As I Lay Dying is a novel by William Faulkner that explores the Bundren family's journey to bury their matriarch, Addie Bundren, in Jefferson, Mississippi. The narrative unfolds through the perspectives of multiple characters, revealing their inner thoughts and conflicts as they face physical and emotional challenges. Themes of death, identity, and the struggle for meaning permeate the text, making it a profound examination of human experience. This edition is essential for students and literature enthusiasts studying Southern Gothic literature and Faulkner's unique narrative style.

Key Points

  • Explores the Bundren family's journey to bury Addie Bundren in Jefferson, Mississippi.
  • Features multiple character perspectives, revealing their inner thoughts and conflicts.
  • Examines themes of death, identity, and the search for meaning in human experience.
  • Essential reading for students of Southern Gothic literature and Faulkner's narrative style.
newtopiccyclegrowin
90 pages
Arts and Humanities
newtopiccyclegrowin
90 pages
Arts and Humanities
106
/ 90
AS I LAY DYING
TO
Hal Smith
Copyright 1930, and renewed 1957, by William Faulkner
Darl
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although
I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see
Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.
The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked
brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid-by cotton, to the cottonhouse
in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four
soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading
precision.
The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long
fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and
shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite
walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When we reach it I turn and follow
the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking
straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring
straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the
floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in
patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single
stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around
the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on
up the path toward the foot of the bluff.
Tull's wagon stands beside the spring, hitched to the rail, the reins
wrapped about the seat stanchion. In the wagon bed are two chairs. Jewel stops
at the spring and takes the gourd from the willow branch and drinks. I pass him
and mount the path, beginning to hear Cash's saw.
When I reach the top he has quit sawing. Standing in a litter of chips, he
is fitting two of the boards together. Between the shadow spaces they are yellow
as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks
of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the
trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and
squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A
good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, better box to lie in.
It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the
Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.
of the adze.
Cora
So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday. The cakes turned out right well. We
depend a lot on our chickens. They are good layers, what few we have left after
the possums and such. Snakes too, in the summer. A snake will break up a henhouse
quicker than anything. So after they were going to cost so much more than
Mr Tull thought, and after I promised that the difference in the number of eggs
would make it up, I had to be more careful than ever because it was on my final
say-so we took them. We could have stocked cheaper chickens, but I gave my
promise as Miss Lawington said when she advised me to get a good breed, because
Mr Tull himself admits that a good breed of cows or hogs pays in the long run.
So when we lost so many of them we couldn't afford to use the eggs ourselves,
because I could not have had Mr Tull chide me when it was on my say-so we took
them. So when Miss Lawington told me about the cakes I thought that I could bake
them and earn enough, at one time to increase the net value of the flock the
equivalent of two head. And that by saving the eggs out one at a time, even the
eggs wouldn't be costing anything. And that week they laid so well that I not
only saved out enough eggs above what we had engaged to sell, to bake the cakes
with, I had saved enough so that the flour and the sugar and the stove wood
would not be costing anything. So I baked yesterday, more careful than ever I
baked in my life, and the cakes turned out right well. But when we got to town
this morning Miss Lawington told me the lady had changed her mind and was not
going to have the party after all.
"She ought to taken those cakes anyway," Kate says.
"Well," I say, "I reckon she never had no use for them now."
"She ought to taken them," Kate says. "But those rich town ladies can
change their minds. Poor folks cant."
Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
"Maybe I can sell them at the bazaar Saturday," I say. They turned out real
well.
"You cant get two dollars a piece for them," Kate says.
"Well, it isn't like they cost me anything," I say. I saved them out and
swapped a dozen of them for the sugar and flour. It isn't like the cakes cost me
anything, as Mr Tull himself realises that the eggs I saved were over and beyond
what we had engaged to sell, so it was like we had found the eggs or they had
been given to us.
"She ought to taken those cakes when she same as gave you her word," Kate
says. The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His will that some folks has
different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His
decree.
"I reckon she never had any use for them," I say. They turned out real
well, too.
The quilt is drawn up to her chin, hot as it is, with only her two hands
and her face outside. She is propped on the pillow, with her head raised so she
can see out the window, and we can hear him every time he takes up the adze or
the saw. If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him.
Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white
lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the
sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and
grace is not upon her.
"They turned out real nice," I say. "But not like the cakes Addie used to
bake." You can see that girl's washing and ironing in the pillow-slip, if ironed
it ever was. Maybe it will reveal her blindness to her, laying there at the
mercy and the ministration of four men and a tom-boy girl. "There's not a woman
in this section could ever bake with Addie Bundren," I say. "First thing we know
she'll be up and baking again, and then we wont have any sale for ours at all."
Under the quilt she makes no more of a hump than a rail would, and the only way
you can tell she is breathing is by the sound of the mattress shucks. Even the
hair, at her cheek does not move, even with that girl standing right over her,
fanning her with the fan. While we watch she swaps the fan to the other hand
without stopping it.
"Is she sleeping?" Kate whispers.
"She's just watching Cash yonder," the girl says. We can hear the saw in
the board. It sounds like snoring. Eula turns on the trunk and looks out the
window. Her necklace looks real nice with her red hat. You wouldn't think it
only cost twenty-five cents.
"She ought to taken those cakes," Kate says.
I could have used the money real well. But it's not like they cost me
anything except the baking. I can tell him that anybody is likely to make a
miscue, but it's not all of them that can get out of it without loss, I can tell
him. It's not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him.
Someone comes through the hall. It is Darl. He does not look in as he
passes the door. Eula watches him as he goes on and passes from sight again
toward the back. Her hand rises and touches her beads lightly, and then her
hair. When she finds me watching her, her eyes go blank.
Darl
Pa and Vernon are sitting on the back porch. Pa is tilting snuff from the lid of
his snuff-box into his lower lip, holding the lip outdrawn between thumb and
finger. They look around as I cross the porch and dip the gourd into the water
bucket and drink.
"Where's Jewel?" pa says. When I was a boy I first learned how much better
water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a
faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least
six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal.
And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall,
waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the
bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a
round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I
could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or
two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older. Then I would wait until they
all went to sleep so I could lie with my shirt-tail up, hearing them asleep,
feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my
parts and wondering if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too, had been
doing it perhaps for the last two years before I could have wanted to or could
have.
Pa's feet are badly splayed, his toes cramped and bent and warped, with no
toenail at all on his little toes, from working so hard in the wet in homemade
shoes when he was a boy. Beside his chair his brogans sit. They look as though
they had been hacked with a blunt axe out of pig-iron. Vernon has been to town.
I have never seen him go to town in overalls. His wife, they say. She taught
school too, once.
I fling the dipper dregs to the ground and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. It
is going to rain before morning. Maybe before dark. "Down to the barn," I say.
"Harnessing the team."
Down there fooling with that horse. He will go on through the barn, into
the pasture. The horse will not be in sight: he is up there among the pine
seedlings, in the cool. Jewel whistles, once and shrill. The horse snorts, then
Jewel sees him, glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows. Jewel
whistles again; the horse comes dropping down the slope, stiff-legged, his ears
cocking and flicking, his mis-matched eyes rolling, and fetches up twenty feet
/ 90
End of Document
106

You May Also Like

FAQs

What is the main conflict in As I Lay Dying?
The main conflict in As I Lay Dying revolves around the Bundren family's struggle to fulfill Addie Bundren's dying wish to be buried in Jefferson. This journey is fraught with physical obstacles, such as flooded roads and the death of their mules, as well as emotional turmoil among family members. Each character grapples with their own motivations, desires, and resentments, leading to a complex interplay of relationships that drives the narrative forward. The family's journey becomes a metaphor for their individual struggles with identity, duty, and the inevitability of death.
Who are the key characters in As I Lay Dying?
Key characters in As I Lay Dying include Darl Bundren, the introspective and sensitive son who often serves as the narrator; Jewel Bundren, the fiercely independent and passionate son; and Addie Bundren, the matriarch whose death prompts the family's journey. Other significant characters include Cash, the practical and skilled carpenter son; Dewey Dell, the daughter who faces her own struggles with womanhood; and Anse Bundren, the self-centered father whose motivations often conflict with the family's needs. Each character's unique perspective adds depth to the story, highlighting their individual conflicts and relationships.
What themes are explored in As I Lay Dying?
As I Lay Dying explores several profound themes, including the nature of death and the human experience of grief. The struggle for identity is central, as characters confront their roles within the family and society. The novel also delves into the complexities of communication and misunderstanding, as characters often fail to connect with one another despite their shared experiences. Additionally, the theme of isolation is prevalent, reflecting the characters' emotional distances from each other and their environments. Faulkner's use of stream-of-consciousness narration further emphasizes these themes, allowing readers to experience the characters' inner thoughts and conflicts.
How does Faulkner's narrative style impact the story?
Faulkner's narrative style in As I Lay Dying employs multiple perspectives and stream-of-consciousness techniques, which significantly impact the storytelling. Each character's voice provides unique insights into their thoughts, emotions, and motivations, creating a rich tapestry of experiences that contribute to the overall narrative. This approach allows readers to understand the complexities of family dynamics and individual struggles, as characters grapple with their identities and relationships. The fragmented structure mirrors the chaos of their journey, enhancing the themes of disconnection and isolation. Faulkner's innovative style challenges traditional storytelling, making the novel a landmark in American literature.

Related