As I Lay Dying

“They are rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs, with lowered head; Jewel with dug heels, shutting off the horse’s wind with one hand, with the other patting the horse’s neck in short strokes myriad and caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.” 

This passage describes the centaur-like hybrid creature that Jewel becomes when he is riding his horse. The succession of adjectives indicates that Darl, the observer, is actively constructing an impression of his brother on horseback. The juxtaposition of caressing and cursing in Jewel’s petting of his horse indicates his simultaneously aggressive and affectionate relationship with it and the contrasts of light and dark in his own character.

“I can see the fan and Dewey Dell’s arm. I said if you’d just let her alone. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you’re tired you can’t breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less. One lick less.” 

Jewel contemplates the scene at his mother’s deathbed with disgust, even conjecturing that Cash’s effort in making Addie’s coffin and Dewey Dell’s in fanning her, are accelerating Addie’s death. The multiple subjects crammed into one sentence enhance the impression of noise and panic as Addie’s time runs out. To Jewel, the fan is moving so fast that Addie will not be able to breathe the air it creates, while each successive stroke of Cash’s adze is not the expected “one lick more” but the “one lick less,” which indicates its diminishment of Addie’s life-span.

“Then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without the words, and I knew he knew because if he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us.” 

This passage refers to the fact that Dewey Dell knows that Darl is aware of her secret pregnancy without having used the words to tell her. The idea of knowing and communicating women’s problems, whether biological or spiritual, without the words and having trouble articulating them, is common to both Dewey Dell and Addie. Society’s prudishness with regard to female sexuality, and the preference for not articulating women’s problems causes the absurd predicament of such problems being unspeakable while they continue to exist.

“When it got far enough into the day for me to read weather sign I knew it couldn’t have been anybody but Anse that sent. I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.” 

This passage is one of many that establishes Anse’s reputation as a “luckless man,” who everything goes wrong for. His calling for Peabody, the doctor, at the last minute when it is already too late, is enhanced by the pathetic fallacy of cyclone-like weather.

“I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible. Lafe. Lafe. ‘Lafe’ Lafe. Lafe. […] I feel the darkness rushing past my breast, past the cow; I begin to rush upon the darkness but the cow stops me and the darkness rushes on upon the sweet blast of her moaning breath, filled with wood and with silence.” 

For Dewey Dell, the process of becoming “unalone,” the state she and her mother, Addie, use to describe motherhood, is terrifying and unsafe. Thinking that she is alone apart from the baby in her womb and the cow that needs milking beside her, she calls out her lover’s name, both silently and aloud. The barn is likely the place where they met in the dark to copulate and carry out the assignation of Lafe’s giving her ten dollars for an abortion. We see the motif of “silence,” which is associated with womanhood throughout the novel, in the cow’s breath, signifying that Dewey Dell exists apart from the male characters and is locked into a different kind of existence with the female cow.

“They had laid her in it reversed. Cash made it clock-shape, like this [Image of a clock-shaped tomb accompanies the text] with every joint and seam bevelled and scrubbed with the plane, tight as a drum and neat as a sewing basket, and they had laid her in it head to foot so it wouldn’t crush her dress. It was her wedding dress and it had a flare out bottom […] and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show.” 

This passage describes the juxtaposition of care and carelessness regarding the Bundren family’s treatment of Addie’s corpse. The care is communicated through the coffin’s purposeful shape and the thought to bury Addie in the dress which was likely her best. The wedding dress, which she likely wore when she came from Jefferson to marry Anse, signals her reverse journey back to her father. However, in a darkly comic turn, Cash has compromised his labor on the coffin by accidentally puncturing holes in his mother’s face, which have to be concealed with a makeshift mosquito net. This contrast of care and carelessness is a motif throughout the rest of the novel, as the Bundrens fulfill Addie’s wishes while putting her coffin through extreme conditions in the process.

“For an instant it resists, as though volitional, as though within it her pole-thin body clings furiously, even though dead, to a sort of modesty, as she would have tried to conceal a soiled garment that she could not prevent her body soiling. Then it breaks free, rising suddenly as though the emaciation of her body had added buoyancy to the planks or as though, seeing that the garment was about to be torn from her, she rushes suddenly after it in a passionate reversal that flouts its own desire and need.”

In this macabre scene where the men are attempting to lift Addie’s coffin, Darl attributes the volition of a living woman onto his mother’s coffin. The anthropomorphic coffin displays prudishness at being lifted conspicuously high by a band of men. Then it makes a plea for liberty, to be allowed to control its own destiny rather than to be pedaled through the hands of these men who want to make a show of it. Here, Darl, in language that is more articulate and formal than the other characters’, projects his knowledge of his mother’s wish for aloneness onto the coffin. Perhaps he indicates that he is suspicious of his father’s endeavor in taking the coffin to town.

“I says I got some regard for what folks says about my flesh and blood even if you haven’t, even if I have raised such a durn passel of boys, and when you fixes it so folks can say such about you, it’s a reflection on your ma, I says, not me: I am a man and I can stand it; it’s on your womenfolks, your ma and sister that you should care for, and I turned and looked back at him setting there, laughing.” 

After reproaching his sons’ eccentricities, Anse defends himself from charges that their behavior is a reflection on him. He considers that his gender excuses him from blame, whereas his wife’s means that she absorbs all the censure for her children’s misbehavior. Despite his own sexist attitude, Anse tells his sons to have compassion for the women in the family, who will be blamed for any impropriety. Anse’s speech, which is full of grammatical errors and informal diction, such as the word “passel,” meaning large group, gives a misleading impression of his intelligence. While he appears a simple, unlucky farmer, he is actually running the operation of Addie’s removal to Jefferson in order to benefit from the trip himself.

“Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hard-working man profit. It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off them that sweats […] Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it. It’s because there’s a reward for us above, where they can’t take their motors and such.” 

Anse describes the hard, miserable existence which afflicts rural laborers like himself. He finds some comfort in the Christian teaching that after death, all fortunes will be reversed, and his reward will be deferred to heaven. However, the mention of a motor car, which would have made transporting Addie to Jefferson far easier, indicates a hint of resentment. Heaven, it seems, is the only place a motor car cannot be taken; meanwhile, he is stuck with the low technology of a mule-drawn wagon which cannot be relied upon to make even the most essential journeys.

“A man can’t tell nothing about them. I lived with the same one fifteen years and I be durn if I can. And I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman. But they make life hard on them not taking it as it comes up, like a man does.” 

Samson, the Bundrens’ host from the first night they are on the road, makes the sexist generalization that women are mysterious and difficult. He responds this way after hearing his wife, Rachel’s, passionate objection to Addie’s corpse being carted about the country. When Rachel attributes this feat to Anse’s male brutishness and insensitivity, Samson classes her unpredictable reaction to a whim, a bit like Addie’s wish to be buried in Jefferson. Thus, women, the great Other, forever stand to surprise men with their whims and emotions and so cannot be fully trusted. However, there is also some absurdist comedy in Samson’s surprise that the element coming between him and his wife is a body.

“I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish that I had time to wish that I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon too soon too soon.” 

On the wagon ride, Dewey Dell is processing her mother’s death while feeling that she simultaneously has not processed it. Her own sense of preoccupation, and time running out with the daily advancement of her unwanted pregnancy, makes her feel that there is no time for the slower process of grief. The assonant repetition of too soon, which breaks the logic of the syntax, gives the sense of loss of control as Dewey Dell feels that she is being carried along with events rather than shaping them.

“When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.” 

When Darl and Cash are contemplating a 15-year-old Jewel’s nocturnal antics, they reach the conclusion that “new and hard and bright” as Jewel’s sexuality is, it will aim towards something that is risky and unknown rather than safe. Jewel, their mother’s favorite and the most beautiful and vigorous among them, takes a risk when he purchases his horse out of self-interest. Ironically, the risk here is self-parading and self-interest rather than the womanly lover Jewel’s brothers imagine.

“He was standing there, humped, mournful, looking at the empty road beyond the swagging and swaying bridge. And that gal, too, with the lunch-basket on one arm and that package under the other. Just going to town. Bent on it. They would risk the fire and the earth and the water and all just to eat a sack of bananas.” 

Tull watches with amazement as Anse and Dewey Dell ignore the highly unsteady bridge and stubbornly fix on the idea of going to town. The motif of Anse’s melancholy hunch-backed aspect and Dewey Dell’s two appendages, is a repeated one that emphasizes their consistency of purpose. The small, childish reward of a sack of bananas after risking their lives and livelihoods is pathetic and absurd to Tull, who judges the Bundrens as both ridiculous and brave.

“He came up to see and I hollering catch her Darl catch her and he didn’t come back because she was too heavy he had to go on catching at her and I hollering catch her darl catch her darl because in the water she could go faster than a man and Darl had to grabble for her so I knew he could catch her because he is the best grabbler.” 

Vardaman’s sentence, with its lack of punctuation and its repetitions of his brother Darl’s name, conveys the latter’s panicked, scrabbling attempts to save Addie’s coffin from the river. The repetition of Darl, both in upper and lowercase, reflects a younger brother’s admiration for his grown-up adult brother, who attempts heroics that are as yet beyond his power. The notion of Addie, a woman in a coffin, going “faster than a man” in the water, is a surreal image, which hints at the male protagonists’ loss of control of the situation.

“Then she began to sing again, working at the wash-tub, with that singing look in her face like she had done give up folks and all their foolishness and had done went on ahead of them, marching up the sky, singing.” 

Tull mocks his wife Cora’s religious zeal as he repeats the motif of her singing, which reaches a surreal, synesthetic effect when it assumes visual form on the expression on Cora’s face. Further, the image of “marching up the sky” is an absurd one, as it indicates that this mortal woman thinks that other earth-treading mortals are beneath her and would want to attempt the impossible feat of acting like earth is heaven. Cora’s hypocrisy is also shown in her scant level of Christian compassion as she delights in contemplating the “foolishness” of other folks.

“He is my cross and he 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.” 

Cora cites Addie’s words about her favorite and most troubling child, Jewel. Addie talks of Jewel as though he is a matter of religious transcendence through penance, directly alluding to the metaphor of Christ’s cross. The full meaning of this passage comes to light in later chapters when we learn that Jewel was the product of Addie’s out-of-wedlock liaison with Whitfield, the priest.

“When I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at.” 

Addie finds that her disillusionment with words arrives at the same time as that other unwelcome experience—her pregnancy with Cash. Pregnancy is the answer to her harsh view of life, which she thinks is an unnecessarily torturous phenomenon. Language is similarly nonsensical and unfit for purpose. The irregular syntax in the clause that “words don’t ever fit what they are trying to say at” reflects Addie’s Southern dialect, while the extraneous “at” indicates that she gestures to a meaning beyond what the words appear to signify. The syntax thus expresses the weakness of language in conveying meaning.

“When Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he couldn’t have known he was right any more than I could have known I was wrong.”

This passage alludes to the promise that Anse made Addie of taking her back to Jefferson when she died. Addie, who thought that she was finished having children after Darl, her second, is already turning her thoughts to death, when she will get a break from them. A depressed Addie thinks back to her father’s idea that living was just getting ready to stay dead a long time, and she thinks that after two childbirths she knows the full meaning of his pronouncement.

“She had sworn then that she would never tell it, but eternity is a fearsome thing to face: have I not wrestled thigh to thigh with Satan myself? let me not have also the sin of her broken vow upon my soul. Let not the waters of Thy mighty wrath encompass me until I have cleansed my soul in the presence of them whom I injured.” 

Whitfield, the man who Addie had an affair with, addresses this confession by means of a prayer to the Lord that he humbles himself before. The transgression of adultery is made sin in the image of wrestling “thigh to thigh with Satan,” which alludes to sexual intercourse. Whitfield now performs the self-righteous act of wanting to atone for his sin in the presence of the Bundrens. Although Darl mentions the subject of Jewel’s father, Addie and Whitfield’s adultery does not make the impact the reader might expect. Still, it is significant in contributing to Faulkner’s critique of religious hypocrisy, in addition to showing that Addie was her own person.

“It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an ant-hill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folks were scared would fall to pieces before they could get it out of town, with that home-made box and another fellow with a broken leg lying on a quilt on top of it, and the father and a little boy sitting on the seat and the marshal trying to make them get out of town.” 

Told through the pharmacist’s eyes, the spectacle of the Bundrens and their wagon seems ludicrous and grotesque. Instead of being afforded the sanctity normally reserved to the dead, Addie’s eight-days-dead corpse has been left to stink like rotten cheese while broken-legged Cash lies on top her. However, the “home-made” nature of the box and the determination to keep going on the ramshackle wagon also lends the Bundrens a heroic appeal. They resemble the early pioneers of the American West, who were equally impoverished and determined in their missions.

“The barn is still red. It used to be redder than this. Then it went swirling, making the stars run backward without falling. It hurt my heart like the train did. When I went to find where they stay at night, I saw something that Dewey Dell says I mustn’t never tell nobody.”

Before we learn that Darl burned down Gillespie’s barn, Vardaman’s observation sets up the spectacle of the burned barn that is red hours after burning, and also repeats the refrain of seeing something that must be forever kept a secret. Guided by Vardaman’s childish perspective, the reader prepares themselves for something truly shocking. The image of the train that hurts Vardaman’s heart will be picked up when Darl is sent to gaol on a train.

“He went to Jackson. He went crazy and went to Jackson both. Lots of people didn’t go crazy. Pa and Cash and Jewel and Dewey Dell and me didn’t go crazy. We never did go crazy. We didn’t go to Jackson either.” 

Vardaman’s sing-song refrain plays with the flexibility of the verb phrase “to go,” as he contemplates how after so much time traveling as a family, his brother Darl has now taken the solo journey on a train and into madness. The listing of the names of his other family members makes Darl seem especially alone in his insanity.

“Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.” 

Uniquely in the novel, Darl’s final chapter is written in the third person, as Darl contemplates his predicament from the distance of an outside observer. This exacerbates the impression of Darl’s fragile mental health following the burning of the barn. He even repeats Vardaman’s childish cadences, as he refers to himself as “our brother Darl” and describes prison as a cage in childish terms. The grimy hands and a foaming mouth are disturbing, animalistic images which refer to the brutality of his being locked up.