As I lay dying
Subtitle: stories out of stories
By: Warwick Wadlington.
Series: Twayne's masterwork studies ;; no. 102
Publisher: Twayne; Maxwell Macmillan Canada; Maxwell Macmillan International
Published: 1992
Place of publication: New York; Toronto; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 123
Subjects: Faulkner, William, 1897-1962.; Domestic fiction, American -- History and criticism.; Death in literature.
Description: Economically put, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the story of the death and eventual burial of Addie Bundren, matriarch of the poor, farming, Southern Bundren family, and of the meaning of her death and burial journey to that family. But this is a story that defies a brief summing up. As Addie herself says in the novel, "Words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at." Especially so few words about such a multifaceted work. Embedded in the text is the secret story of each character's inner life; the tangled ensnaring story the characters live together as a family; the universal story of human beings struggling with the meaning of death; the cultural story of the impoverished 1920s in the rural South; the American story of the struggle between individual desire and the collective good. Faulkner unravels all of these stories - and more - from the impelling event of Addie's death.^

In this concise critical assessment of the novel, Warwick Wadlington takes the view that each of the stories the novel tells simultaneously grows out of and informs the other, much as people shape and are shaped by one another. Faulkner's tendency to show the reader his fictional world from many different angles and points of view - giving each of the characters, for example, a chance to tell his or her private version of a story - is thus echoed in Wadlington's approach to the novel. The author takes into account the many frames through which As I Lay Dying can be perceived - sociohistorical, psychological, cultural, religious, political, artistic, personal - and synthesizes them for the reader. Faulkner's novel as a whole, too, is a story pulled out of older stories that would eventually be taken up by newer ones.^

As I Lay Dying shows the influence of such master narratives as Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, James Joyce's Ulysses, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. And it anticipates much 1930's writing, especially John Steinbeck's epic Grapes of Wrath. Faulkner actually began to write As I Lay Dying on the day after the great Wall Street crash of 25 October 1929. He and his novel were thus poised on the brink of enormous change, looking back at a decade that loved risk taking and pleasure and that romanticized rugged individualism - or, perhaps more aptly, rugged entrepreneurship - and forward to a decade that would struggle in a kind of forced collective labor in order to survive - the decade of the Great Depression. The "tightrope walk," as Wadlington calls it, between individualism and collectivism, a long-standing exercise in the South, is a major theme of the novel.^

Like much else in the book, however, this apparently two-dimensional issue is "honeycombed with ambivalences and cross-purposes," Wadlington writes. While Faulkner acknowledges the necessity and the good of cooperative action, he also knows that the individual may exploit it for selfish purposes and simultaneously deny this self-interest. As the Bundren family together shoulders the burden of transporting Addie's body to its burial site, each family member also carries the weight of his or her own separate past and keeps pushing ahead toward his or her own distinct goal. In a generous-minded and insightful critique, Wadlington focuses and refocuses the fragments of the Bundren's lives that Faulkner reveals to give the reader a multidimensional portrait of this rich, complex novel.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-119) and index.