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As I Lay Dying
by William FaulknerPrescribed for HSC English 2024–2027 (NESA) · Last reviewed As I Lay Dying is a 1930 novel by the American writer William Faulkner, told in fifty-nine monologues by fifteen narrators as the Bundren family hauls their mother's coffin across rural Mississippi for burial. It is studied in HSC English Extension 1's elective on hybrid worlds.
Summary
As I Lay Dying is a 1930 novel by the American writer William Faulkner, told in fifty-nine monologues by fifteen narrators as the Bundren family hauls their mother's coffin across rural Mississippi for burial. It is studied in HSC English Extension 1's elective on hybrid worlds.
Written in 1929 and published in 1930, As I Lay Dying is composed of fifty-nine short sections narrated in the first person by fifteen different characters, seven of them Bundrens and the rest neighbours and strangers met on the road. There is no external narrator to arbitrate: the story assembles itself from competing monologues. Its spine is a journey. Addie Bundren dies on the family's failing Mississippi farm while her eldest son Cash builds her coffin beneath her window, and the family sets out to carry her to Jefferson for burial, as she made them promise.
What should be a day's trip becomes a nine-day ordeal. A flood sweeps away the river crossing, drowns the mules and shatters Cash's leg; Jewel, Addie's secret favourite, twice saves the coffin, plunging into the flood and later dragging it from a burning barn that Darl, the family's strange, near-clairvoyant second son, has set alight to end the grotesque journey. The family arrives with the corpse stinking and trailed by buzzards.
In Jefferson the private motives surface. Dewey Dell, seventeen and secretly pregnant, fails to obtain the abortion she came for and is preyed on by a drugstore clerk; Darl is committed to the asylum at Jackson; and Anse, the work-shy father who framed the whole journey as a sacred promise, gets his new teeth and presents a stranger to his children with the novel's astonishing last line, "Meet Mrs Bundren", days after burying the old one.
Context
Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying, by his own account, in a matter of weeks in 1929 while working night shifts at a power plant, and published it in 1930. It belongs to the extraordinary run of novels in which he invented Yoknapatawpha County, his fictional patch of Mississippi, populated by poor white farmers, worn-out land and the long shadow of a defeated South. The title comes from Book XI of Homer's Odyssey, in the 1925 translation by William Marris, where the murdered Agamemnon recalls his wife refusing to close his eyes "as I lay dying" - an epic frame into which Faulkner poured the least epic of materials. He was writing at the height of literary modernism, which had licensed the multiple narrator and the collage of registers, and as a regional writer steeped in Southern oral storytelling. The novel's genius is to make those two inheritances quarrel on the page rather than settle into a style.
Themes and Techniques
The novel's deepest concern is its own hybridity: a Homeric funeral quest driven through the mud of rural Mississippi until epic and farce run in the same sentence. The collision lives in the voices. Cash renders grief as a carpentry specification - "I made it on the bevel" because "It makes a neater job" - a pastiche of technical prose whose flat neutrality is unbearable precisely because it cannot say what it feels. Darl's high lyric monologue, "In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep", imports the philosophical art novel into a farm boy's body, while Vardaman's one-sentence chapter, "My mother is a fish.", grants five words of shattered child logic the same structural weight as an adult's philosophy.
Faulkner's method is mock-heroic: the elevated form and the debased matter held in one frame so that each exposes the other. Jewel's rescues are genuinely heroic - Darl crowns him "enclosed in a thin nimbus of fire" at the barn. Anse, by contrast, compresses the whole double register into one sentence at his wife's deathbed: "God's will be done. Now I can get them teeth."
Addie's monologue, spoken from beyond the grave near the book's centre, supplies the novel's theory of itself: "words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at", and "words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it". The characters who cannot say what they feel express themselves through deeds - Cash through carpentry, Jewel through rescue, Dewey Dell, who feels "like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth", through her body.
Faulkner refuses to let death be solemn. The rotting corpse, the buzzards, the leg set in cement and the coffin bored with holes sit alongside genuine grief, and Peabody's civilised reflection that death is "no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement" is stranded amid slapstick catastrophe. Cash is left to reach the book's most sophisticated idea in its lowest register: "it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."
Key Quotes
"My mother is a fish."
- Technique
- Child's animism, one-line chapter
- Idea
- Five words of shattered child logic given full structural weight - the novel is assembled from voices that cannot be reconciled
"I made it on the bevel."
- Technique
- Pastiche of technical prose
- Idea
- Grief displaced wholesale into a carpentry specification - an incompatible genre carrying the weight the elegiac cannot
"words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it"
- Technique
- Antithesis, spatial imagery
- Idea
- Addie's theory of the whole novel: words rise uselessly while doing crawls along the ground
"God's will be done. Now I can get them teeth."
- Technique
- Bathos, juxtaposition
- Idea
- Pious formula and mercenary appetite share a single breath - the sacred duty exposed as cover story
"Meet Mrs Bundren," he says.
- Technique
- Anticlimax, tall-tale punchline
- Idea
- The elegiac quest collapses into a joke in the final line - the last collision of epic and farce
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which module is As I Lay Dying studied in for the HSC?
- It is set for HSC English Extension 1 in the elective on hybrid worlds, which explores texts made from other texts and forms.
- Who wrote As I Lay Dying?
- William Faulkner, the American modernist and chronicler of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, wrote the novel in 1929 and published it in 1930.
- What is As I Lay Dying about?
- Addie Bundren dies on the family's failing farm and her family carries her coffin on a nine-day ordeal to Jefferson for burial, through flood and fire, each member nursing a private motive beneath the sacred promise.
- What makes As I Lay Dying a hybrid text?
- It drives a Homeric funeral quest through the mud of rural Mississippi until epic and farce run in the same sentence, colliding high modernist interior monologue with the Southern tall tale across fifteen incompatible narrating voices.
- What should students focus on when studying As I Lay Dying for Extension 1?
- Focus on how Faulkner builds each collision of genre and register - in a voice, a structural join, an image - and tie it to the elective's idea that a hybrid text is one no single form can hold.
Studying As I Lay Dying for the HSC?
As I Lay Dying is studied in HSC English Extension 1 in the elective on hybrid worlds, which asks students to explore texts made from other texts and forms - how colliding genres and registers generate meaning that no single form could hold. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.
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