“Before us the the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.”
Considered a classic of the Southern gothic genre and American literature, As I Lay Dying is a challenging but rewarding read. Narrated in first person point of view by fifteen different characters of varying age, articulateness, and mental capacity, the story follows the dirt poor Bundren family as they journey to Jefferson where they will bury the gradually rotting corpse of the family matriarch, Addie. Throughout the polyphonic novel, the tone varies drastically as we veere from very poignant prose to the thoughts of a young boy who has a limited understanding of the world and an underdeveloped vocabulary. Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness style is utilized frequently, and many of the chapters can be difficult to read or connect to the main story; notably, there is an entire chapter that consists of the sentence: “My mother is a fish.”
Although there are fifteen total narrators, the bulk of the story is told by the Bundren family:
Addie—the matriarch who lays dying and wishes to be buried where she was born;
Anse—Addie’s shiftless and hunchbacked husband, described as “a figure carved clumsily from tough wood by a drunken caricaturist,” who doesn’t work and desperately wants a set of dentures;
Darl—Anse and Addie’s son who narrates omnisciently at times and is the point of view with the most chapters. He is the most articulate of the family, and the others consider him queer because of it. He constantly considers the past, and annoyingly gets stuck on what is and what was;
Cash—a carpenter and the eldest son, who begins the novel constructing Addie’s coffin, and who struggles to complete sentences, even in his head. He describes the different methods for building the coffin as a way to cope with his mother’s death;
Jewel—Addie’s favorite son, a result of her affair with Reverend Whitfield; a brooding type who loves his horse (a descendant of the untamed ponies sold by Flem Snopes in “Spotted Horses”—a story incorporated into Faulkner’s The Hamlet) and is described as one who “invents devilment”;
Vardaman—the youngest son who thinks his mother is a fish, who suffers from some unclarified mental shortcoming similar to Benjy from The Sound and the Fury;
Dewey Dell—the lone daughter, seventeen years old, and pregnant by a man named Lafe.
The characters are very flawed—selfish, prideful, hot-tempered, weak, unintelligent, stubborn—and the narrative is so scattered among the points of view that it is kind of hard to get a grasp of what is actually occuring at times, until the same experiences are filtered through a different narrator’s perspective. A handful of chapters are chock full of descriptions of sensory input and incorrect deductions instead of processed thought, making the novel unintelligible at times, though it is at least less confusing than the first two chapters of The Sound and the Fury. The story unfolds in inevitable tragedy. The objective of the main characters—to transport Addie’s body to Jefferson—is such a small-scale feat that their mishaps and the unusual thoughts of some of the characters allow the novel to read as a kind of black comedy.
Dewey Dell said we will get some bananas. The train is behind the glass, red on the track. When it runs the track shines on and off. Pa said flour and sugar and coffee costs so much. Because I am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles. Why do flour and sugar and coffee cost so much when he is a country boy. “Wouldn’t you ruther have some bananas instead?” Bananas are gone, eaten. Gone. When it runs on the track shines again. “Why aint I a town boy, pa?” I said. God made me. I did not said to God to made me in the country. If He can make the train, why cant He make them all in the town because flour and sugar and coffee.
Though the neighbor’s insist it is a bad idea, Anse is adamant that he will fulfill Addie’s dying wish and transport her body the thirtysome miles to Jefferson. During the family’s trek, Anse refuses any assistance, and so the children are often hungry or sleeping in barns; still other times he bristles at being beholden to any man, and so cons kind people into giving him things out of charity. Jewel tries to leave when Anse sells his horse for extra money; Cash breaks his leg and rides atop the coffin with a makeshift concrete cast, though he never admits to being in pain. They almost lose the coffin when crossing a river, and then again in a barn fire. Several times Dewey Dell naively tries to find someone who can abort her baby without really knowing how to ask; she is cruelly tricked by the false pharmacist, and her abortion money is used by her father to buy his new teeth. Darl ends up being sent to an asylum for arson, and everyone believes he is crazy except maybe Cash.
Sometimes I aint so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint… It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
By the time they arrive in Jefferson, buzzards circle the wagon and the smell horrifies the townspeople. After the family buries Addie, the dark comedy concludes with Anse introducing his children to his new wife: the woman from whom he had borrowed the shovels to dig Addie’s grave. Admittedly, a plot summary of As I Lay Dying is not really appealing. If you are used to plot-driven novels—where the discussion points are entirely based around what happened instead of structure, prose, themes, etc.—then this book would seem kind of awful. It’s structure, style, and disparate narrative voices make it compelling. By presenting the journey from varying perspectives, the circuitous story weaves a robust, if messy, emotional tapestry.
Any of the novel’s 59 chapters could be considered inconsequential. With the exception of Darl, who sometimes slips into Faulkner’s polysyllabic omniscient run-on form, the characters thoughts are not profound or even succinct—they are rambling and often incoherent. It is the whole—the jumbled locomotive thoughts of the Bundren family—that give the book its emotional power. The selection of visceral, grisly details draws us into the physical world of early twentieth century Mississippi, evoking strong sensory reactions.
The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.
Social issues prevalent in the uneducated and impoverished south, while present, are not addressed head-on as in the works of Faulkner contemporary John Steinbeck (The Pearl,The Grapes of Wrath), but are only touched on vaguely by the limited thoughts of the characters who are the most affected but unable to form coherent thoughts about them. The family’s religion remains a difficult mystery that they mostly fail to comprehend but still try to allude to when they need something to blame for their misfortures. There is a really unique moment where Faulkner’s word choice is able to kind of pause time, making it malleable in the author’s hand even as he plays with the order of events throughout the novel.
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.
At times Faulkner does slip up and use his own narrative voice in the middle of a section narrated by Vardaman or Dewey Dell, two uneducated speakers who generally talk in short, stunted, single-thought phrases. While I personally enjoy Faulkner’s unique prose, it works much better when it is used as in omniscient narration, not intermittently interspersed into the thoughts of a mentally handicapped eight year old. The crisscrossing form of the novel is bound to interfere with thoughtful analysis of its thematic content, but the two work in tandem. In the modernist style, there is no clear protagonist, and the various narrators emphasize the fact that none of them are reliable; that observation is a subjective experience. But, the factual occurrences are trivial; the takeaway is the different ways that these people process their grief.
Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying over the course of six weeks during the midnight shift at a power plant where he worked, claiming he did not change a single word once he finished the first draft. The title comes from Homer’s Odyssey: the character Agamemnon says to Odysseus: “As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” Though the novel is short, it has a lot going on—too much to really capture in a summary view. Certainly not for the casual reader who is chiefly reliant on plot for enjoyment, As I Lay Dying is a worthwhile but dense read.