Published
in 1930, As I Lay Dying
uses thirteen
narrators to explore the many voices found in a
Southern family and community.
In this particular novel, Addie Bundren, the wife
and mother to a poor white farm family, is on her
deathbed. Friends and family members gather to help
ease her pain and to prepare for
her funeral. She is a proud, bitter woman who is
ready to die. She feels her husband is worthless,
her neighbors overly-religious and annoying, and of
all her children, she only loves her son Jewel. As
her last wish, she requests that her husband bury
her among her family in the town of Jefferson. And
so, upon her death, her family, for
the most part begrudgingly, follows through with
her wish. We hear from everyone involved in the
journey, including Addie from the grave—a testament
to Faulkner’s creation of an environment so
believable that such outrageousness is allowed. The
humor is dark. You might not expect to laugh at the
image of a dead women’s corpse falling from a casket
into a river—but you will.
Faulkner used multiple narratives, each with his or
her own interests and biases, to create a puzzle
that readers could piece together the 'true'
circumstances of the story.
The conclusion presents a key to understanding the
background to the central event in a way that
traditional linear narratives simply cannot
accomplish. With that said, in As I Lay Dying,
all of the narrators are believable, even Addie who
is dead when we hear from her. This method of
narration greatly effects how you encounter the
story since a character speaking from his own
point-of-view creates a limited but intimate
perspective while an omniscient narrator often gives
the impression of authorial investment and
oversight, yet maintains a distance from the
characters.
The most brilliant aspect of this novel is how
Faulkner carefully weaves bits and pieces from the
many narrative voices, thereby creating a rich
tapestry of often conflicting and competing
perspectives. With this complex technique,
seamlessly accomplished, we are forced to analyze
the information and come to our own understanding.
“And so I took Anse. And when I knew that I had
Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this
was the answer to it. That was when I learned that
words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even
what they are trying to say at. When he was born I
knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had
to have a word for it because the ones that had the
children didn’t care whether there was a word for it
or not I knew that fear was invented by someone
that had never had the fear; pride who never had
pride. I knew that it had been not that they had
dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another
by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from
a bean, swinging and twisting and never touching,
and that only through the blows of the switch could
my blood and their blood flow as one stream. I knew
that it had been, not that my aloneness had to be
violated over and over each day, but that it had
never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had
been used to words for a long time. I knew that that
word was like the others: just a shape to fill a
lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t
need a word for that anymore than for pride or
fear.”
