![]() First edition cover | |
Author | William Faulkner |
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Genre | Modernist, southern gothic, black comedy |
Publisher | Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith |
Publication date | 1930 |
Preceded by | The Sound and the Fury |
Followed by | Sanctuary |
Text | As I Lay Dying online |
As I Lay Dying is a 1930 Southern Gothic [1] novel by American author William Faulkner. Faulkner's fifth novel, it is consistently ranked among the best novels of the 20th century. [2] [3] [4] The title is derived from William Marris's 1925 translation of Homer's Odyssey , [5] referring to the similar themes of both works.
The novel uses a stream-of-consciousness writing technique, multiple narrators, and varying chapter lengths. The work will enter the public domain on January 1, 2026. [lower-alpha 1]
The book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family's quest to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi as well as the motives—noble or selfish—they show on the journey.
In the novel's opening chapters, Addie is alive but in ill health. She expects to die soon and sits at a window watching as her firstborn child, Cash, builds her coffin. Anse, Addie's husband, waits on the porch, while their daughter, Dewey Dell, fans her mother in the July heat. The night after Addie dies, a heavy rainstorm sets in; rivers rise and wash out bridges that the family will need to cross to get to Jefferson.
The family's trek by wagon begins, with Addie's non-embalmed body in the coffin. Along the way, Anse and the five children encounter various difficulties. Stubborn Anse frequently rejects any offers of assistance, including meals or lodging, so at times the family goes hungry and sleeps in barns. At other times he refuses to accept loans from people, claiming he wishes to "be beholden to no man", thus manipulating the would-be lender into giving him charity as a gift not to be repaid.
Jewel, Addie's middle child, tries to leave the family after Anse sells Jewel's most prized possession, his horse. Yet Jewel cannot turn his back on his father and siblings through the tribulations of the journey to Jefferson. Cash breaks a leg and winds up riding atop the coffin. He stoically refuses to admit to any discomfort but the family eventually puts a makeshift cast of concrete on his leg. Twice, the family almost loses Addie's coffin—first, while crossing a river on a washed-out bridge (two mules are lost) and then when a fire of suspicious origin starts in the barn where the coffin is being stored for the night.
After nine days, the family arrives in Jefferson, where the stench from the coffin is quickly smelled by the townspeople. In town, family members have different items of business to take care of. Cash's broken leg needs attention. Dewey Dell, for the second time in the novel, goes to a pharmacy, to obtain an abortion that she does not know how to ask for; clerk Skeet MacGowan coerces her into sex in the cellar in exchange for "abortion pills" which are just talcum powder. First, though, Anse wants to borrow some shovels to bury Addie, because that was the purpose of the trip and the family should be together for that. After that happens, Darl, the second eldest and thoughtful, poetic observer of the family, is seized for the arson of the barn and sent to the Mississippi State Insane Asylum in Jackson. [6] With Addie only just buried, Anse forces Dewey Dell to give up the money from Lafe (the man who got her pregnant) for an abortion, which he spends on getting "new teeth" and quickly marries the woman from whom he borrowed the shovels.
As are many of Faulkner's works, the story is set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which Faulkner referred to as "my apocryphal county", a fictional rendition of the writer's home of Lafayette County in the same state.
Faulkner said that he wrote the novel from midnight to 4:00 a.m. over the course of six weeks and that he did not change a word of it. [7] Faulkner spent the first eight hours of his twelve-hour shift at the University of Mississippi Power House shoveling coal or directing other works and the remaining four hours handwriting his manuscript on unlined onionskin paper. [8]
Throughout the novel, Faulkner presents 15 points of view, each chapter narrated by one character, including Addie, who expresses her thoughts after she has already died. In 59 chapters titled only by their narrators' names, the characters are developed gradually through each other's perceptions and opinions, with Darl's predominating. [9]
As I Lay Dying helped to solidify Faulkner's reputation as a pioneer, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, of stream of consciousness. He first used the technique in The Sound and the Fury , and it gives As I Lay Dying its distinctly intimate tone, through the monologues of the Bundrens and the passers-by whom they encounter. Faulkner manipulates conventional differences between stream of consciousness and interior monologue. For example, Faulkner has a character such as Darl speak in an interior monologue with far more intellectual diction (and knowledge of his physical environment) than he realistically possesses. This represents an innovation on conventions of interior monologues; as Dorrit Cohn states in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, the language in an interior monologue is "like the language a character speaks to others ... it accords with his time, his place, his social station, level of intelligence ..." The novel represents a progenitor of the Southern Renaissance, reflecting on being, existence, and other existential metaphysics of everyday life. [10]
As I Lay Dying is consistently ranked among the best novels of 20th-century literature. [2] [3] [11] The novel has been reprinted by the Modern Library, [12] the Library of America, and numerous publishers, including Chatto and Windus in 1970, [13] Random House in 1990, [14] Tandem Library in 1991, [15] Vintage Books in 1996, [16] and the Folio Society in 2013. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 for his novels prior to that date, with this book being among them. [17]
The novel has also directly influenced a number of other critically acclaimed books, including British author Graham Swift's 1996 Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders , [18] Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body , [19] [20] and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing . [21]
The Grammy-nominated metalcore band As I Lay Dying derived its name from the novel. [22]
The character of Darl Bundren later appeared in Faulkner's 1935 short story "Uncle Willy". [23]
An adaptation of the novel by Edward Kemp was staged by the Young Vic company in May 1998. [24]
Jewel often refers to:
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Light in August is a 1932 novel by American author William Faulkner. It belongs to the Southern gothic and modernist literary genres.
The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. It employs several narrative styles, including stream of consciousness. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later said was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention.
James Kimble Vardaman was an American politician from the U.S. state of Mississippi. A Democrat, he served as the Governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908 and then represented Mississippi in the United States Senate from 1913 to 1919.
Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional Mississippi county created by the American author William Faulkner, largely based on and inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi, and its county seat of Oxford. Faulkner often referred to Yoknapatawpha County as "my apocryphal county".
Louis Grenier is a fictional character in William Faulkner's novels and stories.
Sartoris is a novel, first published in 1929, by the American author William Faulkner. It portrays the decay of the Mississippi aristocracy following the social upheaval of the American Civil War. The 1929 edition is an abridged version of Faulkner's original work. The full text was published in 1973 as Flags in the Dust. Faulkner's great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, himself a colonel in the American Civil War, served as the model for Colonel John Sartoris. Faulkner also fashioned other characters in the book on local people from his hometown Oxford. His friend Ben Wasson was the model for Horace Benbow, while Faulkner's brother Murry served as the antetype for young Bayard Sartoris.
Sanctuary is a 1931 novel by American author William Faulkner about the rape and abduction of an upper-class Mississippi college girl, Temple Drake, during the Prohibition era. The novel was Faulkner's commercial and critical breakthrough and established his literary reputation, but was controversial given its themes. It is said Faulkner claimed it was a "potboiler", written purely for profit, but this has been debated by scholars and Faulkner's own friends.
Intruder in the Dust is a 1948 crime novel written by American author William Faulkner. Taking place in Mississippi, it revolves around an African American farmer accused of murdering a Caucasian man.
The Reivers: A Reminiscence, published in 1962, is the last novel by the American author William Faulkner as it was published a month before his death. The bestselling novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. Faulkner previously won this award for his book A Fable, making him one of only four authors to be awarded it more than once. Unlike many of his earlier works, it is a straightforward narration and eschews the complicated literary techniques of his more well-known works. It is a picaresque novel, and as such may seem uncharacteristically lighthearted given its subject matter. For these reasons, The Reivers is often ignored by Faulkner scholars or dismissed as a lesser work. He previously had referred to writing a "Golden Book of Yoknapatawpha County" with which he would finish his literary career. It is likely that The Reivers was meant to be this "Golden Book". The Reivers was adapted into a film of the same name directed by Mark Rydell and starring Steve McQueen as Boon Hogganbeck.
The Hamlet is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1940, about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi. Originally a standalone novel, it was later followed by The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), forming the Snopes trilogy.
Flags in the Dust is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, completed in 1927. His publisher heavily edited the manuscript with Faulkner's reluctant consent, removing about 40,000 words in the process. That version was published as Sartoris in 1929. Faulkner's original manuscript of Flags in the Dust was published in 1973, and Sartoris was subsequently taken out of print.
The Town is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1957, about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi. It is the second of the "Snopes" trilogy, following The Hamlet (1940) and completed by The Mansion (1959).
Addie is a given name, nickname and surname. It may refer to:
"Spotted Horses" is a novella written by William Faulkner and originally published in Scribner's magazine in 1931. It includes the character Flem Snopes, who appears in much of Faulkner's work, and tells in ambiguous terms of his backhand profiteering with an honest Texan selling untamed ponies. "Spotted Horses" was later incorporated into The Hamlet under the title "The Peasants: Chapter One".
Vardaman can refer to:
As I Lay Dying is a 2013 American drama film directed and co-written by and starring James Franco, based on William Faulkner's 1930 novel of the same name. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard Section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
See You Tomorrow is a novel by Norwegian author Tore Renberg. This darkly humoristic neo-noir drama explores the themes of friendship, crime, loneliness and tragic death. It was launched in Norway in September 2013 and in the UK in August 2014. Critics both in Renberg's native Norway and abroad have hailed it as a career high and compared him with the likes of Balzac, George R.R. Martin and the writers of modern HBO-series. See You Tomorrow is the first novel in the Teksas-series.
Dean Faulkner Wells was an American author, editor, and publisher.