On the homepage of Digital Yoknapatawpha
select As I Lay Dying from the menu
so that it loads a map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County
as it appears in As I Lay Dying.
The tools you see on this page can
help you compare different strategies for organizing
Faulkner's story.
Is the movement of the Bundren family
the main vehicle for our interpretation, as we follow
their journey to Jefferson?
The map you see allows you to track their progress,
and it sets the different sites of the story's action
in geographical relation to one another.
Clicking the player on the bottom left,
titled "Page Order," will map onto your screen
the events of the novel as they appear when you read them.
Watching the story unfold before you, however, may make you
realize just how much of the story
takes place with the Bundrens sitting with Addie's body,
at home.
If we click the heatmap function,
you'll see that the warm orange glow
where the most events take place is, in fact, the Bundren House.
We're up to Page 147 before we attempt to cross the river.
These pieces of evidence can help push us
into further study.
Can we compare the family's feelings for one another
before they move and afterward?
Does time on the wagon increase or decrease
how well they understand and sympathize with one another?
You'll see that there are two ways of organizing
the events of the novel at the bottom of the page: page
order, and chronology.
We might use these two ways of "playing"
the events of the novel to examine where the Bundrens tend
to be most stuck or invested in the past:
when they are at home, or when they are "progressing"
on their journey?
You can also use this part of the site
to examine particular narrators' sections of the novel.
How are different locations or events or time periods
stressed as we move from narrator to narrator,
from Tull's sections to Darl's sections?
How does the map begin to reflect
the priorities of each storyteller
as you narrow your focus?