As I Lay Dying (Norton Anthology)

by William Faulkner

anthologized in The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Between the Wars, 1914-1945, Volume D

(Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. 1693-1790)

Paperback, 97 Pages, Fiction

“My mother is a fish” (1724).

From the Cover: As I Lay Dying is the harrowing, darkly comic tale of the Bundren family’s trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, their wife and mother, in the town of her choice. The story is told by each family member – including Addie herself. Faulkner’s use of multiple viewpoints to reveal the inner psychological make-up of the characters is one of the novel’s chief charms.

My Review: If it hadn’t been for my English 2520 class (American Literature 1865-Present) I probably never would have read As I Lay Dying. And that, friends and neighbors, would have been as much a tragedy as any William Faulkner could have imagined. I loved this novel. It is one of the most brilliant and darkly humorous books I have ever read. It is told by fifteen different narrators in fifty-nine chapters, and that – in and of itself – is quite a feat. But what I found to be the most brilliant and amazing aspect of the form and style of narration is that each voice of the fifteen is different and distinct. It is almost as if fifteen different people wrote this novel, and that is what impresses me the most about As I Lay Dying. In my class, we spent two days discussing Faulkner’s novel, and after that discussion I can honestly say that I think that Faulkner is word-for-word, thought-for-thought the greatest American writer. Forget Hemingway. Faulkner is clearly the best. As I Lay Dying is one of the most complex and absolutely incredible novels I have read. In his Banquet Speech (December 10, 1950) upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature 1949, Faulkner states that “the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed.” These Verities of the Heart are: love, honor, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice. As I Lay Dying sets up the Bundren family, and then one-by-one strips away each and every one of Faulkner’s verities until the characters are mere human shells; they become grotesques. Faulkner will slowly pull out all the verities of his stories, until you need to bring the verities in yourself up so that you can finish Faulkner. (I understand that Sanctuary is one of Faulkner’s best/worst at this.) My professor said that “reading Faulkner can make you a more compassionate person; it makes you recognize and love other people. It makes you see the verities even in a shell of a person like a grotesque (like Anse Bundren), it makes you find it in everybody.” One last thing about As I Lay Dying, in the section narrated by Addie Bundren, there is a blank space; a space where Faulkner, who could always find a word for anything, leaves a void. It is a deistic space, a space before Creation. It is a pause. When you read As I Lay Dying, think about what could fill that void. See it as something reflective of what happens when someone is so whole, when someone who so knows a human being (as does Faulkner) cannot come up with a word for the creation of a human being. As I Lay Dying is, as are most of Faulkner’s stories, a study of the human condition and the progression of the human soul from every possible angle; from the I AM of the individual within the story to the study of the family from both inside and outside that makes up As I Lay Dying.