As I Lay Dying
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

The novels of Mississippi author William Faulkner (1898-1963) are notoriously difficult to read. One of his novels that is more accessible, shorter, and easier to read is the 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying. It’s about the Bundren family, as luckless a bunch of misfits as you ever saw. The Bundrens are poor country people and are not very smart. Anse Bundren is the patriarch of the family. He follows his conscience in all matters but still seems to make all the wrong decisions.

Addie, Anse’s wife, is dying. As Anse says, “She’s made up her mind to go.” Addie and Anse’s oldest son, Cash, is making a coffin for Addie in the yard. The sounds of hammering and sawing provide the musical accompaniment to her dying.

Anse has promised Addie that he will bury her in the town where she came from. The trouble is that it’s forty miles away. They will go by horse-drawn wagon. The entire family. It’s July and the heat in Mississippi is intense.

Cash is the oldest child. He’s a carpenter, a “doer” and not a complainer. He’s a stolid fellow, serious and loyal. He sustains a badly broken leg on the trip to bury Addie, when the wagon overturns while crossing a flooded river.

Next oldest to Cash is Darl. He’s the deep one of the bunch, the most thoughtful and also the most rebellious. He will stand up to Anse when the others won’t. He engages in some profound self-reflection.

Jewel comes next. He is Addie’s favorite. She spoiled him. Anse doesn’t know, of course, that Addie had a brief affair with another man and that this other man is Jewel’s father. We know it because Addie tells us.

Dewey Dell is the only girl in the Bundren family. She’s about seventeen. She went a little too far with a boy she knew, and she’s going to have a baby. She keeps it a secret, of course, but she won’t be able to keep it a secret for long. When they get to the town where they’re going to bury her mother, maybe she can get the druggist to “give her something” to “take care of it.” We can only feel for Dewey Dell.

Vardaman is only about eleven, the baby of the family. He’s going to miss his mother.

In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner advanced the technique of “stream of consciousness” writing. Instead of an omniscient narrator, each chapter is told in the first-person voice of a different character. As I Lay Dying is my favorite Faulkner novel. I’ve read it three times over the years. It is number 35 on the Modern Library’s list of the Hundred Greatest Books in English of the Twentieth Century. Every writer wishes he could write a novel as good.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp