Analysis of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 10, 2025

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner’s fifth novel, is the third set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and the first that identifies Yoknapatawpha County by name. The novel was written immediately after—although published before—Sanctuary, the sensational “potboiler” Faulkner had written to recoup losses after the commercial failure of the more experimental The Sound and the Fury (1929). As I Lay Dying marks a return to the formal experiments of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner claimed to have written the novel in six weeks without any revisions. While The Sound and the Fury always remained his favorite among his works, Faulkner said that in As I Lay Dying he deliberately set out to write his masterpiece, and many critics believe he succeeded.

Like The Sound and the Fury and other novels in the Yoknapatawpha cycle, As I Lay Dying explores the dynamic of a particular family. But unlike most of the other Yoknapatawpha novels, it is about neither a family of dissipated Old South aristocrats like the Compsons nor a family of ambitious New South scoundrels like the Snopeses. Instead, the novel focuses on the Bundrens, a poor, white rural family eking out a meager existence in the dwindling Mississippi cotton market.

The family consists of Anse, a chronically lazy farmer who appears to have married to create a supply of slave labor; his wife Addie, a strong-willed former schoolteacher; their relentlessly pragmatic oldest son Cash, a skilled carpenter in his late twenties or early thirties; the next oldest son, Darl, whose poetic temperament is perceived by some as madness; Jewel, a boy of eighteen who seems both physically distinct and emotionally alienated from the rest of the family; the only daughter, Dewey Dell, sixteen and secretly pregnant; and Vardaman, still a child.

As the novel begins, Addie is on her deathbed, and Cash methodically builds her coffin just beneath her bedroom window. When she dies, the Bundrens prepare for a long journey. Anse has promised to bury her with her family in Jefferson, a distance of forty miles on the back roads of rural Mississippi. On the grueling journey, the Bundrens’ mule-drawn wagon is escorted by buzzards attracted by the stench of the body.

A flood washes out a key bridge, and when Anse’s seemingly obsessive drive to fulfill his promise leads him to cross the raging river anyway, the mules drown and Cash’s leg is broken. After trading Jewel’s beloved horse for a new team of mules, the family continues, stopping at various farms overnight and sleeping in barns. At the Gillespie farm, the barn catches fire during the night, but the journey continues when Addie’s coffin is rescued from the fire, just as it had been rescued from the flood.

It gradually becomes clear that each member of the family has an ulterior, selfish motive for wanting to get to Jefferson. Dewey Dell wants to get an abortion before her pregnancy is discovered. Vardaman wants to buy a toy train that he once saw in a store window. Cash, though he sacrifices much for the journey, is also intent on buying a “graphophone” in Jefferson. Anse makes it clear that he is more interested in buying a set of false teeth in Jefferson than in fulfilling any promise.

Darl’s motives are perhaps the most difficult to discern, but it is clear that they involve escaping from the family altogether, particularly from Addie’s influence: he purposely tries to lose Addie’s coffin at the bottom of the river, and he is the one who sets fire to Gillespie’s barn in an effort to destroy the coffin. Only Jewel, who is revealed to be the illegitimate product of Addie’s affair with the Reverend Whitfield, appears to be undertaking the trip out of genuine devotion to his mother.

Addie herself, it turns out, had her own ulterior motive for making her family undertake the journey. Faulkner reveals that she married so she could produce children who, unlike her pupils, would be entirely her possessions, entirely extensions of her own will. She found, however, that her children were at least as much Anse’s as her own, and were finally as alien to her as he is.

She had the affair with Whitfield in a desperate attempt to gain autonomy over some part of her life, and the result was Jewel, who she told her friend Cora Tull “is my cross and—will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he will save me” (133). Her words prove prophetic, as Jewel indeed rescues Addie’s coffin from both the overflowing river and the fire in Gillespie’s barn.

Her request to be buried in Jefferson, then, is both a declaration of independence from the Bundren family and a last attempt to make her own influence felt beyond the grave.

When the Bundrens arrive in Jefferson, however, most of these motives are thwarted. Partly because Anse appropriates all the family’s money, Dewey Dell does not get her abortion and Vardaman does not get his train. Darl’s attempts at escape lead only to a more profound confinement, as the family has him committed to an asylum in Jackson to avoid liability for Gillespie’s barn. Only Anse gets everything he wants: not only his false teeth, but a brand-new Mrs. Bundren as well. Cash gets his graphophone and Jewel gets his mother buried, but both ultimately serve the ends of Anse and the newly reconstituted Bundren family.

The novel ends with the image of the remaining family members gathered together around the graphophone—Jewel included, indicating that Addie’s version of life after death has itself proved mortal.

What is most original in this story is the radically experimental form in which it is told. The novel is composed of fifty-nine interior monologues, each headed by the name of one of the fifteen characters whose thoughts are being transcribed. The style of each monologue reflects both the point of view and the degree of sophistication of its narrator, so that different sections recount different pieces of the narrative and provide conflicting interpretations of characters and events.

Critics such as Michael Millgate and Donald M. Kartiganer have agreed that one purpose of such experiments is to demonstrate the degree to which characters’ selfish purposes color their perceptions of reality. But the novel’s form also resembles one of its most prominent recurring images, that of vessels within vessels, or Chinese boxes. The meanings of the surviving Bundrens’ lives are largely contained within Addie’s coffin, which lies at their feet in the wagon, and within her one and only monologue, which unaccountably appears long after the death.

The reader must peel back layer upon layer of the Bundrens’ story in order to find its dark emotional heart and the answers to the riddles within Addie’s fierce monologue. Irving Howe has pointed out that the novel’s central theme is the tension between individual self-definition and the contingency of selfhood upon others, particularly parents and family. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pregnant bodies of Addie and Dewey Dell, both of whom conceive of themselves as inhabited by alien presences.

This is, of course, the condition Addie rages against in her monologue, rebelling against wifehood and motherhood and repudiating the children who are also Anse’s. Feminist critics have sometimes interpreted this struggle as Addie’s heroic revolt against patriarchy, but Faulkner also seems to be attributing darker and more selfish motives to her. In marrying and bearing children, Addie hopes to extend her personality and will to action even beyond the grave, but she finds that, ironically, she must sacrifice too much of her identity to do so.

Darl faces a problem complementary to Addie’s—the difficulty of defining oneself as an individual when one is also the product of a family. Addie is the powerful parental influence Darl resists in his struggle for autonomy, and this struggle is represented by his constant efforts to thwart the fulfillment of Addie’s wish to be buried in Jefferson.

Neither Darl nor Addie, however, gets the last word in the novel. The final monologue belongs to Cash, who has not played much of a role in the family’s emotional struggles. Cash is the only character who seems to have worked out a practical compromise between autonomy and contingency, words and deeds, and these issues increasingly become the themes of his final monologues.

While both Addie’s and Darl’s quests for autonomy end in confinement—Addie within a coffin surrounded by her ancestors and Darl imprisoned in a cell in Jackson by his immediate family—only Cash, sitting around the graphophone with his family, seems to have found a way to fulfill his individual ambitions within the context of family life.

As in all his Yoknapatawpha novels, the fate of the South also becomes a key theme in As I Lay Dying. Faulkner repeatedly contrasts the poor rural family with the “town folk” of the New South. Cleanth Brooks has observed a heroism in the Bundrens’ quest and their stubborn endurance. In a somewhat different vein, Myra Jehlen sees the class dynamic in this and other Faulkner novels as an attempt to critique the prevailing myths of the South.

While the novel’s conclusion seems tragic, even apocalyptic, many critics have found in this novel signs of Faulkner’s darkly comic sensibility. In an early, important study of Faulkner’s achievement, Olga Vickery explains that the juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy is important to the book’s structure. Harold Bloom discerns in Anse’s triumph an anticipation of the more overt comedy of the Snopes trilogy, which Faulkner would begin a decade later, but for Bloom the dark irony of As I Lay Dying remains Faulkner’s finest achievement.

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Sources

Bloom, Harold, ed. William Faulkner. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1974.
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. New York: Random House, 1951. Rev. ed., New York: Vintage, 1952.
Jehlen, Myra. Class and Character in Faulkner’s South. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
Kartiganer, Donald M. The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.
Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1963.
Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner. 2nd ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.