A family’s individual views of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying is the third William Faulkner book I’ve read, and so different from the previous two that you would think it was a different author. This book is tremendous. It gets accolades as one of the best books ever written and it’s hard to argue against that. It even had me liking the somewhat stream-of-conciousness writing that takes place throughout. I never thought I’d see the day!

If a book can be both simple and complex, this is it. The story itself is rather plain and straight forward, but the way Faulkner weaves it, it takes on a life of its own. The novel is told in first person throughout, by over a dozen characters. Each (short) chapter, sometimes just a couple pages, sometimes just a paragraph or two, is narrated by a different person, and told in a way unique to the personality of the person telling it. Oldest son Darl is a bit of a dreamer and tends to more obtuse; carpenter son Cash is more direct and forceful; 8-year-old Vardaman is all play, and his mind wanders; and so forth. Faulkner spins these separate viewpoints into a beautiful, whole tale (spoilers follow).

The book begins with Addie Bundren on her death bed. The matriarch of a poor farm family, she is overseen by her husband Anse and all their kids: Darl, Cash, Jewel, Dewey Dell (the only girl), and Vardaman. Knowing she could go at any time, Cash is outside putting together her coffin, even holding it up so she can see it through the window, and approve of its build quality. From there, this family’s tale is opened slowly, like a flower taking bloom in the morning. Pretty quickly we learn that the father, Anse, is a good-for-nothing waste of space; he tells a story that a doctor once told him that if he ever sweat, he would die, and he has milked that to go through life without doing anything. But he seems hell-bent on granting Addie’s dying wish that she be buried with her people in Jefferson, a good couple days journey away by wagon. Darl and Jewel are away with said wagon when Addie does finally perish, so the family isn’t able to leave on their trek until she’s already been gone 4 days, and is starting to smell in her coffin.

It so happens a storm has washed out both bridges leaving their homestead, and through their travels around their neighbors, we learn more about the family. Anse really is a piece of shit; he feigns Godliness by not accepting hand-outs from others, but really it is just a way for him to not feel indebted to others. His kids seem to know this (especially the oldest three brothers) but no one is willing or able to stand up to him. When they finally attempt to ford a swollen river, Anse walks across the nearly drowned bridge carefully and lets his sons take the dangerous job of moving the wagon and mules across the unused ford. In doing so, Cash’s leg is broken and the mules are drowned. As Darl and Jewel make trip after dangerous trip back into the water to bring up Cash’s carpenter tools, Anse only watches. Even though they could all use a rest, Anse keeps them going, guilting them with Addie’s final wishes.

They reach a neighbor’s house and stay the night in the barn, and the next day, find that Anse has sold Jewel’s horse (a horse Jewel earned himself through hard work over a long period of time) to replace the dead mules. We also learn around this time that Dewey Dell is hiding a secret, that she is pregnant from a local farmhand, and is hoping to find a pharmacist in town to “help her situation,” though she knows nothing about the process. At the next night’s stop, they are staying the night in another barn when it goes up in flame. Jewel rescues the coffin and all of the animals in the barn, getting burned badly in the process.

When they finally get to town, they are shunned by its people, because the smell has gotten so bad from the coffin (now 9 days in), and buzzards are flying overhead. Cash really should see a doctor, but Anse instead makes an impromptu cast out of concrete, against everybody’s advise. The police arrive to take Darl, who it turns out set the fire in the barn to burn up the coffin and end their miserable trip. He loses his hold on his sanity and ends up sent to an asylum. Dewey Dell goes to the doctor, but is assaulted by an impersonator who is working the counter there, who convinces her to have sex with him to “cure” her. The concrete cast is causing Cash’s foot to turn black, so they break the concrete off, only to find it has taken most of his leg’s skin with it.

In the end, we find the true reason Anse kept everyone going to Jefferson to bury Addie, a woman he probably didn’t love and who most certainly didn’t love him in return. He shows up the next morning after the burial with new teeth, and introduces his family to the “new” Mrs Bundren, some floozy he met in town that night.

I was skeptical for the first 100 or so pages of this book (a good portion, because it is only about 250 pages in length), but I see now that Faulkner was just setting up all the of the chess pieces properly. When bombshells are dropped (finding out Jewel is not Anse’s child, but the son of the local priest is one!), they are felt through your core. Also, telling the story through multiple viewpoints is genius. We all see the world in our own way, and in the book, this leads to some facts being stressed by one person and almost completely ignored by another. This may be a top 5 book for me, it is that good. Classic books like this are the reason I wanted to do this whole crazy journey in the first place, I probably would never have experienced it otherwise.