This novel, with its experimental narrative structure and multiple perspectives, delves deep into the human psyche, exploring themes of death, family, and existential despair.
By examining the unique narrative techniques, rich symbolism, and complex characterizations that define this novel, we can begin to understand why As I Lay Dying has left an indelible mark on American literature and continues to captivate readers and scholars alike.
For fans of mystery and suspense, And Then There Were None offers a deep dive into Agatha Christie’s masterful use of plot twists and psychological tension. And for those who appreciate classical literature, our article on Don Quixote unpacks the enduring relevance of Cervantes’ satirical masterpiece and its commentary on idealism and reality.
Table of Contents
- Background
- Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Literary Technique
- Historical and Social Context
- The Latest Adaptation of As I Lay Dying
- William Faulkner
BACKGROUND
Although it achieved little commercial success at the time of its publication, As I Lay Dying has become one of William Faulkner’s most popular novels.
Many were put off at first by its controversial subject matter and confusing style, but commentators and readers have come to appreciate the novel’s vivid characters, elusive tone, and complex narrative techniques.
As I Lay Dying chronicles the death of Addie Bundren and the subsequent journey to bury her corpse in her family cemetery several miles away. This darkly comic tale of disaster is enriched by Faulkner’s innovative narrative technique, which features narration by 15 characters, including a confused child and the dead woman, Addie.
In addition, Faulkner mixes vernacular speech with stream-of-consciousness passages to enhance this unique narrative style.
Through his characterization, Faulkner challenges stereotypical perceptions of poor Southerners. For instance, characters contemplate issues of love, death, identity, and the limitations of language. Their actions and adventures draw attention to rural life, class conflicts, and the repercussions of desire and selfishness.
Significantly, Faulkner explores the potent, complex workings of the human mind. Difficult to categorize, As I Lay Dying has provided a rewarding, illuminating, and, at times, unsettling experience for generations of readers.
PLOT SUMMARY
As I Lay Dying chronicles the dark, comic story of a Mississippi family’s long and arduous journey to bury Addie, the family matriarch. Respecting Addie’s request to be buried in her family cemetery in Jefferson, Anse Bundren and his five children disregard the advice of friends and neighbours and embark on a 40-mile, nine-day trek in the wake of a devastating storm.
The story of the journey is presented by a variety of narrators: family members, friends, acquaintances, and objective onlookers. Each narrator provides a different perspective on individuals and events.
As the novel begins, Addie is on her deathbed. Outside her bedroom window, Cash slowly and meticulously builds her coffin. On the front porch, Jewel and Darl confer with their father about taking a last-minute job to make a bit of money.
Anse reminds his sons of his promise to their mother but agrees to let them go, even though he knows that Addie may die before they return.
When Peabody, the local doctor, is finally summoned to the Bundren home, he predicts that it will be too late to do anything for Addie. Sure enough, she dies shortly after Peabody’s arrival at the Bundren farm. After sending Dewey Dell away to prepare supper, Anse stands over his dead wife, listens to the sound of Cash’s saw as he works on the coffin, and says: “God’s will be done. Now I can get them teeth.”
Cash finishes the coffin later that night in the pouring rain. Addie is kept in the coffin for three days before Darl and Jewel return home with the wagon. On the first day, the family wakes to find that Vardaman has drilled the top of the coffin full of holes—two of which bored straight through Addie’s face.
By the time the family finally gets the coffin on the wagon, the bridge to town has been washed away by heavy rains, adding several days to their journey.
Jewel, refusing to travel with the family, follows some distance behind on his beloved horse.
Just before sunset they complete the first eight miles of their journey. They spend the night in a neighbour’s barn and start off again early the next morning, trying to find a bridge that has not been completely destroyed by the recent storm. They finally find one near Vernon Tull’s farm.
After consideration, it is decided that Anse, Dewey Dell, Vardaman, and Vernon Tull will walk across the remains of the bridge and that Cash and Darl will lead the wagon across the river at the ford. Jewel crosses ahead of them on his horse. Halfway across the bridge, the wagon is hit by a floating log and is dragged off by the current. The wagon and Addie’s coffin are recovered, but the mules drown and Cash breaks his leg.
The narrative action pauses as Addie narrates a section in the novel. She describes her youth, her miserable life as a schoolteacher, and her decision to marry Anse. Her marriage has been an unhappy one.
After giving birth to Cash, she suffered from depression; after giving birth to her second son, Darl, she makes Anse promise to bury her in Jefferson when she dies. Her revenge, she says, would be that Anse would never know that she was taking revenge. Addie also reveals her secret affair with Reverend Whitfield—a union that produced Addie’s favourite child, Jewel.
After the disastrous river crossing, the Bundrens spend the night at Armstid’s farm. In the morning, Anse rides off on Jewel’s horse to purchase a team of mules. During his absence, the heat intensifies the already putrid stench of Addie’s corpse. Outraged, Lula Armstid thinks Anse “should be lawed for treating [Addie] so.”
When Anse finally returns, he announces that he has traded Jewel’s horse for a team of mules. The family’s journey resumes the next morning with Cash lying on a pallet placed atop Addie’s coffin.
Like Anse, Dewey Dell has personal reasons for wanting to go to town. She is pregnant and her boyfriend, Lafe, has told her that she would be able to “get something at the drugstore” to induce an abortion. When the procession passes through the town of Mottson, Dewey Dell speaks to the pharmacist but is told that she will not get what she wants in his store.
Meanwhile, Darl buys cement for Cash’s leg at a hardware store. Anse, waiting outside in the wagon, is told by the town marshal that he will have to leave town. After eight days in the stifling heat, Addie’s body is endangering the public health.
The family leaves town, stopping briefly to apply fresh cement to Cash’s broken leg. Jewel, who disappeared after Anse traded his horse, reappears and rejoins the family.
They spend the last night of their journey on a farm belonging to Mr Gillespie. During the night, Darl sets fire to the barn and Jewel’s back is burned rescuing the coffin from the flames.
When Gillespie discovers that it was Darl who started the fire, he threatens to sue unless Darl is committed to the mental institution in Jackson. Cash thinks that Darl “done right in a way”, trying to get Addie “outen our hands”, but decides that it does not excuse setting fire to a man’s barn and endangering his property.
As they arrive in Jefferson the next day, Anse finally concedes that they will have to find a doctor for Cash’s infected leg. But first, they bury Addie.
Anse borrows a couple of spades on the way to the cemetery and—nine days after Addie’s death—finally lays his wife to rest in her family plot. As they leave the cemetery, Darl is jumped by Dewey Dell and Jewel and handed over to the men waiting to take him to the mental institution in Jackson.
When Cash finally gets to the doctor, Peabody cannot believe that Anse treated his son’s broken leg with raw cement. Shocked at the damage they have done to him, the doctor wonders why Anse simply did not bring Cash to the nearest sawmill and stick his leg in the saw.
Meanwhile, Dewey Dell finds another pharmacy. After requesting something that will terminate her pregnancy, she is given a box of useless capsules by the pharmacy assistant. The deceitful shop assistant proceeds to seduce her. The next morning, Anse disappears only to reappear with a new set of teeth and a new Mrs Bundren—a local woman who loaned him the tools to bury Addie.
CHARACTERS
A. Vernon Tull
Tull is the farmer who lives closest to the Bundrens.
A thrifty, hardworking man, he is very successful as a farmer. He helps Cash build the coffin, tries to guide the family across the flooded river, and retrieves Cash’s tools from the water.
He feels especially drawn to Vardaman, and his interest in the boy may result from his own lack of a son.
B. Armstid
A local farmer, Armstid provides shelter for the Bundren family after their disastrous river crossing. He makes cryptic comments on the treatment of Cash’s injury, the deal Anse strikes for the mule team, and the rotting smell coming from the coffin.
C. Gillespie
Gillespie is a farmer who allows the Bundrens to stay on his farm during their journey. Darl burns down his barn in an attempt to destroy Addie’s coffin and end the humiliating journey.
D. Skeet Macgowan
Macgowan is a pharmacy sales assistant in Jefferson. He cons Dewey Dell, giving her fake abortion pills. He seduces her in the cellar of the store.
E. Moseley
Moseley is a pharmacy owner in Mottson. A religious man, he refuses to sell abortion drugs to Dewey Dell and condemns her for trying to purchase them.
F Dr Peabody
Dr Peabody tends to Addie on her deathbed. The help he can give is limited, however, because Anse sends for him too late. He comments on the family’s behaviour from an objective perspective.
He views the family as proud, but slovenly and ignorant. In Jefferson, Peabody tries to fix the damage done to Cash’s leg.
G. Samson
Samson is a farmer who offers shelter to the Bundren family before they try to cross the river. He unfavourably comments on their refusal to accept his hospitality.
H. Rachel Samson
Rachel Samson is Samson’s wife. She expresses outrage at the handling of Addie’s body and relates it to the treatment of all women.
I. Cora Tull
Cora is Vernon Tull’s wife. She narrates many of the early chapters in the book, offering her perspective on the Bundrens. Throughout the chapters she narrates, her judgments are almost always self-serving and wrong, often comically so.
J. Reverend Whitfield
A local preacher, Reverend Whitfield had an affair with Addie in their youth; in fact, he is Jewel’s father. He has never admitted the affair to anyone. He visits Addie on the night she dies, supposedly to reveal the affair to the Bundren family. When Addie dies, he believes that he has been absolved of his sin by God and remains silent.
K. Addie Bundren
The family matriarch, Addie is Anse’s wife and the mother of the Bundren children. She dies early in the book from a lingering illness and the action of the novel revolves around transporting her body to her family cemetery. As a young woman, Addie was a schoolteacher in Jefferson.
To escape this life, she married Anse, a local farmer. She was happy when she gave birth to her eldest son Cash; but with her next child, Darl, she began to resent her situation.
Years into her marriage, she had a passionate affair with the Reverend Whitfield. During the affair, she became pregnant with Jewel, her favourite child. She had two more children—Dewey Dell and Vardaman—more out of obligation than anything else.
Considering Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman products of an unhappy time, she does not feel affection for them; instead, she favours Cash and Jewel.
L. Anse Bundren
Anse is the patriarch of the Bundren family. A selfish and lazy man, he claims sweat will kill him, and therefore refuses to work. Instead, he connives to get others to work for him. Physically, he is hunchbacked, and his hands are gnarled.
Though his wife is dying, he allows Darl and Jewel to leave her deathbed in order to work. He considers himself to be a right-thinking, hard-working man who is victimized by God. In what first seems to be a selfless move, he pushes for the journey to bury Addie at her family cemetery. Later his true motive is revealed: to buy a set of false teeth in Jefferson.
When the family’s mules die in the flooded river, he steals Cash’s money and barters away Jewel’s beloved horse to obtain new mules.
During the trip, he scrimps on money wherever possible, even borrowing shovels to bury his wife. While in Jefferson, he takes Dewey Dell’s money, buys false teeth, and secretly woos a local woman. He ends the novel with his new teeth, introducing his new wife to his surprised children.
M. Cash Bundren
The oldest son of Anse and Addie, Cash is a carpenter of extraordinary precision and skill. As his mother is dying, he carefully builds her coffin, holding up each board for her inspection. He even decides to bevel the edges, despite the extra work it requires.
When the Bundrens try to cross the flooded river, Cash is knocked out of the wagon and suffers a severely broken leg. After the bone is reset, he rides for three days on top of the coffin before the family buys cement to cover the leg.
However, they apply the cement directly to his skin, which causes a horrible infection. Despite intense pain, Cash remains stoical. When the doctor removes the concrete from his leg, Cash loses over 60 inches of skin along with it.
While in Jefferson, Cash is torn by the decision to commit Darl to an insane asylum. On the one hand, he feels empathy for his brother; on the other hand, he recognizes that a man cannot simply burn down another man’s hard-earned property. He eventually agrees with the decision to commit him.
N. Darl Bundren
The second of the Bundren children, Darl is a veteran of World War I. He narrates more sections of the book than any other character. He is profoundly jealous of Addie’s obvious preference for Jewel, and throughout the book, he scrutinizes and often goads his brother. He even connives to separate Jewel from Addie when she is dying by volunteering both himself and Jewel to haul timber. While on this trip, a wagon wheel breaks.
As Jewel tries to fix the wheel, Darl narrates his mother’s death for the reader and informs Jewel of her death. This form of “second sight”, or telepathy, also manifests itself in his knowledge of Dewey Dell’s pregnancy.
Darl participates in the journey to Jefferson, but he is never committed to it.
Embarrassed by his family and the experience of dragging his mother’s corpse all over the county, he burns down Gillespie’s barn with Addie’s coffin inside. For this act, he is committed to the insane asylum in Jackson. He ends the novel on a train, laughing and talking about himself in the third person.
O. Dewey Dell Bundren
Seventeen years old, Dewey Dell is the only daughter of the Bundren family.
Like Darl and Vardaman, she feels rejected by her mother, Addie. She resents and fears Darl because he knows about her pregnancy. She desperately wants to go to Jefferson so that she can obtain “medicine” to illegally abort the pregnancy. Her first fumbling attempt to acquire the medicine fails when the pharmacist Mosely refuses to give it to her.
While she is in Jefferson, Anse steals her money. To make matters worse, a sleazy pharmacy shop assistant, Skeet Macgowan, gives her worthless pills filled with talcum powder. He then seduces her. After Addie’s burial, Dewey Dell is strongly in favour of committing Darl to the mental institution.
P. Jewel Bundren
Jewel, in his late teens, is Addie’s third son and her favourite child. The product of her affair with Reverend Whitfield, Jewel does not know his true paternity.
After a lifetime of being her favourite, he loves his mother fiercely and feels a strong devotion to her.
Described as tall and wooden in appearance, Jewel is a reticent young man. When he does talk, he usually curses, exhibiting a persistent rage. His favourite possession is his horse, which he bought by working nights for several months.
The horse is as fierce as Jewel, and they engage in battles that exhibit both Jewel’s tendency to violence and his intense love. He loses the horse on the third day of the journey when Anse trades it for a new team of mules. The act of giving up his horse is one indication that Jewel is the family member most committed to fulfilling Addie’s wish to be buried in Jefferson.
In addition to this sacrifice, he helps retrieve his mother’s coffin when it is thrown from the wagon during the river crossing. He also saves the coffin single-handedly from Gillespie’s burning barn, suffering many burns as a result. Like Dewey Dell, he is in favour of committing Darl to the mental institution.
Q. Mrs Bundren
Mrs Bundren is Anse’s second wife. A “duckshaped” woman with “hardlooking pop eyes”, she marries Anse after he woos her in Jefferson.
R. Vardaman Bundren
Vardaman is the youngest Bundren child. He cannot fully comprehend the reality of his mother’s death.
At first, he blames Dr Peabody for taking her away and releases Peabody’s horse team in revenge. Then, he believes that Addie is not dead but has mutated into a fish. He drills holes in her coffin to give her air, mutilating her face. Later in the novel, because of his belief that Addie has turned into a fish, he is filled with fear and excitement when her coffin falls into the river.
He runs along the bank, yelling for Darl to catch her so that she will not escape, a thought he cannot bear.
Vardaman grows closer to Darl during the trip. At the end of the novel, he sees his brother set fire to Gillespie’s barn, which disappoints him. He struggles to understand Darl’s insanity and feels the loss when his brother is taken away to the mental institution in Jackson.
THEMES
A. Alienation and Loneliness
Faulkner’s use of multiple narrators underscores one of his primary themes: every character is essentially isolated from the others.
Moreover, the characters in the novel do not communicate effectively with one another. Although the reader is privy to the characters’ thoughts and emotional responses, none of the characters adequately expresses their dilemmas or desires to others.
Outside of Darl, who knows Addie’s and Dewey Dell’s secrets through intuition, the characters can only guess at the motivations, beliefs, and feelings of others. When these guesses turn out to be wrong, misunderstandings ensue.
As a result of their communication problems, members of the Bundren family live alienated from each other—whether willfully (like Addie or Jewel), unknowingly (like Anse, Cash, Dewey Dell, or Vardaman), or painfully (like Darl). This alienation extends to neighbours, who misinterpret or simply cannot fathom the family’s actions.
The more sensitive characters, especially Addie and Darl, recognize their alienation from others. In particular, Addie is a striking example of someone who both longs to transcend this isolation and stubbornly works to maintain an impenetrable individuality.
As a schoolteacher, she would whip the children in order to overcome the barriers between her and others: “I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.” One can also see her selfishness here, however, as she violently imposes herself onto others without opening herself up to them.
Similarly, she holds back from her children, except for Cash and her favourite, Jewel. Her contradictions highlight the fundamental compulsion to maintain one’s private self while yearning to connect with others.
B. Death
In a novel that features a disastrous journey to bury a decomposing corpse, one would expect death to be a central concern. Indeed, the outraged reactions of other characters to the journey of the Bundren family reveal both social expectations about the treatment of the dead and underlying anxieties over the basic truths of human mortality.
Moreover, Vardaman’s chapters revolve primarily around defining the nature of death, and his confusion proves both moving and unsettling.
The theme of death also takes other forms in the novel. Through Addie’s narrative, Faulkner investigates the possibility of living in a deadened state. On the one hand, Faulkner makes her “speak” from the dead; on the other hand, however, is Addie’s thwarted desire to live life. The antithesis of her desire is Anse, who, to Addie, is dead and “did not know he was dead”.
To her, Anse symbolizes restriction, blindness, and emptiness. Faulkner explores the implications of such an existence by investigating its potential in all of his characters, particularly those who use platitudes to avoid genuine feelings and self-examination.
C. Identity
Questions about the nature and strength of self-identity recur throughout the novel.
Some characters, such as Anse, Cash, Jewel, and the Tulls, possess a defined sense of self. Yet it is through the characters of Darl and Vardaman that Faulkner explores the fragile nature of identity. Vardaman almost compulsively defines his relationships with others, repeating “Darl is my brother” and, more famously, “My mother is a fish.”
Through these repetitions, Faulkner articulates the development of identity as Vardaman relates to others.
For Vardaman, the process is incomplete but progressing.
For Darl, the process will never reach completion. The absence of his mother’s love leads Darl to isolation not only from others but also from himself. He expresses the differences between himself and Jewel when he says, “I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not.”
In such passages, Darl’s insight proves both compelling and disturbing since it calls into question the very essence of human consciousness.
D. Language and its Meaning
One of Faulkner’s central themes in the novel is the limitation of language.
From the inability of the characters to communicate with one another, to Addie’s singular distrust of words, to the unlikely vocabulary the characters employ in their narration, Faulkner explores the inadequacy of language to express thought and emotion.
Many characters communicate only through platitudes. As a result, they create misunderstanding rather than understanding between people. These instances of ineffective communication are not as comprehensive as Addie’s rejection of language, however. For Addie, words cannot express human experience because they are so distant from it.
Only action matters for her (and for the inarticulate Jewel).
Faulkner also reveals the limitations of language by contrasting the thoughts of his characters with their actual words. In their narratives, the characters often employ vocabulary far beyond their educational level or speech customs. These passages underscore Faulkner’s attempts to verbalize his characters’ groping for meaning and adequate expression. In this way, Faulkner comments on the tenuousness of language itself.
E. Love and Emotion
Love and passion are major themes of the novel. The relationships and destinies of the characters rely heavily on love and intense emotions.
In particular, Addie is defined by passion. Her affair with Whitfield results from genuine feeling, and the rejection of her husband and three of her children is equally intense. Her commitment to Cash and Jewel is fierce and loving.
This love helps them to nurture a strong self-identity, which Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman often lack.
F. Rationality and Irrationality
By chronicling both the Bundrens’ journey and Darl’s descent into madness, Faulkner explores the themes of sanity and insanity.
The fact that the Bundrens would undertake such an arduous journey strikes both the reader and other characters as deranged folly. For most of the Bundrens, however, the trip is perfectly sensible considering their ultimate goals: Anse’s new teeth, Dewey Dell’s abortion, and Jewel’s loyalty to his beloved mother. They may be selfish and blind to social convention, but their desires are understandable, even if they seem misplaced in the current context.
Since all of the narrators hold views that others may consider senseless, evaluations of people’s sanity prove arbitrary in the novel.
Darl’s case is different, however. He exhibits signs of telepathy, burns Gillespie’s barn, is eventually committed to an insane asylum, and ends his final narration in a rant.
Yet Darl is reacting to circumstances beyond his control. He cannot help feeling the lack of his mother’s love, nor can he contain his hypersensitivity to the world. The other characters may remain “sane” simply because they work to maintain their isolation from the world.
Darl may be overwhelmed by knowledge because he cannot, or will not, be blind. Perhaps, as André Bleikasten suggests in his book Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, “From the depths of his own madness, Darl discovers—and makes us discover—the madness of the universe.”
LITERARY TECHNIQUE
A Setting
As I Lay Dying takes place in the northern part of Mississippi in 1928.
The Bundrens must travel 40 miles to bury Addie in Jefferson, the primary town in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The Bundrens live in a time of economic hardship for cotton farmers, who have had to suffer through a depressed cotton market and disastrous heavy rains.
They also lack modern farming equipment and are dependent on animals and their own labour to work the farm.
The modern world exists in Jefferson, however, and the Bundrens often comment on the distinctions between country people and town people. The ethics of the time obligate farm families to house and feed travellers, although the Bundrens refuse such assistance.
Faulkner also depicts a natural environment that is at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile, bringing floods, heat, and intrusive vultures.
B. Perspectives
As I Lay Dying consists of 59 chapters narrated by 15 different characters.
Darl is the most frequent voice, narrating 19 chapters; some characters, like Addie Bundren, Jewel Bundren, and various townspeople, narrate only one chapter. Many chapters appear to unfold as events take place, particularly those narrated by the Bundrens; others relate events that occurred in the past.
At times, Faulkner goes beyond the realm of credible narration, such as when Darl narrates Addie’s death when he is not present and when the deceased Addie recollects her life.
Through these varying perspectives, the reader witnesses both the events that take place and the characters’ individual perceptions of them. Indeed, at times the reader can only discern events by comparing information from various narrators. The reader learns about the assumptions and peculiarities of the different narrators, as well as about their social and religious environment.
As a result, Faulkner constructs not only a rendition of events but also a series of interconnected psychological studies.
C. Stream of Consciousness
“Stream of consciousness” is a literary technique that reproduces a character’s thought processes. These thoughts appear as if they are immediate, unedited responses. Faulkner does not use this technique in all of the chapters, restricting it primarily to the Bundrens, especially Darl and Vardaman.
The stream-of-consciousness passages reveal character and allow for complicated philosophical questioning. They also imply a character’s confusion or distress. A key example occurs when Addie’s coffin falls into the river and Vardaman reacts hysterically: “I ran down into the water to help and I couldn’t stop hollering because Darl was strong and steady holding her under the water even if she did fight he would not let her go he was seeing me and he would hold her and it was all right now it was all right now it was all right.”
Although Faulkner employs paragraph breaks and, in one paragraph, italics, he does not use punctuation until Vardaman speaks to Darl at the end of the chapter. This moment and others in the novel involve the reader in the sometimes perplexing but always engaging world of the characters.
D. Sarcasm
One of the most obvious features of the novel is its humour. One might expect a bleak tone from a story featuring death, a burial procession, abortion, and familial hardship, but Faulkner defies expectation by utilizing comedy, albeit dark comedy.
Faulkner employs a variety of means to achieve this effect. The family journey to bury Addie is absurd in itself, and the dogged determination of the Bundrens often evokes amusement.
Faulkner also uses the characters’ perceptions and faults to generate humour, such as when Anse slithers out of his responsibility for Cash’s broken leg: “‘It’s a trial,’ he says. ‘But I don’t begrudge her [Addie] it.’” Cash’s own understatement can create humour, as well, whether it is his stoic refrain about his leg, “‘It dont bother me none’”, or his recollection of the distance he fell from a roof: “‘Twenty-eight foot, four and half inches, about.’”
Perhaps the most glaring and outrageous comic moment is the ending. After all the family has endured and the losses they have suffered, the selfish, resilient Anse appears with a set of new teeth and a “duckshaped” woman as his new wife. Such episodes make the novel difficult to categorize and greatly enrich its texture and effects.
E. Modernism
Critics often associate Faulkner with literary modernism, a movement that began before World War I and gained prominence during the 1920s. In fact, Faulkner was greatly influenced by two of the most celebrated modernists, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land explored, in both form and content, the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Joyce’s landmark novel Ulysses featured the use of stream of consciousness, which Faulkner also employed in As I Lay Dying.
Modernist writers experimented with language and literary form and were concerned with the limits of expression. Most modernist authors depicted characters grappling with the loss of traditional beliefs after the destructiveness of World War I. These characters are alienated from their past and from other characters, and often suffer from an inability to communicate.
Faulkner’s interest in these practices and themes is obvious, especially in his experiments with narrative perspective, his focus on language and its failures, and his themes of alienation and the destruction of community, including families.
HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT
A Farm Life in the South
Despite efforts to improve technology and farming methods, a farmer’s life during the 1920s involved a constant struggle for survival.
Farming life was restrictive and demanding on both men and women. In fact, farmers often lived on an income of little over 100 dollars a year. Therefore, even families who owned their land relied almost exclusively on themselves to supply both farm labour and basic necessities.
Some would hire additional help during harvesting season, yet this expense could prove burdensome as well.
One can see, therefore, that Darl and Jewel earning three dollars to haul wood was a good wage, and purchases of luxuries like false teeth and bananas were rare. In essence, a farm family’s land, labour, livestock, and equipment were its only assets. To lose any of them could prove disastrous, a fact that underscores the impact of Darl’s decision to burn Gillespie’s barn.
According to scholars of Southern culture, two belief systems provided many Southerners with pride and a sense of purpose: religious conviction and racism. Religion in this community was a potent emotional and psychological force, and a person’s relationship with God provided him or her with a set of values, activities, and friends.
Many critics contend that poor whites used religious beliefs as a means of coping with economic deprivation, social inferiority, and political weakness.
White supremacist beliefs also served these ends for some white citizens, providing poor white labourers with a sense of personal worth and group solidarity against a perceived menace. The economic conditions, religious beliefs, and racial views of white farmers became important factors in Southern politics in the early 20th century.
B. Economics and Politics in the Rural South
On October 24, 1929, the day before Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying, the United States stock market crashed. This financial disaster ended a period of post-World War I economic expansion and marked the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In the rural South, however, economic hardship had been a way of life for years, especially for poor farmers. Three factors, in particular, affected Mississippi cotton farmers.
One, farmers operated under a lien system, whereby they pledged future crops to merchants in return for necessary supplies. Thus, they were in continuous debt. Second, a long-standing depression in the cotton market forced farmers to go further into debt until they could barely manage to sustain their farms or their families. Third, heavy rains and floods in the late 1920s nearly ruined production.
These elements combined with outdated farming methods to make already difficult conditions even worse.
Such tensions were a staple element of Southern life in the early decades of the century. The exploitation of the working class generated populist movements that impacted Mississippi politics in the early 1900s. Sometimes termed “the revolt of the rednecks”, these reforms ushered in a new breed of politician.
One of the most prominent of these men, James K. Vardaman, serves as a representative example (especially since Faulkner’s family supported him and Faulkner named the youngest Bundren son after him). As Mississippi governor from 1904 to 1908 and a United States Senator from 1912 to 1918, Vardaman was a flamboyant orator and advocate of white labourers.
Coming from a poor background, he called for greater regulation of corporations and supported such progressive causes as a graduated income tax, child labour laws, and women’s suffrage.
One of his most potent appeals, however, was his strident racism. His views and manner earned him both the nickname “The White Chief” and a reputation as a demagogue who used racial hatred to further his own ambitions.
By 1918, Vardaman had lost his once-formidable influence because he opposed United States involvement in World War I. “Vardamanism”, as his brand of politics was termed, had faded by the late 1920s, but populist loyalties still existed among farmers, as did the white supremacist ideals that provided poor whites with a false sense of superiority and power.
The latest adaptation of As I Lay Dying
The 2013 adaptation of As I Lay Dying is a film directed by and starring James Franco.
This adaptation brings William Faulkner’s 1930 novel to the screen, staying true to the book’s complex narrative style. Like the novel, the film tells the story of the Bundren family’s arduous journey to bury their matriarch, Addie Bundren, in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi.
The movie is notable for its use of split-screen techniques, which help convey the novel’s multiple perspectives, as the story is narrated by various characters, each with their own viewpoint. Franco plays the role of Darl Bundren, one of Addie’s sons, and the cast also includes Tim Blake Nelson as Anse Bundren, Beth Grant as Addie Bundren, and Logan Marshall-Green as Jewel Bundren.
Despite the challenges of adapting such a complex novel, Franco aimed to capture the novel’s essence, exploring themes of family, death, and existential despair. The film received mixed reviews, with some critics praising its ambition and faithfulness to Faulkner’s style, while others found the adaptation struggled to translate the novel’s depth and complexity effectively to the screen.
Nonetheless, it remains a notable attempt to bring one of Faulkner’s most challenging works to a broader audience through cinema.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi.
He was the first of four sons born to a prominent local businessman Murry Falkner and his wife Maud (Faulkner later restored the “u” that had been removed from the original spelling). The Falkners moved to Oxford, Mississippi, when William was five and for the rest of his life, Oxford remained his primary home.
Though an avid reader, Faulkner did not like school. He dropped out of secondary school and worked in his grandfather’s bank. During this time, he was devastated when his fiancée Estelle Oldham broke off their engagement and, under familial pressure, married another man. In 1918 he was refused admission to the armed forces because of his size (he was 5ft 6in).
Determined to fight in World War I, he falsified his credentials to enter the Royal Air Force in Canada, but the war ended before he completed his military training. He then attended the University of Mississippi for a short time as a special student.
After leaving higher education, he worked briefly in a New York bookshop, before returning to Oxford to become a postmaster at the university. However, in 1924 he was sacked for writing and socializing while on duty. In that same year his first book was published, a collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun.
In 1925, Faulkner lived for a few months in New Orleans. During that short time he socialized with the writer Sherwood Anderson. It was Anderson’s wife, Elizabeth Prall, who encouraged Faulkner to abandon poetry for fiction. Having left New Orleans, he travelled to Paris and toured Europe. He also began to write his first novel.
Faulkner’s first three novels, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), The Mosquitoes (1927), and Sartoris (1929), received little attention. In 1929 Faulkner finally married Estelle Oldham, who had recently divorced her husband. She already had two children by her first marriage, and she and Faulkner had two daughters together, one of whom died in infancy.
Early on, Estelle attempted suicide, an event that signalled the beginning of an unhappy union for the couple.
In 1929 Faulkner published his most ambitious work to date, The Sound and the Fury. It garnered much critical praise but was not commercially successful. While working the night shift as a power plant stoker, he wrote and revised As I Lay Dying in under three months. Published in 1930, the novel was praised by critics but made little commercial impact.
For the rest of his life, Faulkner made his living as a writer of fiction and Hollywood screenplays. His most accomplished works during the 1930s and 1940s include Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942). In 1946 Malcolm Cowley’s editing and publication of The Portable Faulkner helped to cement Faulkner’s literary reputation and enhance his commercial viability.
Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for his novel A Fable. During the last ten years of his life, he travelled, lectured, and became an outspoken critic of racial segregation. From 1957 until his death, he was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, near his daughter Jill and her children. He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi.