As I Lay Dying
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First published on 6 October 1930, As I Lay Dying follows the Bundren family on an arduous journey across rural Mississippi to fulfil the dying wish of their mother, Addie: to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson. As they carry her coffin by wagon through floods, fire and mounting misfortune, each member of the family reveals a private world of grief, resentment, desire and stubborn determination. The story is told through the shifting voices of fifteen narrators, from the fiercely devoted Jewel to the troubled Darl and the youngest child, Vardaman, whose bewildered declaration that his mother is a fish gives the novel one of its most haunting moments.
Both darkly comic and deeply unsettling, Faulkner’s novel transforms an ordinary family journey into an extraordinary exploration of death, loyalty, isolation and the limits of understanding. Its fractured voices and daring structure make the reader piece together the story from conflicting perceptions, while its vivid portrait of the rural American South moves between grotesque humour and profound tenderness. Written in the wake of The Sound and the Fury, it confirms Faulkner as one of the great innovators of twentieth-century fiction.
From the book
“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
On As I Lay Dying
“It is a virtuosic piece, displaying everything that Faulkner has at his disposal.”
— E.L. Doctorow, The New York Review of Books