That’s my tl dr summary of As I Lay Dying: Faulkner drunk texts the death and burial of a Southern woman with a crazy family. Prepare yourself, though: the further in you get, the more Faulkner’s writing sounds like drunk texting. “In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them.” Addie (As I Lay Dying) I doubt I’ll read As I Lay Dying in full again, but I’ll refer back to Chapter 40 many times. Faulkner deftly and skilfully captures the lived experience of a poor woman trapped in a shitty marriage and a small town. For me, it puts to rest any argument as to whether it is possible to write from the perspective of a gender or creed that is not your own. I mean, that’s really sweet (if a little morbid), right? Another highlight was the chapter narrated (posthumously) by Addie herself it was captivating and beautiful. I was actually really touched by the description of the family electing to lay Addie top-to-bottom in her coffin, so that the wedding dress they buried her in could flare out and not get crushed. It’s all a bit weird, sure, but that didn’t turn me off. Papa Anse ends up taking Dewey Dell’s abortion money to buy new teeth, and marrying the woman from whom he borrowed a shovel to bury his first wife. Cash breaks his leg, Darl burns down a barn, Jewel wants to bail on the lot of them because they’re fucking mental, Dewey Dell tries to buy an abortion at a corner store, and Vardaman just wonders what the hell is going on, all the while firmly believing that the fish they caught is actually his dead mother. They almost lose her coffin a couple of times, because the rains come and the rivers get fucking hectic in that part of the world. They carry her coffin from their bumfuck-nowhere town to some other bumfuck-nowhere town, telling themselves and each other over and over again that it’s “what she would have wanted”. The story goes on to depict the death and burial of Addie, as described by various members of her family and other hangers-on.
The youngest son, Vardaman, catches a fish.
And they’re trying to figure out whether they can get $3 together in time to bury her. And the whole family is arguing about whether that’s cool or not. And her eldest son (Cash) is building her coffin right outside her window, where she can hear.
So, we kick off with a woman (Addie) laying in bed, dying.
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