As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is consistently ranked among the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the book tells of the hapless and tormented Bundren family. Addie, the long-suffering matriarch, is lying on her deathbed, tended by her daughter, Dewey Dell. Outside, her son Cash is crafting the coffin she will soon need.

The novel tells not only of Addie’s death but of the family’s arduous trek thirty miles away to bury her among her ancestors in accordance with her wishes. The journey, by wagon, takes them over a flooding bridge, where the coffin containing Addie’s unembalmed body is nearly washed away.

Faulkner, telling the story through the stereoscopic view of fifteen different characters, paints a starkly beautiful portrait not only of a family’s confrontation with death but their twisted and ambivalent relations with one another: Anse, the shiftless and selfish father; the oldest son, Darl, tormented by love for a mother that is not reciprocated; the second son, Jewel, favored by Addie but who does not love her; Dewey Dell, the pregnant unwed teen; and the youngest, Vardaman, who views the panoply with the naive but acute perception of a little boy.

The title comes from a line in Homer’s Odyssey that is spoken by Agamemnon in the underworld: “As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”

Published in 1930, As I Lay Dying marks the beginning of Faulkner’s mature period, which includes Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom! Absalom! and solidifies his position as what many consider to be the greatest American author of the twentieth century. Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, called him “the greatest artist the South has produced.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. In his famous acceptance speech, he said, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”