As I Lay Dying Editorial Review

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is a heavily satirical novel that balances the extremes of both situational comedy and tragedy. The novel follows the journey of a rural family to a distant town in order to bury the Bundren family’s matriarch, Addie, a solemn woman who ends up driving the plot of the story from her coffin. Told through fifteen different narrators, including the deceased herself, each contribute their own strife and interpretation of the story. Faulkner’s detached and poetic writing style lends itself well to the threatening descriptions of the American South throughout the novel, in which the characters are as threatened by their internal conflicts as they are by those around them. Unconventionally written, As I Lay Dying features strange metaphors, unfinished sentences, and indistinct transitions between thought, speech, and action. Even the title itself is a puzzle. Taken from book XI of the Odyssey (which I’m sure many freshmen are familiar with, willing or not), it is peculiar in that it suggests a continual process of dying, despite the fact that Addie Bundren had died early in the novel. Could this be a stylistic sacrifice, or does it have greater implications? This book also has the shortest and maybe the funniest chapter I have ever read, which is reproduced in full below:

“My mother is a fish.”

Yep, that’s the entire chapter.

As challenging as it is intriguing, I highly recommend Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to anyone looking for an intellectual read.

Thank you so much for reading!