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Summary
Summary
A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury : the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.
"I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall." --William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying
This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
Author Notes
Born in an old Mississippi family, William Faulkner made his home in Oxford, seat of the University of Mississippi. After the fifth grade he went to school only off and on-lived, read, and wrote much as he pleased. In 1918, refusing to enlist with the "Yankees," he joined the Canadian Air Force, and was transferred to the British Royal Air Force. After the war he studied a little at the University, did house painting, worked as a night superintendent at a power plant, went to New Orleans and became a friend of Sherwood Anderson, then to Europe and back home to Oxford. By this time he had written two novels.
The Sound and the Fury followed in 1929. Financial success came with Sanctuary in 1931, which he assisted in filming. Faulkner 's novels are intense in their character portrayals of disintegrating Southern aristocrats, poor whites, and African Americans. A complex stream-of-consciousness rhetoric often involves Faulkner in lengthy sentences of anguished power. Most of his tales are set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and are characterized by the use of many recurring characters from families of different social levels spanning more than a century. His best subjects are the old, dying South and the newer materialistic South.
As I Lay Dying (1930), is a grotesquely tragicomic story about a family of poor southern whites. With Absalom, Absalom! (1936); the difficult parts of his famous short novel "The Bear" (published in Go Down, Moses, 1942); and the allegorical A Fable (1954), a non-Yoknapatawpha novel set in France during World War I; Faulkner returned to an innovative and difficult style that most readers have trouble with. Yet, interspersed among such works are collections of easily read stories originally published in popular magazines. There seems to be a growing sentiment among critics that the Snopes trilogy-The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959)-for the most part an example of Faulkner's "moderate" style, could well be among his most important works.
Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature "for his powerful and artistically independent contribution to the new American novel," but it would appear now that he also deserved to win that honor for his contribution to world literature. When reporting his death, the Boston Globe quoted Faulkner's having once told an interviewer: "Since man is mortal, the only immortality for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. That is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must some day pass."
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Faulkner received the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1950, and in 1951 he was given the National Book Award for his Collected Stories Collected Stories. For his novel A Fable he received the National Book Award for the second time, as well as the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. The Reivers (1962) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. In 1957 and 1958, he was the University of Virginia's first writer-in-residence, and in January 1959 he accepted an appointment as consultant on contemporary literature to the Alderman Library of that university.
Although Faulkner was not without honors in his lifetime and has received world recognition since then, it is surprising to learn that, when Malcolm Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner in 1946, he found that almost all of Faulkner's books were out of print. By arranging selections from the works to form a continuous chronicle, Cowley deserves much of the credit for making readers aware of the way in which Faulkner was creating a fictive world on a scale grander than that of any novelist since Balzac.
William Faulkner died in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
Darl : Jewel looks ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face as he stares at the log-built house. That's so as you know this is a rough-hewn poetry. There I go again. Cash is sawing at the box; Addie Bundren couldn't want a better carpenter. Chuck. Chuck. Ma watches him build her box. She wants it like that. Flesh and blood. Cora : The Lord sees everything. That's the last you'll hear of me. Jewel : "I durnt see why she holts on," I says. "Ahm a'leaven with ma hoss." Dewey Dell : Lafe took me in the cotton field and he said his sack was full and he was going to empty it into my sack and so it was because I could not help it I knew Darl knew and he said not to tell pa as it would kill him what with ma dyen. Anse : Durn that road. Durn that rain. Durn them boys. They should be here for her dyen. That fool son a mahn Vardaman has caught a fish in a puddle. Darl : "She wants ta be buryened in Jefferson. She tolt me that," pa says. Cash carries on sawing. She looks like she's a goan. Death's just a function of the mind. It must be the cue for me to write a sentence in random italics. Vardaman : My fish is not fish now it's dead. They kilt my ma. My ma is a fish. Dewey Dell : I am guts and he is guts and I am Lafe's guts and it took her 10 days to die and I go to the barn and feel my body begin to part and open up. Vardaman : I don't suppose you made much of that but you ain't seen nothen yet. Cash gives me a banana. Is that her? Is she a rabbit? It be hacked to pieces. My fish is in that box. It needs to breathe. I pick up Cash's augur and drill through the lid. Faulkner : This multi-voiced experimental fiction isn't going quite as well as planned. The characters still seem much the same. I keep lapsing into third-person observation. Still, at least it's not entirely clear who's who or what's going on, so I must be doing something right. Maybe I should throw in a few more italics. Darl : He bored straight through the box into her face. A hard rain falls. "I have done my duty to the Lord," pa says and I reckon he dun hit. Cash is sawing the wagon. "It ain't balance," he grunts. I don't know if I am or am not. And nor do you. Cash : My 15 point plan. 1. Carry on sawing. 2. Except. 15. That's it. Tull : They placed a veil over her face so the auger holes didn't show. Anse shaved badly as a mark of respect. He had no teeth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. "How far did you fall?" I ask Cash. "300 feet and one quarter of an inch," he answers. "My leg hurts a bit. It's falling off." Jewel : "I been on ma hoss and the bridge is down," I say. "We never git to Jefferson." Darl : Jewel's mother is a horse. Vardaman's mother is a fish. Mine's a flying pig. Dewey Dell : I wish I had lived I wish I had let her die I wish I knew what I wished and by the way I killed Darl. "No you didn't," says Darl. Tull : The river is riz. I suspicioned the mules would not make it across. Darl : Jewel always did a lot of sleeping. We thought he was seeing a woman or a hoss but it turned out he was working at night to buy a hoss. Ma always did treat him different; I heard her crying and I knew that I knew sure as I knew about Dewey Dell. The dark torrent runs. Sorry, I was getting poetic again. Maybe I should use italics for that bit. The wagon has tipped and the mules are drowned. Faulkner : Son of a bitch. I thought I was writing a modernist tragedy of Mississippi country folk. Seems like it's turning into a farce. Addie : I guess you were expecting a stream of unconsciousness sooner or later. I took Anse and then he took me and I had Cash and he violated my aloneness and then I had Darl but then Anse died for me and I did not lay for him instead - Lord forgive me - I lay with Brother Whitfield and had Jewel and then I had Vardaman and Dewey Dell with Anse to say sorry and now I'm going back in my box. Darl : Cash was lyin by the bank with another broken leg and a broken back. "It ain't hurten," he says. Pa goes off to get more mules and ma starts smellen like old cheese. A bit like this story. Dewey Dell : I goes to chemist and tries to buy something to make my guts go down like Lafe said but the chemist gives me notten so I gets some cement and Darl sets Cash's leg and glues him to the top of ma's box. Jewel : Son of a bitch, pa sold ma hoss to buy some mules. Darl : Jewel looked like a figure in a Greek frieze - Durn it where did I get that metfor from as I ain't never seen a Greek frieze - as he pulled the coffin out the blaze. Cash : My leg ain't hurten even though it's turned black. Darl smashed the cement with a sledgehammer. I not blinken. Darl : Ma is smellen so I tried to burn her but now we dug her into a hole. Dewey Dell : I went to another chemist and I still couldn't get rid of the baby do you think I could have some italics too oh look pa's comen down the street with a woman. Anse : Check out the new Mrs Bundren. John Crace's Digested Read appears in G2 on Tuesday. Caption: article-DigestedClassics.1 [Darl] : "She wants ta be buryened in Jefferson. She tolt me that," pa says. Cash carries on sawing. She looks like she's a goan. Death's just a function of the mind. It must be the cue for me to write a sentence in random italics. Darl : He bored straight through the box into her face. A hard rain falls. "I have done my duty to the Lord," pa says and I reckon he dun hit. Cash is sawing the wagon. "It ain't balance," he grunts. I don't know if I am or am not. And nor do you. Tull : They placed a veil over her face so the auger holes didn't show. [Anse] shaved badly as a mark of respect. He had no teeth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. "How far did you fall?" I ask Cash. "300 feet and one quarter of an inch," he answers. "My leg hurts a bit. It's falling off." - John Crace.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision. The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When we reach it I rum and follow the path which circles the house. jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the comer. In single file and five feet apart and jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff. Tull's wagon stands beside the spring, hitched to the rail, the reins wrapped about the seat stanchion. In the wagon bed are two chairs. Jewel stops at the spring and takes the gourd from the willow branch and drinks. I pass him and mount the path, beginning to bear Cash's saw. When I reach the top he has quit sawing. Standing in a litter of chips, he is fitting two of the boards together. Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. it will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
