William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers of Southern literature in the US. His novel, As I Lay Dying, published in 1930, which he claimed to have written in six weeks without changing a word of it, is ranked among the best novels of 20th century literature.
The novel is known for its consciousness and writing technique with multiple narrators, each with their own interests and biases and their inner psychological voices, and embarks on the process of seeking out the nature of man. The story is set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and is narrated by 15 different characters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to honour her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson, many summer miles away, near her relatives as opposed to her home county. She is on her deathbed while her friends and family members gather to help ease her pain and to prepare for her funeral. Upon her death, her family follows through with her wish.
At the start of the novel, Darl Bundren introduces the readers to his brothers Cash and Jewel, and their dying mother. Jewel is reserved and introverted, Cash is a skilled carpenter, obsessively building his mother the most perfect coffin ever. The other characters include Anse their father, Vardaman their youngest brother, Dewey Dell their only sister and Vernon and Cora Tull, their wealthy neighbours. As Addie lays dying, Jewel and Darl embark on a trip for Vernon for which they will earn three dollars. They hope to return before she dies — they do not.
Meanwhile, a narrative section from Addie (who is dead) looks at her past whereas she does not really like her worthless husband, her life and the children, except for Jewel, who has a liking for horses and is the illegitimate child of the minister, Whitfield. Her daughter Dewey Dell is unmarried and pregnant, After Addie’s death, the poverty-stricken family embarks on a long and difficult journey while the youngest son, Vardaman is traumatised by his mother’s death and believes that she is just like the fish he caught and killed just before her death.
As the bad weather had devastated the bridge they need to cross, they try to cross the river due to which the mules drown and the coffin is almost lost. The humour is dark as one might not expect to laugh at the image of a dead woman’s corpse falling from a casket into a river. In the incident, Cash breaks his leg, which is cast in cement by his father to heal the break but is eventually hopelessly destroyed by the cement cast: “Seems like it ain’t no end to bad luck when once it starts.”
The father mortgages everything he owns and even sells Jewel’s special horse to buy a new team of mules. When the family rests for the night at a farm, Darl burns the barn down in an attempt to cremate his mother, wondering why anyone would go through all that trouble when they have encountered nothing but obstacles from the moment of their departure. The coffin is rescued by Jewel. While there is sympathy for the family in the early stages of the journey, this diminishes as they transcend their dusty and empty depression.
The journey takes so long that Addie’s decomposing body begins to stink. Finally, when the family arrives in Jefferson, the father helps his pregnant daughter get a real abortion, who was seen wrapped up in her own trials rather than the fact that her mother recently passed away, as she is intent on obtaining medication that will cause her to abort her baby. The father buys himself a new set of teeth while sending his son Darl to an insane asylum for his burning down the farm. Here the reader is made to think about the difference between sanity and insanity when Faulkner writes: “Sometimes I ain’t so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain’t. Sometimes I think it ain’t none of us pure crazy and ain’t none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.” Finally, Anse borrows shovels to bury Addie’s body while flirting with the woman who lends them to him. In the end, he introduces the woman to his children as the new Mrs Bundren.
The astonishing aspect of the novel is its subtle questioning of life and existence and how the writer carefully weaves bits and pieces from many narrative voices, thus creating a rich tapestry of often conflicting and competing perspectives by forcing the readers to analyse the information and come to their own understanding. The reader gets inside the mind of each character. Overall, the book is a dark comedy full of horror and compassion — simple and complex at the same time.
The reviewer is a social activist. He can be reached at [email protected]