As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A short introduction to his most accessible Southern Gothic novel.
William Faulkner has been called the father of Southern Gothic because his literary vision tends to depict the decaying south as grotesque and morbid.
In his acclaimed novel, As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s writing takes an experimental approach to explore themes of southern poverty, personal selfishness, familial neglect, loyalty, betrayal, and the burdens that death places on the living using his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi as a microcosm of the American South.
The novel takes its title from Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus descends to Hades to inquire of Teiresias, the blind prophet, and encounters, among others, King Agamemnon. Agamemnon recounts to Odysseus his evil homecoming in which Clytemnestra and her adulterous lover, Aigisthos, ambushed and murdered him upon his arrival:
I heard Priam’s daughter Cassandra scream as Clytemnestra killed her close beside me. I lay dying upon the earth with the sword in my body, and raised my hands to kill the slut of a murderess, but she slipped away from me; she would not even close my lips nor my eyes when I was dying, for there is nothing in this world so cruel and so shameless as a woman when she has fallen into such guilt as hers was. Fancy murdering her own husband! I thought I was going to be welcomed home by my children and my servants, but her abominable crime has brought disgrace on herself and all women who shall come after - even on the good ones.’1
Agamemnon’s account of his death relays deep familial betrayal and high treason: The King is murdered by his wife with the help of her lover, and by way of his murderous death, deposed from his throne.
But close readers of Homer will note that Agamemnon is not exactly innocent. He has not only returned with a concubine prize, King Priam’s daughter, Cassandra, but he sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, twenty years earlier in order to gain winds for his ships to sail for Troy. We also know from other sources that house of Atreus is cursed—nothing short of a dysfunctional catastrophe and a grotesque tragedy.
Interestingly, the specific line Faulkner appears to be drawing from reveals something even deeper than mere betrayal and loss, if one can imagine it. By refusing to fulfill the rituals of caring for the deceased’s body (i.e., closing Agamemnon’s mouth and eyes), Clytemnestra adds cruelty to her treachery.
Such cruelty and betrayal resonates deeply with the themes in As I Lay Dying, particularly the Bundren family’s dysfunctional relationships as they are revealed through their struggle to honor Addie Bundren’s dying wish to be buried with her own blood in Jefferson. Like the house of Atreus, the house of Bundren appears to be cursed and their absurd journey is nothing short of a grotesque tragedy of epic proportions.
Because Faulkner is a literary modernist in the vein of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, his writing style here and in his other novels, naturally breaks from the traditional narrative method.
His streams of consciousness approach is a kind of dark impressionism. Rather than follow the story as it unfolds in manifest detail, the reader must feel his way through it, the way one drives a car through the thick fog on a dark night. Because the headlamps refract the light over against the fog, visibility is reduced to mere feet, offering only fleeting glimpses of the winding road ahead. Thus, the reader must proceed slowly and attentively, relying on sensory perceptions to intuit his way through the complexity of Faulkner’s Southern grotesques: familial wisdom and foolishness, guilt and violence, psychological trauma, moral corruption, and existential dread.
For a visual analogy, one might compare this novel to a Baroque painting rendered through a Cubist lens—rich in detail, darkly dramatic, yet fractured and experimental in its execution. It’s as if the reader is compelled to view the story cinematically, through his mind’s eyes, using a proverbial kaleidoscope of fleeting moments, fragmented perceptions, and the subjective experiences of 15 different unreliable narrators.
In a subsequent post, I’ll unpack some of the themes and symbols in As I Lay Dying and offer a more detailed analysis of Faulkner’s most accessible work. But for now, I’ll leave off with this narrator list that I borrowed from Cliff Notes and modified slightly:
Addie Bundren - The dying mother, who has ordered her coffin to be built under her window and who has extracted a promise from her family that they will take her to Jefferson to bury her.
Anse Bundren - Her bumbling and ineffectual husband, who is anxious to take Addie to Jefferson so he can get some false teeth.
Cash - Their oldest son, who is the carpenter and who builds the coffin for Addie. He is about twenty-nine.
Darl - The second son, about twenty-eight. He is the son most given to introspection and thought but also goes mad.
Jewel - The violent son, who owns the horse and who is ten years younger than Darl.
Dewey Dell - The sixteen-year-old, unmarried daughter who has a secret.
Vardaman - The youngest son. His age is never given. He believes his mother is a fish.
Vernon Tull - The helpful neighbor who has helped Anse so long that he can't quit now.
Cora - Tull’s self-righteous wife, who spews forth religious axioms every chance she gets.
Peabody - The town doctor, who weighs over two hundred pounds.
Samson - The neighbor where the Bundrens spend the first night of the journey.
Armstid - Another country farmer who helps the Bundrens during the journey.
Whitfield - The preacher who conducts Addie's funeral.
Moseley - The ethical druggist in a small town who is indignant at Dewey Dell's request.
MacGowan - An unethical druggist's assistant who deceives Dewey Dell.
Homer, The Odyssey. Rendered into English Prose for the Use of Those Who Cannot Read the Original., ed. Samuel Butler (Medford, MA: A. C. Fifield, London, 1900).