Space & Time in As I Lay Dying

The Concepts of Space and Time in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying Space and time come together in As I Lay Dying through a pattern that provides the background upon which the Bundren’s journey through a perpetual landscape. The two phenomena merge and dispel into each other in the novel, creating an element that cannot be easily separated, but better understood through a cyclical symbolism. The circle implies the adjoining nature of not …

…motion. Circles occur throughout As I Lay Dying that shows the contiguous and overlapping quality of life and death, power of fate and subjection of man, physical and mental mourning, and most importantly, time and space. All along, Darl explores fate as a force in the life of man, which prevents him from achieving true motion or progress in any linear fashion. For the Bundren family, “there was no beginning or ending to anything” (Faulkner, 175).