one lick less
Of the various icebreaker questions that are routinely asked within awkward circles of strangers, the one I’m generally most happy to receive is “if you could have any superpower, what would it be?” It’s one of the few for which I have an answer ready to go: the ability to read minds. You could call it a desire to learn as much as possible about humanity, or you could call it nosiness. Either way, my limited point of view has always seemed a handicap to me when dealing with the quest to fully understand any concept or situation. So William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying is particularly intriguing to me for the omniscience it allows its readers. We get to witness a poignant moment in the life of a struggling family from the perspective of each family member. They share common outlooks and dialects in some cases, but even at this early stage in the novel, we can already tell that the subtle disparities among the narratives account for some of the deeper festering conflict. Faulkner is one of those authors who seems to afford his readers a great deal of trust — in this case, the confidence that we will be able to piece the narratives together to create a single, multidimensional picture. I find that such authors are often the most exciting to read.
