Book Review

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

     Weird hicks. That is the subject of William Faulkner’s classic novel As I Lay Dying. This Southern Gothic novel provides shifting perspectives from all the members of the Bundren family, their neighbors, and a few other people along the way of this road trip story. While it is probably one of Faulkner’s best novels, and certainly one of his most accessible, it may not be one of the greatest books ever written as some critics and historians have overstated. Still, it is a high point in American writing.

     The Bundrens live on a cotton farm in an imaginary region of Mississippi. As the story opens, the son named Cash is building a coffin outside the window of Addie, the mother, who is dying in her bed. The toothless husband and father, Anse, is sitting on the porch, typically allergic to work and self-absorbed, contemplating how much better life would be with teeth. The other family members are gradually introduced as death creeps closer and closer to Addie. Darl is a thoughtful son who makes everyone uncomfortable. Jewel was born to Addie after she had an affair with another man. The youngest son, Vardaman, approaches the house with a big fish he caught; he proceeds to kill it with an ax so they can eat it for dinner. Dewey Dell is the mothering and responsible daughter who tries to care for the whole family as their matriarch dies. Predictably Addie does die and at the same time a severe rainstorm comes. The family embarks on a journey to bring the corpse to the family burial plot in a nearby town but first they have to cross a flooded river where all the bridges were destroyed during the storm.

     The narrative is linear but it is told from the shifting first-person perspectives of about twenty people involved in the story. The altering narratives give the whole book a cinematic feel; as a new person takes up the story in each chapter, the change functions like shot transition in cinematography. If such these are done effectively in a movie, the pacing of can take on different characteristics and the shifts in narrative function the same way as well in this novel. As I Lay Dying is a very visual novel as well. But what really enhances the flow of the story is the subjective thoughts that each narrator provides. The reader gets some philosophical ruminations from Darl and Varnaman who contemplate ontologically about the nature of being (their awkward logic reads like a hillbilly version of Heidegger and is even a whole lot easier to understand than that old German fool); Faulkner tries to show how uneducated people, while lacking the intellectual vocabulary of academics, struggle with the same philosophical issues that are discussed in the ivory towers of college campuses. We learn that Anse thinks little about anybody but himself. Cash comes across as a fatalist who just accepts whatever happens to him no matter how rotten it is and Dewey Dell constantly frets over how to take care of the whole family. Most importantly, we see the perspectives of the neighbors and a couple other people who think the Bundrens are a bunch of lunatics. By the end of the novel, you will probably agree.

     A large portion of the novel described the family’s disastrous crossing of the swollen river. Jewel ties his horse to the mule team that is pulling their decrepit wagon with the coffin in the back. A log flowing downstream overturns the wagon, the casket floats away, and the mules drown. Of course, the river is symbolic and shows not only the division between the Bundrens and the more modern people in the town but also the point where the family, at least almost, coalesces and coheres into a more integrated unit. They almost congeal since Jewel, the black sheep of the family, emerges as the most loyal and dedicated member while Darl, who always bickers with Jewel, makes his exit in the later passages of the book. Jewel stands out in this part, not only because he does the most to rescue Cash, his tool box, and the wagon but also because he sacrifices his beloved horse, a symbol of his distance from his family, by selling it so they can buy a new team of mules. After the crossing of the river, we also learn that most of the family members did not want to make this journey for the sake of burying their mother. They had ulterior motives and all pretended to be concerned about her so they could get the things they really wanted in the town.

     As I Lay Dying gets more hilarious as it goes along. The corpse inside the coffin begins to stink and attracts unwanted attention from the people they pass along the way. A flock of vultures continuously circle overhead, waiting for a chance to feast on the corpse. The family tries to heal Cash’s broken leg by pouring concrete over it. A sleazy pharmacist convinces Dewey Dell he can abort her unwanted fetus by having sex with her after giving her capsules filled with talcum powder for ten dollars. Faulkner wrote a novel nicely seasoned with gallows humor; if you do not laugh out loud at least a couple times while reading it, you probably did not really get the book in all its finer details.

     Overall, As I Lay Dying is a great little novel and deserves to be regarded as a classic. Whether it is one of the greatest books ever written might be a bit of an exaggeration. By the end, it seemed a little rudimentary. The story of the road trip takes place over eight days and thankfully Faulkner did not try to describe the entire time they were traveling but some of the time shifts are confusing and make it feel like something was left out. It is also one of those books that needs to be read at least twice in order to really get a good understanding of what everything means. But it is a quick read and by the end of the second time around, you will probably see what makes it great.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage Books. New York, 1964.