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Disinterring Daddy: Family Linen's Reply to As I Lay Dying

Disinterring Daddy: Family Linen's Reply to As I Lay Dying Disinterring Daddy: Family Linen’s Reply to As I Lay Dying by Terrell L. Tebbetts Novelist Lee Smith has often acknowledged Faulkner’s impor- tance to her writing, alluding to him in her fi ction and discussing him in her interviews. In particular, she mentions Faulkner’s use of multiple points of view, his use of many characters with diff erent voices to tell his stories (Arnold 14). It is not surprising, then, to see critics beginning to explore how Smith has used Faulkner, specifi cally how her work re- sponds not only to his techniques but also to his characters and plots. On technique, for instance, Jeanne McDonald writes that it “was from novels like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying that Smith got the idea of multiple narrators” (180). On plot and character, one critic in particular, Susie Paul Johnson, has explored the striking connections between As I Lay Dying and Smith’s 1985 novel Family Linen. She is es- pecially compelling as she discusses the similarities in plot, with both novels set into motion by “the death of the mother” (45), and in char- acter types, with Smith’s Sybill Rife, for example, sharing traits with Faulkner’s http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Southern Literary Journal University of North Carolina Press

Disinterring Daddy: Family Linen's Reply to As I Lay Dying

Tebbetts, Terrell L.
The Southern Literary Journal , Volume 38 (2) – May 31, 2006
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English.
ISSN
1534-1461

Abstract

Disinterring Daddy: Family Linen’s Reply to As I Lay Dying by Terrell L. Tebbetts Novelist Lee Smith has often acknowledged Faulkner’s impor- tance to her writing, alluding to him in her fi ction and discussing him in her interviews. In particular, she mentions Faulkner’s use of multiple points of view, his use of many characters with diff erent voices to tell his stories (Arnold 14). It is not surprising, then, to see critics beginning to explore how Smith has used Faulkner, specifi cally how her work re- sponds not only to his techniques but also to his characters and plots. On technique, for instance, Jeanne McDonald writes that it “was from novels like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying that Smith got the idea of multiple narrators” (180). On plot and character, one critic in particular, Susie Paul Johnson, has explored the striking connections between As I Lay Dying and Smith’s 1985 novel Family Linen. She is es- pecially compelling as she discusses the similarities in plot, with both novels set into motion by “the death of the mother” (45), and in char- acter types, with Smith’s Sybill Rife, for example, sharing traits with Faulkner’s

Journal

The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press

Published: May 31, 2006

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