Book #16: As I Lay Dying

Title: As I Lay Dying
Author: William Faulkner

I read a lot of Faulkner in college and graduate school (the first time around) but somehow never managed to read As I Lay Dying. Since it's basically the seminal work where a story is told from the viewpoint of multiple narrators (well, except for The Canterbury Tales), I figured I needed to read it for my Creative Writing Theory class where I've chosen to study works of fiction with multiple narrators. It was kind of a no-brainer.

As I Lay Dying tells the story of the Bundren family. Addie Bundren always said that when she died, she wanted to be buried with her kin in Jefferson, a day's journey from the rural Yoknapatawpha County home where she's lived out her days in misery, raising five children. Addie kicks the bucket in the opening pages of the novel, during the rainiest rainy season Northern Mississippi has seen in a generation. Anse hasn't been much of a husband, but he decides that he'll honor Addie's wishes, even though the journey may be rough. Addie's five children accompany him on the journey: Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman. All seven members of the Bundren family tell portions of the story, along with neighbors and others who help them along in their journey.

I feel a little bit like I cheated when reading As I Lay Dying. In order to allow me to get the reading done quickly, I ordered it from Audible and listened while I drove to and from school. This particular version of the story had a different narrator for each character, which made it a lot easier to tell the characters apart and didn't force me to rely on Faulkner's ability to differentiate between characters by words on a page. However, from what I could tell in the audiobook, it wouldn't have been too difficult for me to differentiate between the characters. There are a lot of things Faulkner does well in As I Lay Dying, and creating unique voices for each character is one of his strengths. Darl, Cash and Anse all had distinctive patterns of speech (particularly Darl's thoughtful, metaphorical meanderings, which were really interesting, but I had a hard time believing an uneducated farmer from rural Mississipi would be preoccupied with symbols and metaphors). However, his efforts with Vardamon were less successful. Vardamon is Addie's youngest son, a child when his mother dies, and it was extremely difficult for me to tell if Vardamon was an unusually skilled six-year-old or a mentally compromised twelve-year-old. In the chapter when he repeats "my mother is a fish" a dozen times, I wanted to send him to his room and tell him to shut up.

I learned a lot about how characters can move a single story forward, each telling their tangential part, without the story as a whole going off track. The momentum of As I Lay Dying always moved forward, even as the different narrators got caught up in their thoughts. I'm not sure there was as much action as I'd be accustomed to seeing in a more modern novel using the same techniques, so in some ways As I Lay Dying feels a bit like a scholarly exercise. But I was surprised and laughed out loud at the actions in the final chapter, so even though I wanted to wring the necks of individual characters along the journey, I realized by the end that I'd come to care about these people and their sometimes conflicting desires and goals.