This paper aims to examine how As I Lay Dying fits witltin the tradition of the nove! of violence in America. There is a great temptation to elaborate a historical explanation of the emergence of As I Lay Dying as a nove! of violence by attending to what is useful in the contextual frame of the Great Depression against which the nove! was written. I have however reoriented the present treatment of As I Lay Dying as a nove! of violence toward more current issues, with the claim that an aesthetical view of sociological knowledge is able to comprehend social reality at any level of abstraction. The focus of titis study is to determine the nature and formai implications of the novel's sensibility to social factors and to investigate into the author' s representation of reality on the one hand and into his effort to stylize it into art on the other. Implicit in titis approach is the questioning of avant-garde writing and the use of a language in which sensations are reported with immediacy, the unusual treatment of time together with a high degree of dramatization replete with symbols and turns ofhumor.