On William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”
I finished “As I Lay Dying” in late March 2023, six months almost to the date after my grandmother passed away. You can read a book in any number of different ways, but with that context, I read “As I Lay Dying” as, more than anything, a tale of collective grief and mutual responsibility.
I hadn’t read a novel by William Faulkner before this. I now understand why his style is popularly critiqued and viewed more as a subject of literary study reserved exclusively for classrooms and dusty libraries. The narrative was certainly confusing at times, each of the perspectives not really aligning clearly. Faulkner leaves a lot of work for the reader, which is by no means a bad thing. A writer doesn’t need to hold their reader’s hand, and Faulkner certainly doesn’t in “As I Lay Dying.”
In that way, Faulkner leaves the reader to figure out each character’s grief alongside the characters themselves. It’s at times really painful to watch — Cash’s stoic indifference, Jewel’s rash flashes of anger and frustration, Vardaman’s mental collapse, Dewey Dell’s confusion of motherly instincts, Darl’s attempts to hold everything together before it eventually collapses, and Anse’s pitiful leadership before he too falls into easy affection. Altogether it’s like watching a trainwreck as it slowly twists and turns off the tracks.
The narrative is held together by a few things, because — good Lord — the Bundren family can’t hold it together themselves. For one, it’s held together by the reflections of the characters that the Bundren family comes into contact with. The visiting doctor, the owner of the home where the family stays on their journey, the women from the town — these characters and others, who sit outside the main narrative of the Bundren family’s journey to bury their deceased mother, offer outside reflections on the chaos going on inside the family.
But, more important than these removed reflections from outside the family is the one chapter we get from the perspective from the subject and cause of all this chaos and confusion in the first place — Annie Bundren. Her chapter, which comes near the middle of the novel, is (as I wrote in other, shorter reviews) my absolute favorite moment of the book and one of the most brilliant sections of writing I’ve ever read, honestly.
Hearing the reflections of Annie — who, at that point in the story, is dead — on her role as a mother, how she viewed each of her children, what she thought about Anse’s failings as a father, her relationship to God and religion, and her bitter view of society serve to elucidate why the Bundren family dynamic completely falls apart after her passing. Her simple existence held the family together, gave each individual a reason for being, a North Star to be guided by and to gravitate around. It seems she had a strong personality but made rash decisions that led to a sequence of events and a family she eventually ended up feeling judgmental towards and, again, bitter about.
But bitterness is a strange emotion when it comes from the central figure of a family. It creates a dynamic where those around that person, either consciously or subconsciously, seek constantly to please in order to alleviate that person’s bitterness, or are completely turned away. We see that manifest in different characters. Cash and Dewey Dell, for instance, seek to please Annie always. That’s their guiding force. Cash constantly hammering away at her coffin, Dewey Dell by her bedside with a fan at all times.
Anse and Jewel, on the other hand, are pushed away, flitting in and out of connection with Annie and the family. Darl attempts to thread some middle ground and, in this way, acts a bit like the characters outside the family in the story. He’s almost the most removed, the most level-headed, the best able to lead the narrative and describe things as they’re happening while all the others are simply caught up in them.
Annie’s chapter and where it’s positioned in the narrative is absolutely essential for the story, I think. Without it we’re left flying along the tracks as the train steadily derails. With it, we’re suddenly flown 5,000 feet above the train, it pausing as it spins off the tracks, and shown clearly how we got to this point, a series of causes-and-effects that have left the train without a conductor and with no recourse but to crash and burn.
I feel like there’s so much more I could unpack about “As I Lay Dying,” a ton of separate threads that are steadily unraveling themselves as I sit here and write. But I won’t, lest this becomes hundreds of paragraphs long.
I’ll tie this rather brief reflection together at the end by saying that grief is utterly confusing, especially when it’s thrust upon a family after a prolonged period of slow deterioration. It wears a group of people down. And then, after the ‘event’ happens, you’re suddenly with a whole lot of responsibility. That doesn’t change, whether it’s a death that happened in the 17th century, the early 1900s or this year. Dying carries with it countless burdens — emotional, physical, social, spiritual. Faulkner takes this utter confusion and mess of burdens and puts them altogether into a narrative that is at times just confusing and messy as the grief itself, but ultimately paints an essential picture of what death does to a family.
A must read? Maybe!
