As I Lay Dying

The Bundren family patriarch and Addie’s husband, Anse is a poor, little-educated farmer who considers himself unlucky and is worn out by the physical demands of his job. He is hunchbacked, and “since he lost his teeth his mouth collapses in slow repetition when he dips”, which “gives his lower face that appearance that old dogs have” (10). Anse is ill at ease in his own skin, as none of his shirts look like they belong to him, and his toothlessness means that he is incapable of eating “God’s own victuals as a man should” (22). Comically, Anse’s selfish motivation for getting to Jefferson is completely concerned with his appearance, as he gets his teeth fixed and goes to the barber. He goes as far as repeating his earlier habit of going to Jefferson to get a wife when he meets the new Mrs. Bundren, though the narrative leaves ambiguous whether this was his plan all along. However, while Anse repeats the entreaty that they are to go to Jefferson come hell or highwater, in accordance with Addie’s wishes, when he has made insufficient plans for her burial, it becomes clear that he also wishes to benefit from a “holiday” from his life of care and hard work (65). In order to fulfil his mission of getting to Jefferson and getting his teeth, he sacrifices Jewel’s horse, Dewey Dell’s abortion money and Darl’s freedom. Arguably, Darl’s vacancy in the wagon suits Anse, as he is able to fill it with his new wife.

Ironically, while Anse considers himself “ere such a misfortunate man” and Cora considers him a selfish devil who meets God’s wrath at every turn of his journey, in the full course of the novel, Anse thrives at the expense of others (95).

Anse and Addie’s eldest son, Cash, fell off a church and broke his leg. Never recovering to full physical fitness, he walks with a limp. As a result, his father considers him an extra mouth to feed rather than a helpmate on the farm. Anse also resents having to pay for Cash’s carpentry training. Still, Cash uses his carpentry skills to fashion his mother a coffin and is associated with this object for the narrative’s duration. The first third of the book is punctuated with the incessant thuds of Cash’s coffin-making, which is within earshot of Addie’s deathbed. Cash is obsessed with the technical efficacy of his coffin, which is made on the bevel for a numbered list of thirteen reasons; however, ironically, his craftsmanship does not extend to taking care of the corpse in the coffin, as he nails through Addie’s forehead in his enthusiasm to be finished (50). This oversight makes Cash a buffoonish character who lacks his other brothers’ quickness.

When Cash becomes even more injured during the fated river-crossing, he lies on top of the coffin. The spectacle of the homemade coffin reeking with an eight-day-old corpse and Cash lying on top of it is darkly comic, but it also speaks to the Bundren family’s determination to keep going until they reach Jefferson. Cash has a passive, accepting temperament, and allows the family’s mission to take precedence as they delay getting him medical help and enlist counterproductive temporary measures such as pouring cement onto his leg. Similarly, when Darl is taken to prison, Cash misses him, but he ultimately judges that his absence from the family will be mutually beneficial.

Addie and Anse’s second son, Darl, is the most eloquent and thoughtful family member. His first-person accounts stand out from the rest for their use of highly descriptive, formal diction and relatively regular syntax. Darl has seen more of the world than the other Bundrens, having fought in the First World War in France, an experience that likely left him shell-shocked. Darl’s relative worldliness enables him to function as the reader’s guide into Faulkner’s unfamiliar Mississippi locale. For example, Faulkner advises the reader that water tastes better “when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar tree smells” (7). Darl seems the sturdy thoughtful counterpart to his whimsical cavalier brother Jewel, and a conscious student of character. However, Darl is irrational where he feels himself slighted by Addie and becomes obsessed with her favorite child, Jewel, whom he observes minutely. While Cora considers that Darl’s love for Addie is evident, his darker side shows through when he taunts Jewel about Addie’s death on their return from the errand.

Darl is eccentric, performing actions such as beginning to laugh when the family sets out on their expedition to Jefferson. While such a response might be a function of Darl’s shellshock and mirror the reader’s reaction to the dark comedy of this expedition, it is an inappropriate action by the social standards of the day. Vernon Tull summarizes the community’s attitude to Darl when he declares that the latter’s problem is that he “thinks by himself too much”—a statement that simultaneously implies that Darl thinks too much in general and thinks too little like other people (43). Interestingly, this mirrors Addie’s longing to be by herself. When Cora imagines that a wife would benefit Darl and “straighten him out” (43), she perhaps implies that having earthlier concerns and a distraction from his family of origin would do him good. However, Darl, who comes back from France with a spyglass, shows unusual penetration in his ability to discover the secrets that his female family members are hiding, with regard to their extra-marital affairs.

When Darl burns Gillespie’s barn, he shows remorse through his tears; however, this is not enough for his family who reject them. In the chapter about Darl on the train to Jackson, he shows evidence of an altered logic, as he refers to himself in the third person and mimics Vardaman’s childish speech of repetitions and animal imagery, saying, “Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed” (156). The plot comes full circle, as the laugh Darl uttered at the beginning of the expedition gets turned on him; he, the misfit, is abandoned by his family to serve the majority’s benefit of getting to Jefferson without being stopped by the police. Darl’s use of third person indicates that he feels that his subjecthood and identity are coming undone.

Addie’s third child, Jewel, is the product of her extramarital affair with the Reverend Whitfield. Striking Jewel, with “his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face” and physical agility is whimsical, quick-tempered, and argumentative (3). While Jewel is the child who causes Addie the most trouble owing to such caprices as sneaking away to work nights so that he can afford to buy himself a horse and returning home exhausted, he is also the one that she is most bound to, judging that “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” (102). Addie’s statement proves prophetic when Jewel does indeed rescue her coffin from the high tide of a river and the fire that Darl sets off in a barn.

Jewel’s affection for his mother is mediated through his love for the horse, which his brothers Darl and Vardaman term Jewel’s mother. The horse and Jewel enjoy a relationship that is both tender and violent, performing risky athletic feats together—Jewel’s feelings towards this “circus animal” so unlike the utilitarian wagon mules, can be summarized when he terms it a “sweet son of a bitch” (62;10). More parallels appear between Jewel’s relationship with his horse and that with his mother when Jewel insists that he will pay for the horse’s feed himself through his own earnings rather than being beholden to Anse; similarly, Addie views Jewel as her own personal project from the outset. As she conceived Jewel without Anse, she alone is responsible for tending to him when she fixes him “special things to eat and hid(es) them for him” (76).

When Jewel accepts that Anse will sell his beloved pet to pay for the mules that will convey them to Jefferson, he relinquishes his selfish side in favor of the family’s common good. He thus switches roles with Darl, who previously worked for the family and ended up alone when he burned Gillespie’s barn.

Anse and Addie’s sole daughter, Dewey Dell, was conceived by Addie “to negative Jewel” (107), the child that resulted from her extramarital affair. Ironically, Dewey Dell has also conceived a child out of wedlock during her trysts with the farmer Lafe, who gives her 10 dollars for an abortion. Perhaps guided by her own mother’s misery, Dewey Dell refuses to consider motherhood as a viable option for her, and she decides to terminate the pregnancy, despite the prohibitions of a patriarchal society. In a silent confrontation at Addie’s deathbed, Darl accuses Dewey Dell of wanting Addie to die quickly so that she will be able to get to town sooner. From the time of Peabody’s visit to Addie in their home, to her own visits to Moseley and Macgowan, Dewey Dell feels that she is surrounded by men who have the power to help her, even though she finds it difficult to confront them with her problem. Her discretion is symbolized by the two neat packages she carries on her journey, which include the Sunday clothes that will give her the appearance of respectability and the 10 dollars Lafe has given her. When Dewey Dell makes her problem clear to Moseley and Macgowan, they taunt her and refuse to look at her condition directly, referring to it in a series of euphemisms, such as “trouble” (122). While Moseley proposes the cure of marriage for her problem, Macgowan, who sees a girl who needs his services as an attractive proposition tries to fool her into having sex with him. While Dewey Dell acquiesces to “the same operation” she has had before, she is not fooled that it will cure her of her problem (152). It is unclear whether she is still pregnant at the end of the novel when the Bundrens head back home.

Faulkner conceives Dewey Dell as supremely feminine. She is “pretty in a kind of sullen, awkward way” that impresses both the male pharmacists she deals with, and she speaks in a stream of consciousness style that addresses her affinity with other female creatures in nature (121). A cow is present and demands to be milked as Dewey Dell contemplates Lafe and her pregnancy, stating that “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” (37). The darkness symbolizes the unknown of female sexuality and childbearing that links Dewey Dell with the cow, while the moaning is an intimation of a lover’s sound. Faulkner writes in recognized modernist tropes about femininity, as the lush natural imagery of Dewey Dell’s language is similar to that in Molly Bloom’s famous monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses.

The youngest Bundren child, Vardaman, is still a little boy. He is conscious of himself as a country boy who has less access to privileges, such as bananas and Santa Claus, than town boys do, and that he did not choose this for himself. His position reflects a typical childish sensation of powerlessness. He appears at the beginning of the narrative when he has caught “a fish nigh as long as he is” in the local river (18). In the context of Addie’s death, he announces that “my mother is a fish” (51), thus giving her a second existence beyond death. Vardaman’s stream of consciousness flow is typically childish in being punctuated with repetitions and comprising of short sentences. His observations are acute and literal, as he offers no interpretation of them. This is especially effective in describing action, as in the following sequence “‘Jewel,’ pa says. Jewel does not stop. ‘Where are you going?’ pa says. But Jewel does not stop. ‘You leave that horse here,’ pa says. Jewel stops and looks at pa” (60). Without offering any description of character, Vardaman’s blow-by-blow description implies the tension between his brother and father.

The Bundrens’ neighbor, Cora Tull is a one-time schoolteacher and a self-righteous religious ideologue, who sings of the rewards she expects to receive in heaven. She judges the Bundrens for being immoral in thinking about money and their personal concerns rather than honoring the sanctity of Addie’s death. She displays especial loathing for Anse, who she considers has sent Addie to her grave early and is being punished by God when every turn of his journey goes wrong. However, from her husband Vernon’s perspective we learn that Cora, who hovers over Addie’s deathbed, is an interfering busy body, “a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else” (60). She thus prides herself on having social influence and privileged access to the center of the drama and action. She functions as an outsider’s perspective that is intimately familiar with the family and first reveals Anse’s selfishness.

Cora’s husband, Vernon, is the Bundrens’ neighbor and friend. He seems less well-mannered than his wife, with the comic tic of repeatedly spitting into the dust. Vernon is wealthier than Anse, frequenting town more and being in the position to give Anse a loan. Like Cora, he offers an outsider’s perspective on the Bundrens. However, in joining the men in their manual errands, such as making and shouldering the coffin and rescuing the wagon from the river, he gets closer to them and is less judgmental of their behavior. Vernon points out the contradiction in Cora’s diatribes against Anse, saying that in “one breath you say they was daring the hand of God to try” the journey and “the next breath you jump on Anse because he wasn’t with them” trying to get the wagon out of the river (92). He thus makes the case that Cora’s judgement of Anse is limited and spurred by her own prejudice.

Vernon’s own view of divine wrath against the Bundrens is more detached, when he observes that the obstructive log responsible for the wagon’s destruction in the river “went on good as a swimming man could have done. It was like it had been sent there to do a job and done it and went on” (92). There is comedy in the matter-of-factness of Vernon’s anthropomorphized log; as though it is the obstruction of a capricious joker, rather than Cora’s solemn Old Testament God. This indicates that Vernon inhabits a more flexible and inexplicable universe than his wife.

Reverend Whitfield has the façade of devout religiosity, whilst at the same time having had an affair with Addie and conceiving Jewel through her. He speaks of his affair with Addie as a Satanic “wrestle” from which he “emerged victorious” (108), believing that God has already forgiven him; he intends to ask the same from Anse . However, despite Whitfield’s lofty intentions, this conversation does not take place in the narrative.

Whitfield incorporates the contradictions between the sacred and the carnal, as he speaks continually of the Lord, but has impressive physicality that appeals to women. Addie considers him “more beautiful since the garment which he exchanged for sin was sanctified” (106), thereby feeling sexually attracted to the distinctive priest’s garment that makes Whitfield stand out amongst other men. He possesses a voice that is “bigger than him […] like he is one, and his voice is one, swimming on two horses side by side across the ford” (55). The imagery of horses relates to Whitfield’s prowess in being able to clear the ford that troubled the Bundrens on horseback, a feat that he and Cora attributes to God’s predetermined preferment of him as one of those elected for salvation. However, on an earthlier level, Whitfield’s horsemanship links his talents to those of his illegitimate son, Jewel.