As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

 

As I Lay Dying

Faulkner gives As I Lay Dying fifty-nine narrators and lets them contradict each other freely, which tells you most of what you need to know about the novel's deepest concern: that reality is not a fixed thing but a surface refracted differently through every consciousness that touches it. The plot is almost aggressively simple — the Bundren family crosses Mississippi to bury their matriarch, Addie, in the town where she was born. What the journey means is a different matter for each of them.

Addie herself is given one chapter, positioned not at the beginning but in the middle, after she is already dead. In it, she speaks from wherever the dead speak from, and what she says recontextualizes everything that precedes and follows it. She was not, it turns out, the passive center of her family's devotion. She was a woman with her own philosophy of language and experience, her own resentments, her own long-maintained distance from a husband she considered fraudulent. The chapter is one of the strangest and most arresting in American literature.

Darl narrates more than anyone else, and his perception has an almost supernatural acuity — he seems to know things he could not logically know, to see around corners, to inhabit other people's consciousness. The family's unease with him is the unease we feel toward anyone who sees too clearly. He is the novel's intelligence, and intelligence is not always comfortable.

Cash, the eldest son, builds his mother's coffin outside her bedroom window as she lies dying inside — she can hear the sound of each plank being fitted. This is presented without irony. It is his act of love, practical and formal and absolutely committed. Jewel's love expresses itself differently: in the horse he acquired through secret labor, in the ferocity with which he acts when action is required.

The journey itself becomes increasingly surreal — a flooded river, a burning barn, broken limbs, accumulating catastrophe — as if the landscape itself is testing the Bundrens' commitment to the dead and to each other. What they're testing, Faulkner makes clear, is not only loyalty to Addie but the question of what loyalty even means when needs and motivations are this thoroughly entangled.

As I Lay Dying is blackly funny, formally daring, and filled with the kind of human observation that makes you put the book down just to think about it. It is also, beneath its difficulty, a deeply compassionate work — about how people carry the dead, and what that carrying costs.

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