As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Having read Absalom, Absalom! recently, and then re-reading The Sound and the Fury, both of which are modernist American masterworks that I thoroughly enjoyed, I wanted to continue reading Faulkner. I had read As I Lay Dying, in college, and was ready to read it again. I borrowed a copy from the library, along with another Faulkner novel, Sanctuary, and Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time and Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, after having read several of his other novels last summer. I’ll get to those, soon.

Although written in the same high modernist style as The Sound and the Fury: multiple narrators, first-person stream of consciousness, As I Lay Dying is much easier to read. None of the writing is near as challenging as the Benjy chapter of The Sound and the Fury or the opening section of Absalom, Absalom! The story unfolds over just a couple of weeks and is told nearly entirely in chronological order. I remembered it being very funny, but what I remembered as dark comedy I experienced now more as pathos. I had a sense that Faulkner wanted the reader to laugh at his characters, but I resisted doing so. There is the bittersweet human comedy of characters acting out of human weaknesses: selfishness, pride, ignorance, but these characters have so little; it felt more sad than funny this reading, or at least equally sad and funny.

What I hadn’t remembered is how quick a read it is. I read the entire novel in a day, and still took a break to go to the gym in the afternoon and another break for dinner. Although the page length is 261 (I read a paperback Vintage edition) it’s broken into nearly 60 chapters (the chapters aren’t numbered and I didn’t count, but 59 is what it says on Wikipedia) so when one chapter ends near the top of a page and the next doesn’t begin until halfway down the next page, there’s a lot of blank space in 261 pages, so they turn pretty quickly.

Each chapter is titled with the name of that chapter’s narrator. Wikipedia says there are fifteen different narrators. That’s probably correct. The most prominent narrator (and probably the most frequent, too, again, I didn’t count) is Darl. He is the second oldest of the five children in the Bundren family. Addie Bundren is the mother of the family. As the novel begins she is bedridden and silent, alive but dying. She dies on page 50. The rest of the novel concerns the family carrying her in her coffin from the farm where they live to “town” to be buried with her people, the town being Faulkner’s fictional Jefferson, Mississippi, also the setting for The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! although none of the characters overlap. The time is about 1930, the year the novel was published. The Sound and the Fury had come out the year before and is set in the Easter weekend of 1928.

Addie Bundren and her husband Anse are both given chapters to narrate, as are all the children. Cash the eldest, begins the novel by sawing and nailing together the coffin that will bury his mother. Darl, who other characters call “queer” (not referring to sex but to a look in his eyes and a strange air about him) will end the novel being sent to the state mental hospital in Jackson (the same hospital where Benjy is sent at the end of The Sound and the Fury) but who Faulkner presents as the most aware and insightful of any of the novel’s characters. Cash and Darl are in their late twenties. About ten years younger comes Jewel, a hot-headed, complaining, but ultimately loyal son, who we learn halfway through the novel is not Anse’s son, but is a boy Addie had through an affair with Rev. Whitfield, a secret she took to her grave. The fourth Bundren child is the only girl, Dewey Dell, seventeen years-old, secretly two months pregnant by a boy named Lafe who gave her money to buy abortion pills, which she tries to do during the journey. The fifth child, Vardaman, is a boy of unspecified age but young enough to struggle with comprehending his mother’s death.

The other narrators are neighbors of the Bundren family, a doctor, the Reverend Whitfield who I mentioned before, workers at the pharmacy’s where Dewey Dell attempts to buy the abortifants she needs, and some of the other folks the family encounters along the way and in Jefferson once they arrive.

The big scenes are quite dramatic. I remembered all of them from 40 years ago. The opening scene when Addie is still alive and Cash is constructing her coffin outside her window seems macabre but actually is Addie’s wish. From time to time she sits up in bed to look out the window and check his progress. Cash takes pride in his carpentry. After Addie dies but before the family can begin the trip, a series of rainstorms arrive which flood the rivers and wash out the bridges. The family is forced to ford a swollen river where the mules hauling the wagon are washed away and Cash breaks his leg. The family foolishly sets the leg with concrete. Anse trades Jewel’s prized horse for a new team of mules. By this time Addie’s un-embalmed body is several days dead and beginning to smell. Buzzards circle above the family’s wagon and wherever they stop, leading to the next big scene when Darl sets fire to a barn where the family is spending the night hoping that the fire will burn Addie’s coffin and end the miserable journey. The coffin doesn’t burn and the journey continues. Addie’s actual burying in Jefferson takes place almost unremarked, but we learn the real, selfish reason that Anse put his family through such danger and sacrifice, not to fulfill Addie’s wish, but because in the city, Anse can buy a set of false teeth (using the money that Lafe had given to Dewey Dell for the abortion pills) and get a new wife, which he introduces in the final line of the novel.

I said that all the narrators speak in first person. That’s not quite true, Darl at times, in his chapters, imagines scenes taking place elsewhere, or perhaps knows them in the way of an omniscient narrator. He even speaks of himself in third person, occasionally. He also uses authorial language far elevated from the other narrators or what you would expect from an uneducated farmer. He is the moral conscience of the novel, seeing the absurdity of their trip, and, when he burns the barn, working to put a stop to it and deal with his mother’s body respectfully. Like Benjy, in The Sound and the Fury, who Faulkner in several ways sets up as a Christ character (it’s Benjy’s thirty-third birthday on Easter Saturday), Faulkner, in As I Lay Dying, gives to the character that others see as “queer” and who will end up in a mental asylum, the ability to rise above the narrow human motivations of the others and see our human struggles in the larger context of nature and divinity. Anse wants new teeth and a new wife. Dewey Dell wants abortion pills. Jewel acts from pride. Cash lives in his head, loving his tools and the calculations of his carpentry but stoically denying the pain of his broken leg even when it’s set in concrete. Darl, alone, acts without a selfish motivation, kindly assisting each member of the family, and alone he honors both the physical and spiritual realities of human nature. it is Faulkner’s final joke of the novel, or at least his final tragic comment on human nature, that Darl is the one sent to the hospital in Jackson, but like the rest of the comedy, it’s more sad than funny, or at least equally so.