Paul Bryant's Reviews > As I Lay Dying

Once you get past the ungainly oddness and wild strangeness which assails you from every direction, then you can see the weirdness which lies beyond.

The story, and there is a very strong clear linear narrative here, is wonderfully stupid. A back country family in Mississippi in the 20s has their dear mama Addie Bundren up and die on them and the lazy-ass sumbitch daddy thinks he then has to carry out her settled dying wish which, very unreasonably, was to get buried with her own kin 40 miles away in Jefferson. This wouldn’t be so bad except it’s the height of summer and there’s just been bad rains and a flood, so the bridges over the river are down. The whole passel of them, four sons, one daughter, one daddy, two mules and one horse, nevertheless trek off to do the right thing. To say they encounter obstacles would be to say nought but the truth. One such is that before very long Addie starts to decomp, to which many passing strangers take exception.

So it’s kind of a comic tale but it ain’t told comically. No sir. No ma’am.

The guides will say the same thing about this short but dense-like-a-black-hole novel:

As I Lay Dying is written as a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues, in which the characters’ thoughts are presented in all their uncensored chaos, without the organizing presence of an objective narrator.

That’s from the online Spark Notes. Fair enough , except that it’s just completely not true. All the short chapters are headed up with a character name, and it kind of naturally seems as if that character is narrating, but a) only occasionally could you call anything in this book stream of consciousness, and even then it’s nothing at all like our old beloved friends Virginia Woolf or James Joyce because these interior monologues come at you in perfectly formed and mostly graceful sentences; and b) The chapters obey no consistent rules or they change the rules all the time which is the same thing, so that in the middle of a paragraph it is suddenly the author’s omniscient voice popping up.

And another thing - what Faulkner does all the time is bend the credibility of the characters’ voices until they break.

Here’s two examples of purely natural monologue

Because be durn if there ain’t something about a durn fellow like Anse that seems to make a man have to help him, even when he knows he’ll be wanting to kick himself the next minute.

And

Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like 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.

But here’s an example of Faulkner’s own voice breaking in. The narrator here is Vardaman, aged around ten :

I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears It is dark. I can hear wood, silence. I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity into an unrelated scattering of components

The last sentence is not Vardaman. It’s Faulkner.

Here’s the daughter Dewey Dell – her usual mode is like this

About his head the print of his hat sweated into his hair. His shirt is blotched with sweat. He has not washed his hands and arms.

But then

The cow breathes upon my hips and back, her breath warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning.

(even my spellcheck does not know stertorous, much less an uneducated 17 year old country girl. So what is Faulkner doing here? Messing with us readers, I think.)

And now, here’s Darl, one of the sons. Now as this family is the
purely uneducated rural poor, how is it one of their sons (the one who narrates about half of the book) thinks in this lushly textured poetic and highly intellectual language?

He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a composite picture of all time since he was a child…. For a while, still, she looks down at him from the composite picture, neither with censure nor approbation. …

Then she flings herself across Addie Bundren’s knees, clutching her, shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Addie Bundren left, jarring the whole bed into a chattering sibilance of mattress shucks, her arms outflung and the fan in one hand still beating with expiring breath into the quilt.

She looks down at the face. It is like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with any semblance of life : a curled, gnarled inertness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail has not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last.

Check out these examples of Darl’s vocabulary:

We go on with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant

A cubistic bug

Starkly re-accruent

Don’t sound like no poor white trash I ever came acrost, dunt know about you. Sounds more like Marcel damn Proust than Hank Williams. Shoot, sounds more like this William Faulkner hisself talkin. Seems he didn’t want to write no normal book but one a them whatchacallem modernist efforts but like he jes couldnt hep hisself & had to git that thar poetic jawbreakin stuff in there someways n so turned one a his ole country boys into some kinda god damn genius.

It doesn’t really work, a few pages of Darl and my suspension of disbelief came crashing down and really bruised my left shoulder, I can still feel it now.

And there’s another thing about old Darl. He frequently launches off into Deep Space, like this:

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. . He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not.


I had to look round and ask here, who let Samuel Beckett in here?

Even so, and also taking into consideration a couple of apparent plot holes in the rather-too-neat O Henryish ending (how did bumbling Anse fix up all that in such a short space of time?) I still loved the bravery and confidence of this novel. It ramified my brain, and there is hardly any higher praise. It was great.

4.5 stars