As I Lay Dying: Review. “I don’t begrudge it,” he said in a…

Author: William Faulkner. Date of Publication: 1930. Pages: 250. Genre: Literary Fiction, Southern Gothic

This novel reads like a bad dream. The Bundren family are trying to get their recently deceased matriarch Addie buried. Her husband Anse has promised to lay her to rest with her kin 40 miles away from the family’s home. At every turn there is a quality of furious unreality, to borrow a Faulkner-ism. Sons Jewel and Darl go into town to make a few extra dollars for the journey and get stuck on the other side of the river when there’s a storm. The subsequent flood washes out several of the bridges the family travels to cross. While fording the river at another point their wagon is hit by a floating log. They nearly lose Addie’s body and her eldest, Cash, breaks his leg. With no time to spare they set it with concrete and rope him to the top of the coffin so the jostling on the wagon doesn’t hurt him. There’s no rhyme or reason to how horribly wrong things go and it was a fools’ errand to begin with, as in a nightmare.

The characterizations are masterful. Cash the responsible eldest son with a practical fondness for his carpenter’s tools. Jewel the rebellious middle child with plans of his own. The Tulls who help the Bundrens at various points in their journey take the place of the reader, bewildered by the strange and stubborn ways of the family. Anse is the standout figure looming large over the story. He has an uncanny ability to claim everything he wants from other people without lifting a finger himself, getting several people in the story to give him by charity what they had originally offered by loan or not offered at all: places to stay, food, mules and horses. He is a selfish father who lords over his family. The kind of father who hears his son’s gotten a scholarship to college and says “you’re abandoning your family because you look down on us” to stop him from going. An exchange that recounts when Jewel buys himself a horse by working nights on someone else’s field is illustrative of their dynamic:

“So you bought a horse,” he said. “You went behind my back and bought a horse. You never consulted me; you know how tight it is for us to make by, yet you bought a horse for me to feed. Taken the work from your flesh and blood and bought a horse with it.”
Jewe looked at pa, his eyes paler than ever. “He wont never eat a mouthful of yours,” he said. “Not a mouthful. I’ll kill him first. Dont you never think it. Dont you never.”
[Pg. 129]

Faulkner famously writes with a stream of consciousness style which makes As I Lay Daying an uneven read, to put it mildly. I thought it was kind of lazy to say that Darl has second sight as an excuse for omniscient narration when the whole book is getting in the heads of different characters. I also found youngest son Vardaman’s perspective to be a really unconvincing attempt at portraying the mind of a child. Overall though the high-flying borderline nonsensical thought-dumps are kept within a reasonable limit and the novel is much more readable compared to a The Sound and the Fury.

Notes

This book was a reading option during my junior year English class, set along side Daisy Miller by Henry James and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I think A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway might have also been there but no one chose it because it was way longer than the others. While I’m glad I chose Slaughterhouse Five at the time I don’t regret circling back to this one. I am honestly doubtful though if assigning this book to high schoolers would do much to nurture a love of literature.