with illiteracy, shiftlessness, and brutality. This paper tries exploring the spiritual predicament of modern people from the background, techniques and text analysis of this novel.The main body of this paper consists of four chapters.Chapter one is background study. It includes the personal and social economic situation and the influence of the South.Chapter two illustrates modernist techniques in the novel As I Lay Dying.Chapter three shows the spiritual predicament in Bundren family.Chapter four explores failure as inevitable.The tragedy of the Bundren family is a reflection of the living situation of modern people, who live in spiritual predicament and are impotent to conquer it.