How many times I told him it’s doing such things that makes folks talk about him, I don’t know.” Each member of the family perceives Addie’s death in a different manner: Setting back there on the plank seat with Cash, with his dead ma laying at his feet, laughing. In fact, Addie’s relatives can barely understand one another, especially regarding her death: “Darl begun to laugh. Ironically, death comes as a salvation for Addie herself: “I knew that living was terrible.” Revealed twenty-six chapters after her passing, her perspective can be heard or understood by no other character in the novel. Shifting between fifteen different streams of consciousness, the novel takes us on a journey of loneliness and isolation wherein the connection between death and solitude is used as a metaphor for the modernists’ elucidation of the solitary confinement in which language leaves us.

Take, for example, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which follows the mourning process of each member of the Bundren family as they try to cope with the passing of their matriarch, Addie, during the Great Depression. Modern writers mean to display the often forgotten weaknesses of the written word, how it ultimately leaves us in a state of eternal solitude. Depending on our respective experiences and imagination, they can be interpreted in a number of ways, rendering our individual perspectives unique and impossible to communicate.

Words are merely symbols for the notions they designate.

As i lay dying 1930