As I Lay Dying as A Hero's Journey

     A mobile stream-of-consciousness multiperspective story isn’t inherently against the hero’s journey format and can work just fine from the perspective of any number of characters. Whether or not you can use several views to tell a hero’s journey the first question is whether you can write a hero’s journey from the perspective of a character other than the hero. The answer to that question is a resounding yes.  The most obvious example of course is stories told through a third-person narrator. These stories of course work because non of the steps of the hero’s journey actually stipulate that what we are seeing is actually from the perspective of the hero. Instead, the hero’s journey only requires that the hero goes through a certain couple of steps meaning a hero’s journey could technically happen in the background of a completely unrelated story.

    One issue that definitely affects whether a hero’s journey is possible, however, is the fragmentation, jumbling of events, and distortion of those events. By making the story itself harder to understand the hero's journey is harder to identify and thus it could make it impossible to have a journey. After all, a hero’s journey is entirely possible in a fully comprehensible and normally formatted story and is entirely impossible in a book that is made entirely of gibberish, so the line is of course somewhere in between. That being said I believe that As I Lay Dying does not cross that line due to the fact that you can still get a general idea of what is going on even if you cannot understand the specifics. Even in the densest and most understandable parts of the book, one can still understand the emotions of the story allowing you to at least superficially follow the story. 

    The hero’s journey can actually be spotted through specific characters, my favorite of which is Jewel Bundren. Jewel begins the story as a vindictive and angry character literally wishing death upon Cash and Anse, but by the end, he makes a very slow and minor but important change. As the story progresses Jewel is only heard from once but his character makes a shift in attitude toward his family. By the end of the story in the Cash chapter, Cash notes “So Jewel got the team and come for me and they fix me a pallet and we drove across the square to the corner where pa said,”(Faulkner 239). Jewel goes through a very small but still notable journey about loving his family in an even more background setting than the rest of the characters, so why can’t they have a hero’s journey?

Overall, the Hero’s journey is fully possible within the odd and esoteric format that Faulkner chose. Although the format makes the book hard to understand at times that does not exclude the story of the book from following the hero’s journey. This is especially true when you consider that many people in the class consider the hero of the journey in Faulkner’s novel to be the family itself. In this way the mobile perspective isn’t actually the perspective to and from the hero, it’s shifting between different perspectives within the same hero. For an alternate perspective imagine a character with multiple personality disorder, if the story swaps between multiple personalities are the person as a whole still the hero? It depends on the story but in general, I would say yes, so therefore As I Lay Dying can be and is a hero’s journey story.