Fathers and Lovers

This essay analyzes William Faulkner's experiment in As I Lay Dying. Among other readings, the novel can be seen as an interrogation of the notion of fatherhood and (perhaps surprisingly) as an attempt to ask what love is. The essay focuses on two fathers, Anse Bundren and Vernon Tull, reading them as, on the one hand, lovers and, on the other hand, as the instance of the Lacanian Nameof-the-Father, something ignored in the Bundren family by Addie, whose control over the minds of her children bars them from achieving a viable sense of self and access to desire. Using psychoanalytical (mostly Lacanian) concepts, the essay concludes with the proposition that As I Lay Dying can be seen as an exploration of one's possibilities of life.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Fetishism · Interrogation · Proposition · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process) · Sociology · Anthropology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices