As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Summary:
Addie Bundren lays dying in her bed. Outside her window, her oldest son Cash constructs her coffin. He works there so she can see the care he is putting into the project. She has three other sons-only one is still a child, a daughter, and a husband. None of her children have left home. Her husband Anse is basically incapable of doing anything in case he might sweat.
Dewey Dell, the daughter, stands beside the bed fanning her mother and worrying about how to deal with a pregnancy due to an encounter with a farm worker. Knowing that their mother is near death, the two middle sons - Jewel and Darl, decide to go and work taking a load somewhere and making three dollars for doing it. Vardaman, the youngest son doesn't really understand what is going on and confuses the death of his mother with the death of a fish he caught and cleaned on the day of her death.
When Addie dies and Cash finishes the coffin, the neighbor ladies dress the body and load it into the coffin with her head where her feet should go, so that her wedding dress can fan out and not be crushed. This leads to problems as Cash built the coffin to balance with her body the other direction. Then they wait for the boys to return with the wagon. Neighbors offer their wagons so the body can quickly be buried in the Mississippi heat, but Anse refuses since he promised Addie that he would bury her with her kinfolk and that her family would all be together to do it. He hasn't given her anything else, but he is dead set on fulfilling this last promise.
Darl and Jewel return home. The coffin is wrestled into the family's wagon in a huge rainstorm. The rainstorm washes out the bridges that the family must cross to get to Addie's childhood home of Jefferson. At one point they meet disaster fording the river risking their lives, losing the mules, nearly losing the coffin and Cash's tools, and breaking Cash's leg (again).
The family wanders around for days ineffectually trying to get to Jefferson while the body decomposes in the wet and heat and begins smelling to high heaven. Cash lays on top of the coffin, suffering with a broken leg that Anse tries to set with concrete. Finally ten days after her death, they arrive in Jefferson to realize they brought no shovel.
My thoughts:
It is a good thing this book is short, because it is confusing. I had to go and read the synopsis on wikipedia to understand most of what was going on. At first I really wasn't thrilled with the writing style. Faulkner writes each chapter from the view point and in the voice of a different character. It makes it hard to get into the flow of the novel. Plus he has a horrible tendency to use pronouns without give you much clue of who it refers to. Many of the chapters seem to be rambling stream of conscious type narratives.
If it hadn't been for my macabre fascination with this bumbling family wandering the bayou with a stinking dead body, I'd probably have given up after the first few chapters. Even when I finished I wasn't sure how I felt about the book.
But the more I ponder it, the more I see the brilliance of the way Faulkner wrote the novel. He shows the lack of clarity in the minds of many of the family members through their chapters. It is a relief to get to a chapter from Tull, the neighbor, or Darl, the only Bundren who seems to be capable of rational thought. Of course by the end of the book, the emotional excruciation of surviving the trip takes his sanity too, and Darl's last chapter shows it.
After letting it settle for several days, I find I rather enjoyed this story of a family's implosion. It is darkly painful and hilarious at the same time.
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