About As I Lay Dying
Faulkner drafted As I Lay Dying in six weeks while he was working the
night shift at a power plant. He later said, "I set out deliberately to write
a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I
knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall."
He clearly succeeded in what he set out to do: As I Lay Dying is a work
in which Faulkner's talent is fully within his control, and the result is one
of the twentieth century's finest and most beloved novels.
Unlike The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying has a clearly
delineated plot line: it is the tale of a journey, and despite the many delays
in that journey, nothing impedes the straightforward movement of the plot
toward its destination--the arrival in Jefferson and the burial of Addie
Bundren's body. However, the way the story is presented embodies an experiment
in narrative technique that is brilliantly achieved. Removing himself
completely as an author-narrator figure, Faulkner breaks his story into
fifty-nine separate monologues, each spoken or thought by one of fifteen
characters. There is no exposition, no description of character or action
outside of the way the characters see themselves, one another, and the events
in which they are involved.
Like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying centers upon a single
family. It is the often comic, often grotesque story of their singleminded
effort to carry out their father's promise to his dying wife: Addie Bundren
wishes to be buried with her family in the town of Jefferson, forty miles away.
This journey, delayed by flood and fire and attended by a growing flock of
buzzards, takes nine days. Throughout their absurd and quixotic ordeal, the
family members exhibit a deep respect for their mother's desire, but they also
have desires of their own that might be fulfilled by this chance at visiting
the town. The father, Anse, wants a new set of teeth; the only daughter, Dewey
Dell, is pregnant and hopes to get a pill to bring on a miscarriage; Cash wants
a gramophone; Vardaman, the youngest, wants a toy train. The two remaining
brothers, Jewel and Darl, want nothing for themselves, but the journey brings
to its crisis a rivalry that has deep roots in their relationship with their
mother.
At once ludicrous and profound, the novel shows us a group of people responding
to grief and to the loss of the most important person in their lives. At the
same time, it illuminates the nature of love within the family and the
responsibility that family members have to one another and to themselves.
For discussion: As I Lay Dying
- Which are the most intelligent and sympathetic voices in the novel? With
whom do you most and least identify? Is Faulkner controlling your closeness to
some characters and not others? How is this done, given the seemingly equal
mode of presentation for all voices?
- Even the reader of such an unusual book may be surprised to come upon Addie
Bundren's narrative on page 169, if only because Addie has been dead since page
48. Why is Addie's narrative placed where it is, and what is the effect of
hearing Addie's voice at this point in the book? Is this one of the ways in
which Faulkner shows Addie's continued "life" in the minds and hearts of her
family? How do the issues raised by Addie here relate to the book as a
whole?
- Faulkner allows certain characters--especially Darl and Vardaman--to
express themselves in language and imagery that would be impossible, given
their lack of education and experience in the world. Why does he break with
the realistic representation of character in this way?
- What makes Darl different from the other characters? Why is he able to
describe Addie's death [p. 48] when he is not present? How is he able to
intuit the fact of Dewey Dell's pregnancy? What does this uncanny visionary
power mean, particularly in the context of what happens to Darl at the end of
the novel? Darl has fought in World War I; why do you think Faulkner has
chosen to include this information about him? What are the sources and meaning
of his madness?
- Anse Bundren is surely one of the most feckless characters in literature,
yet he alone thrives in the midst of disaster. How does he manage to command
the obedience and cooperation of his children? Why are other people so
generous with him? He gets his new teeth at the end of the novel and he also
gets a new wife. What is the secret of Anse's charm? How did he manage to
make Addie marry him, when she is clearly more intelligent than he is?
- Some critics have spoken of Cash as the novel's most gentle character,
while others have felt that he is too rigid, too narrow-minded, to be
sympathetic. What does Cash's list of the thirteen reasons for beveling the
edges of the coffin tell us about him? What does it tell us about his feeling
for his mother? Does Cash's carefully reasoned response to Darl's imprisonment
seem fair to you, or is it a betrayal of his brother?
- Jewel is the result of Addie's affair with the evangelical preacher
Whitfield (an aspect of the plot that bears comparison with Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter). When we read Whitfield's section, we realize that Addie
has again allied herself with a man who is not her equal. How would you
characterize the preacher? What is the meaning of this passionate alliance,
now repudiated by Whitfield? Does Jewel know who his father is?
- What is your response to the section spoken by Vardaman, which states
simply, "My mother is a fish"? What sort of psychological state or process
does this declaration indicate? What are some of the ways in which Vardaman
insists on keeping his mother alive, even as he struggles to understand that
she is dead? In what other ways does the novel show characters wrestling with
ideas of identity and embodiment?
- This is a novel full of acts of love, not the least of which is the
prolonged search in the river for Cash's tools. Consider some of the other
ways that love is expressed among the members of the family. What compels
loyalty in this family? What are the ways in which that loyalty is betrayed?
Which characters are most self-interested?
- The saga of the Bundren family is participated in, and reflected upon, by
many other characters. What does the involvement of Doctor Peabody, of
Armstid, and of Cora and Vernon Tull say about the importance of community in
country life? Are the characters in the town meant to provide a contrast with
country people?
- Does Faulkner deliberately make humor and the grotesque interdependent in
this novel? What is the effect of such horrific details as Vardaman's
accidental drilling of holes in his dead mother's face? Of Darl and Vardaman
listening to the decaying body of Addie "speaking"? Of Vardaman's anxiety
about the growing number of buzzards trying to get at the coffin? Of Cash's
bloody broken leg, set in concrete and suppurating in the heat? Of Jewel's
burnt flesh? Of the "cure" that Dewey Dell is tricked into?
- In one of the novel's central passages, Addie meditates upon the distance
between words and actions: "I would think how words go straight up in a thin
line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging
to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same
person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are
just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what
they never had and cannot have until they forget the words" [pp. 173-74]. What
light does this passage shed upon the meaning of the novel? Aren't words
necessary in order to give form to the story of the Bundrens? Or is Faulkner
saying that words--his own chosen medium--are inadequate?
- What does the novel reveal about the ways in which human beings deal with
death, grieving, and letting go of our loved ones?
About Absalom, Absalom!
When he completed Absalom, Absalom! in May 1936, Faulkner said, "I think
it's the best novel yet written by an American." He described it as "the story
of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they
destroyed him." It is the epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, who grows up as a
dirt-poor boy in backwoods Appalachia and has his first glimpse of social
hierarchy when his family moves to a plantation in Tidewater Virginia. One day
he goes to the mansion's front door, carrying a message, and is told by a slave
wearing the master's livery that he must go around to the back door. This
experience has a searing effect on the boy's consciousness. From that moment
forward, he sets in motion his grand design: to become, at any cost, a man of
wealth and power. He goes to colonial Haiti and marries the daughter of a
plantation owner he has saved from death during the slave revolt there, but he
abandons his wife and newborn son, Charles Bon, when he learns that his wife
has a strain of Negro blood. In 1833 he arrives in Mississippi with a gang of
Haitian slaves, cheats a Chickasaw Indian out of a hundred square miles of
land, and begins with a ruthless and fanatical determination to build a mansion
in the wilderness, to carve out a plantation, to gather wealth, to acquire a
second wife and forge a dynasty that will carry on his name. But the son he
left behind returns to haunt him. At the university Charles Bon becomes the
best friend of Henry, the son of Sutpen's second marriage, and eventually Henry
kills Charles in order to prevent him from marrying their sister Judith. Henry
repudiates his father and flees; ultimately Sutpen, with his plantation in
ruins after the Civil War, is reduced to selling trinkets in a backwoods
general store. After his plan to breed yet a third family with the sister of
his dead wife fails, Sutpen impregnates the teenage daughter of a poor white
man, who kills him with a scythe when he insults the girl because she has given
birth to a daughter. In an ironic coda to Sutpen's dream of dynastic grandeur,
the only descendant who survives to carry on the Sutpen blood is the grandson
of Charles Bon, another of Faulkner's "idiots."
While it is the most challenging of Faulkner's works, Absalom, Absalom!
also contains the most mature and profound examination of his greatest themes:
the South's mixture of horror and pride in its own history, the
interrelationship of incest and miscegenation, the tragic legacy of slavery,
and, as always at the heart of it all, the family drama.
For discussion: Absalom, Absalom!
- Any reader bewildered by the opening pages of Absalom, Absalom! will
realize immediately that its greatest challenge lies in its complex narrative
structure, and as with The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying,
you must learn how to read it as you go. How many narrators are there, and
what is their relationship to one another? What are the sources of their
authority as tellers of the Sutpen story? What, so far as you can make out,
"happened," as opposed to what is conjectured by the various narrators? Why
might Faulkner have chosen such a challenging narrative form, despite the
difficulties it presents for his readers?
- At the center of the novel is the gigantic figure of Sutpen--a man who
drives himself to extraordinary lengths in the pursuit of his "design." Sutpen
means different things to different people: to Rosa, he is a monster, but one
she would have married, whereas to Colonel Compson, he is a human being with
sympathetic characteristics. How does your view of Sutpen change as the web of
his story emerges? How do you come away from the novel feeling about him? Is
he evil? innocent? superhuman? mad? heroic? Does Sutpen's history, which he
has told to Colonel Compson, justify his behavior?
- Why do the various tellers of the story interpret and embroider the tale so
differently? What is Faulkner telling us about the human need to order and
interpret the past? How does each teller affect your response? Whose version
of events do you find most attractive, most compelling? Whose version makes
most sense to you? Is "truth" largely irrelevant?
- Faulkner's original title for the novel was "Dark House," and as in much of
his work, we see in Absalom, Absalom! strong elements of the gothic
literary convention: a ruined and possibly haunted house, a demonic hero,
family secrets, hints of incest, a melodramatic plot, an overwhelming mood of
decadence and decay. Yet in its depth and intensity, the novel clearly
transcends the often trivial melodrama of much gothic fiction. How does
Faulkner's use of gothic elements contribute to the novel's dramatic effect?
- Consider Faulkner's brilliant development of the character of Charles Bon,
the son that Sutpen has cast off. In both Quentin and Shreve's retelling and
in Miss Rosa's, he is a figure of romance, while in Mr. Compson's version he is
an opportunist, using both Judith and Henry to revenge himself upon his father.
Which of these perspectives is more satisfying to you, and why? Why is the
element of doubt about Bon's motivation--even about the extent of his knowledge
about his origin--so crucial to Faulkner's plan?
- The book's title is taken from the biblical story of Absalom, son of King
David, told in the second book of Samuel--a dynastic tale of incest, rebellion,
revenge, and violent death. How is your perspective on the novel enlarged
after reading the Absalom story? How does the biblical tale inflect the
novel's themes of incest, dynastic hopes and failures, rivalry between father
and son? How does David's grief at the death of Absalom (2 Samuel 18:33)
compare with Thomas Sutpen's seeming lack of feeling for his sons--or for
anyone else?
- Charles Bon is at heart of the incest plot, and it is the dual threat of
incest and miscegenation that ruins Sutpen's great design. How do incest and
miscegenation mirror each other? What is it that makes these two forms of
mixing blood--endogamy and exogamy--so taboo? Do you agree that it is the
thought of miscegenation, rather than incest, that Henry can't endure? Why do
rage, self-loathing, and masochism play such a large role in the stories of
Charles Bon's two direct descendants, Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon and Jim
Bond?
- What do you think of Mr. Compson's theory of the incestuous triad formed by
Henry, Bon, and Judith, described as follows: "The brother...taking that
virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he
could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be
despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the
sister, the mistress, the bride" [p. 77]? Does Faulkner assume that a strong
incestuous component is part of the psychology of every family? Or only of
extremely unusual families like the Sutpens?
- The concept of racial hierarchy is at odds with the domestic intimacy in
which blacks and whites lived together in the South. During the Civil War,
Judith, Clytie, and Rosa live together as sisters, eating the same food,
working side by side. But when Rosa returns to the house in 1909, she warns
Clytie not to touch her: "Let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all
the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too" [p. 112]. How does the novel
expose the mental convolutions by which people tried to maintain the notion of
an essential difference--a species difference--between black skin and white,
even among members of the same family? What, in these circumstances, do you
think of Clytie's loyalty and her efforts to protect Henry?
- To what degree do you see the self-destructiveness displayed by just about
all of the figures in this novel as Faulkner's deliberate allegory of the
South?
- Many critics have commented that Faulkner takes his stylistic eccentricity
to its most involuted and exaggerated extremes in Absalom, Absalom!,
making inordinate demands upon the reader's attention and patience. An
anonymous reviewer for Time called this book "the strangest, least
readable, most infuriating and yet in some respects the most impressive novel
that William Faulkner has written." What use does Faulkner make of repetition,
circularity, accumulation, and confusion? Are there aesthetic and intellectual
reasons he takes his rhetoric and syntax to such exhaustive lengths, or do you
feel that his style is too self-indulgent?
- Absalom, Absalom! is a novel about the meaning of history, and
about the extreme pressure of the past, particularly in the South, upon the
inhabitants of the present. More importantly, it is about the doubtful process
of coming to know, reconstruct, and come to grips with history. Mr. Compson
says to Quentin, "We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales...we see dimly people,
the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and
waiting...performing their acts of simple passion and violence, impervious to
time and inexplicable" [p. 80]. Why does Quentin, who is unrelated to Sutpen,
seem to understand the tale as bearing directly upon his own identity and fate?
If history is "a dead time" [p. 71], as Mr. Compson calls it, why does it
command so much mesmerized attention in this novel?
- Absalom, Absalom! shares certain characteristics with classical
tragedy, and Faulkner uses Mr. Compson to make the connection clear. He
alludes to Aeschylus's great play Agamemnon with his discussion on pages
48-49 of the name of Sutpen's daughter by a slave, suggesting that Sutpen might
have meant to call her Cassandra rather than Clytemnestra. Elsewhere, Mr.
Compson sees the story as a dramatic tableau, with "fate, destiny, retribution,
irony--the stage manager" [p. 57]. Aristotle noted that a certain blindness, a
character flaw he called hamartia, was common to tragic heroes. What
are the flaws in Sutpen that contribute to his tragedy? If Sutpen is a
character who stands for pure, unswerving will, what role does fate play in the
story?
- Why does Faulkner have Quentin tell his story to Shreve McCannon, a
Canadian, in a room at Harvard in January, 1910? Why does this reconstruction
of a uniquely Southern tale take place on Yankee soil? What is the meaning of
the relationship between story and setting, as contained in the following
phrase: "that fragile pandora's box of scrawled paper which had filled with
violent and unratiocinative djinns and demons this snug monastic coign, this
dreamy and heatless alcove of what we call the best of thought" [p. 208]? What
do you make of the book's final line, in which Quentin hysterically insists
that he doesn't hate the South?
- In the last few pages of the novel we learn at last, as in a mystery, what
Quentin's role in the story has been. He has entered into the final chapter of
the nightmare of the Sutpen family with his own eyes, accompanying Miss Rosa to
Sutpen's Hundred, where he sees the dying Henry. He seems unable to emerge
from this experience into ordinary life. Why does the past have such
hallucinatory power for Quentin? What does his meeting with Henry mean to him?
Do you see Clytie's burning of the house, with herself and Henry in it, as a
final purgation of the family curse? Why then does this history seem to be a
nightmare from which Quentin is unable to awaken?
Comparing the Three Novels:
- In all three of these novels the family is central to structure, plot, and
meaning. It is the source of grief and identity as well as the locus of all
individual psychic struggles. Do you see all of Faulkner's characters
eternally trapped within their familial roles? How do the families differ in
each of these novels, and how are they similar? How do the particularly
important symbolic roles of the mother and the father differ from book to book?
- Faulkner tries to make himself disappear in these works. Instead of using
the traditional third-person narrator that most readers associate with the
author, he directs a chorus of voices that intertwine, complement, and
contradict one another. As readers, we must rely on what we learn from the
characters themselves as to time, place, plot, and matters of cause and effect.
Why do you think Faulkner prefers to make his characters speak "directly" to
his readers? How does this technique affect your ability to believe in the
worlds that exist in these novels? How would more direct intervention by an
authorial voice change your experience?
- In which of these works do you think Faulkner's style, his use of language,
and his formal innovations are most finely tuned, most powerfully worked out?
In which do you feel that his stylistic quirks are most annoying, most
distracting?
- All of these novels question our assumptions about time as regular, linear,
sequential, predictable. What are some of the ways in which time is disrupted
in these works?
- The Compson family of The Sound and the Fury (1929) plays a central
role in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as well. Does Faulkner want readers of
Absalom, Absalom! to assume that Quentin's involvement in the Sutpen
story is one of the reasons for his suicide, which takes place three months
later in The Sound and the Fury? Do you see a seamless characterization
of Quentin and Mr. Compson in the two books?
- Faulkner is interested in the causes and effects of extreme psychological
pressures, as we see in Quentin and Benjy Compson, Henry and Thomas Sutpen,
Rosa Coldfield, Vardaman and Darl Bundren, and many other characters in these
novels. What are some of the forms that psychopathology takes in Faulkner's
world?
- Faulkner has often been accused of an extremely misogynistic representation
of women. Consider Caddy Compson, Dilsey, Dewey Dell and Addie Bundren, Judith
Sutpen, Rosa Coldfield, the wife of Charles St. Valery Bon, and other female
characters in these three novels. How would you describe Faulkner's notion of
the feminine, as compared with the masculine? Do you agree with the critic
Irving Howe that "Faulkner's inability to achieve moral depth in his
portraiture of young women clearly indicates a major failing as a novelist"?
- Is the work of Faulkner necessarily different in its impact depending upon
whether one is from the North or the South, whether one is black or white?
Suggestions for further reading
Fiction: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Erskine Caldwell,
Tobacco Road, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Lord
Jim; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man;
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus,
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to
Find; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," Reynolds Price,
Mustian; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; William
Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Lie Down in Darkness.
Nonfiction: Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography; Malcolm
Cowley, The Portable Faulkner; John Richard Dennett, The South As It
Is: 1865-1866; Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study; John
T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading
of Faulkner; James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the
Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962; V. S. Naipaul, A
Turn in the South; Eric Sundquist, Faulkner: A House Divided; Robert
Penn Warren, Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Also by William Faulkner, available from Vintage International
Also available from Vintage Books
by Joseph Blotner
