| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系 === 87 === William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is classified as a regional novel, which emphasizes not only the setting and the social structure but also the temperament and the characters' mutual interactions affected by the outside conditions. Faulkner transforms the invented Yoknapatawpha County into the imaginative world which both exists as setting for human actions and a perceptual world in which characters' consciousness conceives of the reality. Neither a mere setting nor an actual area, rather, the concept of space examined in this thesis reveals the characters' mental world and reflects the thematic concerns of the novel.
In As I Lay Dying, the numerous interior monologues which represent individual inner spaces demonstrate the fundamental isolation inherent in every character. The method of phenomenology is applied to analyze the space presented as the content of human consciousness in this novel. Space in this sense represents the characters' mental world interacting with the outside world. As an aspect of thematic structure, this space also conveys the controlling theme of the novel - the collision of mind and world.
The narrative strategies of multiple perspectives in As I Lay Dying also contribute to the creation of spatial form. Faulkner successfully employs the techniques of juxtaposition and montage in cinematography to create literary space in the novel, which is in accordance with Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form. Through the juxtaposition of images and parallel editing of episodes, the reader perceives the effect of simultaneity and space.
These two kinds of space in terms of the characters' internal consciousness and of narrative techniques individually represent the content and form of the novel constituting an encompassing reality. Faulkner structures this representative world endowed with specific dimensions so that content and form are correlative and enrich the interpretations of the novel.
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