As I Lay Dying

The Good: Southern gothic stream-of-consciousness with many narrators
The Bad: Unsettling and confusing, especially at the beginning
The Literary: The title is derived from William Marris’s 1925 translation of Homer’s Odyssey

The Bundren family’s epic journey takes them across the Mississippi countryside to bury their matriarch Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated by each of the family members in turn, this novel is considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction for structure, style, and drama.

I really wanted to read As I Lay Dying for the structure. The different character points of view are all written in a stream of consciousness style. Each character’s unfiltered thoughts, memories, and sensory impressions reveal their personal biases and inner motivations, and each does so in highly stylized language, mostly in a fragmented Southern vernacular.

As a critical reader, I tend to analyze a story as I go, and I picked this up to see if a stream of consciousness prose could help place me in a characters’ inner world. Our modern eyes tend to find accents in dialogue distasteful or racist, and the prose here is all inner dialogue, written from the point of view of poor uneducated white Southerners. So unsurprisingly, it is important to note that some racist remarks do take me out of the story, as when one character likens another’s swollen injured foot to an n-word’s foot.

Faulkner definitely succeeds in writing characters who are all come from the same stock yet are each distinct. He throws many characters at the reader, chapter by chapter, and you quickly discover you must let go of trying to keep track of them and just experience the story through them, though it feels fragmented and often contradictory. But there’s comes a point about a third of the way through where the characters and narrative gel, and as a reader you find more solid footing.

The most prominent theme of the book is death, and together with the depressed economy of 1928 and generational poverty of the deep south, I knew this book would be difficult to read. And it is, but not in the way I expected. I suppose my expectations of such a highly lauded and literary author were that the story would be played straight. That the family would explore death and grief through their small worldviews, and that the book would be quite depressing.

What surprises me most is that it’s funny. The story is an epic odyssey that gradually turns absurdist. The family spends their nine-day journey dragging their mother’s increasingly decomposing corpse across the countryside in extreme conditions. The human body turns grotesque, not just the mother’s smell, but one of the sons sustains a broken leg, which the family encases in a cast of cement. The characters narrate the increasingly horrifying, ridiculous events with humorless straightness. I don’t want to give too many examples away, but I often find my mouth hanging open with the twisted sense of humor.

I understand why As I Lay Dying is so important to literature. It’s unique style, narrative structure, and stream of consciousness storytelling, innovated fiction and the way we tell stories. Faulkner manages to create characters who ring true and aren’t stereotypes. But most important for me, I am struck by how he manages to define the haunting southern gothic genre, adding profound tragedy, while at the same time incorporating a grotesque irony. This is a masterpiece, and I love it.