As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
Summary
When Addie Bundren dies on the family's poor Mississippi farm, her husband Anse insists on honoring her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson, forty miles away, and loads her coffin onto a mule drawn wagon for a journey that stretches into nine increasingly disastrous days. Faulkner tells the whole trip through fifteen different narrators, including, in one chapter, Addie herself speaking from inside her own coffin, and the family that carries her fractures further with every mile: Cash breaks his leg trying to ford a flooded river and the family sets it in wet concrete rather than seek real medical help, worsening the injury badly; a barn the family sleeps in one night catches fire, apparently set deliberately by the increasingly unstable son Darl, who cannot stand watching his mother's decomposing body dragged across the countryside any longer. By the time the Bundrens finally reach Jefferson, Addie's body has become so foul smelling that buzzards trail the wagon and townspeople hold their noses at the sight of it. Once the burial is finally done, Anse takes the money his daughter Dewey Dell was secretly carrying for an abortion and spends it on a new set of false teeth, then promptly marries a woman who had lent him a shovel, introducing her to his stunned children as simply Mrs. Bundren. Darl, blamed for the fire, is committed to the state insane asylum; Dewey Dell, still pregnant, has been tricked out of both her money and her body by a drugstore clerk who sold her powder instead of the pills he promised; only Jewel, Addie's favored and illegitimate son, stays anywhere near steady through the wreckage the trip leaves behind.
Faulkner reportedly wrote the entire novel in six weeks, working midnight to four in the morning while employed at the University of Mississippi's power plant, and later claimed he never changed a word of the draft. It reads with a strange, dark comic momentum despite its subject, each new disaster landing almost absurdly on top of the last, and the fifteen distinct voices, some barely literate and one already dead, give the same nine days a different shape depending entirely on whose head a reader is currently inside.
The novel runs to fifty nine short chapters split among its narrators, an unusually fractured structure even by Faulkner's own experimental standards, and Addie's single chapter, delivered from beyond her own death, remains one of the boldest formal choices in American fiction of its decade.
Historical Context & Significance
No prize considered As I Lay Dying on its October 1930 publication by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, and it sold modestly, read at the time mainly as further evidence that Faulkner was writing something formally strange. The 1931 Pulitzer for the novel went to Margaret Ayer Barnes's Years of Grace, a now largely forgotten chronicle of Chicago society, rather than to a book built from fifteen fractured voices carrying a coffin across rural Mississippi.
Faulkner's own recognition arrived decades later and for his career overall rather than for this book specifically, with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. As I Lay Dying has since become one of the most consistently praised American novels of the twentieth century, its influence traceable directly into Graham Swift's Booker Prize winning Last Orders and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, both of which borrow its device of carrying a body toward burial through a chorus of shifting narrators.