As I Lay Dying

The Bundren Family

Addie Bundren is dying in her farmhouse in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and her husband Anse has promised to bury her in Jefferson, the county seat forty miles away, where her family is from. Cash, the eldest son, is building her coffin outside her window while she is still alive — a gesture that is simultaneously tender and grotesque, practical and surreal. The family that will carry out the burial journey is a portrait of rural American poverty in all its dignity and absurdity: Anse, the husband who is shiftless and self-pitying but capable of a certain stubborn commitment; Cash the careful carpenter; Darl, the most perceptive of the children, who sees more than he should; Jewel, whose violent energy and secret origins are revealed gradually; Dewey Dell, the only daughter, who is pregnant and desperate to reach Jefferson for reasons of her own; and Vardaman, the youngest, who responds to his mother’s death by declaring, with a child’s terrible logic, “My mother is a fish.”

The journey to Jefferson is a sustained catastrophe of escalating dark comedy. The first bridge is washed out; they attempt a crossing and nearly drown; Cash’s leg is broken and cemented by Anse using a mixture of sand and cement that will cripple him. A barn catches fire. The August heat advances the decomposition of Addie’s body in the coffin until the smell draws buzzards overhead. Neighbors are appalled. The family pushes on. Faulkner is interested in the specific quality of human endurance that refuses to acknowledge the obvious absurdity of what it is doing — the Bundrens are simultaneously heroic and ridiculous, and the novel refuses to resolve that tension.

Fifteen Narrators

The novel is composed of 59 chapters narrated by 15 different characters, ranging from single paragraphs to several pages. This is not experimental technique for its own sake; each narrator perceives the same journey through a completely different cognitive and emotional instrument, and the cumulative effect is a portrait of how fundamentally divided experience is — how the same event, the same family, the same death produces fifteen distinct and partially incompatible realities.

Addie herself narrates one chapter — from inside the coffin, from death, arriving in the novel’s middle section as the formal center around which everything else orbits. This is Faulkner’s most audacious structural move: we hear Addie’s own account of her life, her marriage, her fierce inner life, only after we have spent the entire first half of the novel hearing everyone else’s version of who she was. The chapter is not supernatural; it is a formal device, and what it communicates is Addie’s argument about the relationship between words and the things they claim to represent — a philosophical position that reverberates through everything that has been said and done in her name.

Darl’s sections are the novel’s most technically extraordinary: he narrates events he could not have witnessed, perceives the inner states of people across distances, and his consciousness is both the most penetrating and, eventually, the most unstable. Vardaman’s brief, dislocated sections — fragmented by grief into a child’s attempt to force death into a comprehensible category — are simultaneously comic and devastating. “My mother is a fish” is not merely a child’s confusion; it is the novel’s most compressed statement about the inadequacy of language to encompass loss.

Comedy and Catastrophe

The blackness of As I Lay Dying’s comedy is part of its argument. Anse wants to make the journey not solely out of loyalty to his promise or grief for his wife; he wants false teeth, which he can only obtain in Jefferson. Dewey Dell wants to find an abortion. The journey, in other words, is organized partly around the needs of the living rather than the wishes of the dead, and Faulkner does not shy away from this — he makes it one of the novel’s central ironies that the promise to Addie is fulfilled while simultaneously serving agendas she never knew about.

The Southern Gothic tradition to which Faulkner belongs is deeply interested in the gap between the stories people tell about themselves — their sense of dignity, honor, obligation — and the material reality of their lives. The Bundrens insist on completing this burial journey with a conviction that exceeds any rational justification. They keep going because stopping would require them to acknowledge what they are actually doing: hauling a decomposing body across Mississippi in summer heat, at enormous cost, for the sake of a promise made to a woman who is no longer there to receive it. The insistence on that promise is both the most human thing about them and the most absurd.

Faulkner refuses to resolve the novel’s tonal complexity. As I Lay Dying is tragic and farcical, formally radical and viscerally immediate, philosophically serious and blackly funny, and it insists on being all of these things simultaneously. That refusal of resolution is, ultimately, its most honest quality.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — One of modernism’s most formally ambitious novels, and also one of its funniest — a sustained act of dark comic genius about dignity, death, and the human refusal to accept the obvious.

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