In some ways, the fractured and experimental narrative style of The Sound and the Fury helps Faulkner to avoid pitfalls of melodrama. Though the story is in many ways overwrought and sensational, it must be filtered through non conventional narrative techniques which inhibit the types of tropes and familiar cliches associated with the gothic form.
Similarly, the collective narration of As I Lay Dying moderates the dark burlesque humor of the novel. The humor ranges from Cora’s many mistakes in her early narrative section, to Vardaman boring holes into his mother’s face to let her corpse breathe inside her coffin, to the sick irony of Dewey Dell’s rape, culminating in the final image of Anse returning to the family with new teeth and a new wife. The humor is over the top, but because the plot itself is buried beneath the competing narrations, thre reader must take few extra steps before the humor becomes apparent.
This technique of buried irony contributes to several themes throughout the novel. The increasingly disastrous journey (the fire, the cemented leg, the lack of a shovel) generates a dramatic irony that implicates both an authorial presence, and associates this presence with both a malevolent God and the backlash of violated Nature. The nearly slapstick comedy of ill and breaking and rotting bodies reinforces the novels central concern with the paradox of the “being” and the physical object which contains that being. Formally, the humor complicates the intent of the novel, frustrating tragic proportions but never foreclosing to potential tragedy of the family.
The final “gag” of Anse’s return is the most blatant and, in some ways, the least effective. But the build up of Anse’s repeated desire for new teeth, and his mysterious loyalty to his wife’s wishes despite general laziness, lends a sense of inevitability to the final joke. The reader simultaneously can’t believe Anse’s callousness, and cannot imagine any other outcome to the journey. Humor, as a a technique buried beneath broken narration and the readerly task of constructing a coherent narrative, ultimately structures the characteristics of the Bundren family and the pitfalls of their journey. The humor of the novel successfully assimilates complex themes within a sort of ironic authorial omniscience and undermines the concept of authorial mastery by undercutting the seriousness of the novel itself.
