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As I Lay Dying is made up of a succession of first-person narratives, with the action seen and interpreted by fifteen characters. The narrators are subjective--they convey their own feelings and thoughts as well as report the action. None of them is detached from the action for long.
Seven of the narrators are Bundrens, totally caught up in the events and unable to make complete sense of them. Darl never ceases to try, however, and Cash gains some perspective at the end.
The other eight narrators are outsiders. Faulkner uses them to show you how observers--some of them neutral (Tull, Peabody, Samson, Armstid, Moseley), some of them not so neutral (Cora, Whitfield, MacGowan)--view the Bundrens.
Since all the narrators are wrapped up in the action, you ought to question their reliability. Anse says he is \"beholden to no man,\" but we learn he is. Cora is convinced that Jewel and Anse forced Darl to leave his dying mother\'s bedside. She is wrong. What you\'ve got to do is test the narrators\' perceptions against each other, then draw your own conclusions.
One of the major themes of the novel is that because facts are subjective, truth is elusive. It\'s not easy to make sense of the action with so many competing points of view. You must sift the evidence and make up your own mind about what happened and why.
Faulkner surely has an opinion of each character. But even when his characters are most vile--when Anse, for example, takes Dewey Dell\'s money, or MacGowan seduces her--Faulkner refuses to criticize them. He portrays his characters, warts and all, with affection.
The use of multiple narrators is an effective substitute for an omniscient (all-knowing) narrator. Omniscient narrators allow novelists to present several perspectives on events. The fifteen narrators in As I Lay Dying permit Faulkner--and you--to work with fifteen perspectives.
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