"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner (1930)

It's been some time since reading a novel that struck me so, what with the characters so varied in age and perspective but ultimately cursed with the same limited empathy for those around them. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a story about a woman, Addie Bundren, who is dying and is told through the thoughts of those that surround her; her husband, her children, her neighbours, people who liver further off and those whom meet the Bundren family as they carry the dead body of the mother and wife to its destination in Jefferson.

The story is not a savage indictment of the selfishness of people, it isn't an indictment at all. Much like previously reviewed Absalom, Absalom! the characters present the faults but they cannot be condemned for them because it's a fact that everyone has them. Perfect, then, to take a quote from that novel and place it here:

"You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over."

Faulkner succeeds in As I Lay Dying to create a patchwork narrative through the voices and thoughts of quickly changing characters, regardless of their moral substance or their practical influence in the novel. The idea is not to tell the story in vivid detail, plant it with imagery and stick to an overall objective; the idea is to have a look at how the characters in the story respond to death. Some respond with self pity, especially Anse Bundren, the husband of the dead wife:

"I have heard men cuss their luck, and right, for they were sinful men. But I do not say it's a curse on me, because I have done no wrong to be cussed by. I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is my heart: I know it is. I have done things but neither better nor worse than them that pretend otherlike, and I know that Old Marster will care for me as for ere a sparrow that falls. But is seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road."
- Anse Bundren

This is a darkly comical insight into the conceited manner in which the husband thinks only of himself, then makes a reference to something altogether unrelated- a new road built through his village which offends his sensibilities. Anse is concerned with his own relation to the divine and doesn't seem concerned for his wife; his only concern seems to be fulfilling a promise to bury her in Jefferson, her home town. Principles rather than genuine feeling or devotion; the allegation of an undevoted husband stands tall without even needed to be stated in fact.

Other characters regard the situation from what they view as superior ground, from their own faithfulness in God which is superior because it is more humble. Strangely enough, Cora Tull, the Bundrens' neighbour and friend insists upon her moral high ground without realising that in so declaring herself in closer reach of the divine, she demonstrates her own vanity and lack of humility:

"Because it is not us that can judge our sins or know what is sin in the Lord's eyes. She has had a hard life, but so does every woman. But you'd think from the way she talked that she knew more about sin and salvation than the Lord God Himself, than them who have strove and labored with the sin in this human world."
- Cora Tull

The children in the story are all growing at their own pace and the event of Addie Bundren's death precipitates events in their lives which may not have happened or which could have been avoided. Anse Bundren's blindness and his vacuous intentions to have his wife buried in Jefferson plunge his family into varying levels of despair and suffering, the troubled journey of their carriage darkly comic in overall effect. What is the overall effect of the journey? Overall, one might confidently say, the family is split and the father only secures his role as the head of the family, regardless of his stupidity and blindness, by stubbornness and vanity.

The story is tragic, yet comic in style. It depends whether the reader wishes to treat the superstition, flawed nature and selfishness of each character as merely tragic or amusing insights into human behaviour. It is certainly a dark story but its purpose is really a lesson of insight and understanding; perhaps the father of the family is more flawed that the rest of them; perhaps the wife wasn't as she was perceived; perhaps people shouldn't be trusted at their word. Really, simply lessons and no mistake. But in the context and in the way that the conequences of vanity, stubbornness and superstition are portrayed the effect is a wonderful landscape of insight.It makes one wish that in every day life one could perceive the thoughts of others.