As I Lay Dying is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. It was published in 1930 and is one of several novels and short stories that Faulkner set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi.
The novel begins with Addie Bundren dying in her backwoods home, with her son Cash making her coffin. The other members of the family are Addie’s lazy and whining husband, Anse; their sons, Cash, Darl, and Vardaman; their daughter, Dewey Dell; and Addie’s illegitimate son, Jewel, whom she conceived with a local preacher.
After Addie dies, the family puts the coffin containing her body onto a mule-driven wagon to make the 10-day trip to Addie’s hometown of Jefferson, where she asked to be buried. The rest of the novel describes the difficulties the family experiences taking the body for burial.
Faulkner tells his story through a sequence of 59 short, fragmented chapters. They are all narrated by members of the family and associates who relate their thoughts. The tone varies from humor to pathos. During the course of the action, Cash re-injures a broken leg and becomes permanently disabled, Darl is taken to an insane asylum, and Dewey Dell is faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Jewel is badly burned after Darl sets fire to a barn in which his mother’s coffin is lying so the body, which was beginning to decay, would be cremated. The injured Jewel dragged the coffin to safety. The novel ends when Anse Bundren introduces a woman he met in Jefferson at the time of Addie’s funeral as his new wife.
As was the case with Faulkner’s first novel, The Sound and The Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying was considered experimental and difficult when it first came out, with its multiple narrators and fractured style. Faulkner wrote the bulk of As I Lay Dying in six weeks while working the night shift in a power plant. He boasted that he hardly revised a word.
Critical reaction to As I Lay Dying was positive among some critics. However, its small first printing barely sold out, which led the struggling Faulkner to publish the more accessible novel Sanctuary (1931) as his next work. The sensationalism of that book, with its melodrama and bizarre cast of characters, made Faulkner a bestselling author.
See also Faulkner, William.
