As with his stunning _The_Sound_and_the_Fury_ and _Absalom_Absalom_, this book makes use of the author's masterful use of stream-of-conscious writing to render an entire reality with internal monologues. The story unfolds as you construct it from the observations and responses of the characters. Though briefer and less challenging than these other two books, it's as absorbing a read as they have been for decades. When you reach the end, you can imagine that you'll pick up the book again someday, sure there's more to explore.

The structure is simple once you get the hang of it. Each chapter is the name of a particular character in the story of the family of Addie Bundren, dead in the first few pages, and being transported by her clan to the land of her birth for burial-by wagon, in the heat and dust, over rivers, for weeks, before the vacuum seal... There is no "Once upon a time." Instead, whatever that character is thinking at the instant the chapter begins is what you're reading. Soon, you know who everyone is and what she thinks of everyone else. The effect of this structure is that you can inhabit the narrative as each of the players, can see how events are interpreted differently. It's also like a mystery-someone will have troubled thoughts about something you can't quite distinguish; then, twenty pages later, you figure out what they've been talking about and you flip backward in a frenzy to see how the early references to the issue flesh out the story. This is a terribly rewarding way of reading.

This is a great first Faulkner for everyone. You develop the ability to read his complex novels by virtue of the simplicity of the story and the mostly brief chapters, each from a fresh point of view. You learn to read on if you don't get something. (Important skill: Faulkner is one of my absolute favorite authors since high school, and one of my favorite things is that you have to trust the story to tell you what you need to know in time. Not only do you get the reward of context for the occasional non sequitur, but you have the thrill of anticipation when something weird happens. This book is a great example of how, unlike Hemingway, where you have to read a basically boring story over and over to understand all the juicy stuff, Faulkner gives you nibbles of fantastic plot to hold you through the ultimate analysis.


Rubbernecking on the Literary Highway   February 6, 2007
 68 out of 70 found this review helpful

I was re-reading this book last week, pen and highlighter in hand, when my husband walked into the living room and said, "What are you reading?" I lifted the cover. "Is it any good?" To which I replied, "No," and he responded, "Why are you reading it?" And, slightly irritated, I said, "For the same reason you are watching the American Idol Audition show. It's DEFINITELY not good, but you can't look away."

And so it is with most of Faulkner's work. As a reader, you should not go into his work expecting anything "good." You won't find an easy or clear plotline, clear language, or (and this is USUALLY a major gripe of mine) likeable characters. But even though you don't really like what you are reading, you just have to know how it ends. You have to know what makes these reprehensible people tick. And, surprisingly enough, you are usually unsatisfied in the end, but not so much that you don't want to double back and have one more look at the car-wreck that is the work of Faulkner.

And so it is with *As I Lay Dying*. It's a fascinating piece of work, masterfully crafted, ultimately depressing, and darkly funny all at once. Having been to Rowan Oak a few times, I can see Faulkner sitting in his front garden chuckling over the idea of Vardaman's infamous "My Mother is a fish," chapter and how it captivated the world with it's "brilliance."

I also have no doubt, having grown up in Mississippi, that he was writing about real people, warts and all. I'm probably related to some of them. Maybe for that reason, Faulkner reads a little differently to locals. While I certainly appreciate his literary genius, the truth and realism of what he wrote also shines through. Reading Faulkner is a little like attending a funeral in Mississippi, something that closely resembles a family reunion set anywhere else - everybody's talking at once (in the most genteel manner, except for that blacksheep son - we all know he's not his Daddy's child, bless his heart - who keeps using bad language) about stuff that would absolutely curl the toenails of anyone is polite "society." The stream-of-consciousness style reminds me very much of what I picked up on as a child overhearing these conversations in the viewing room of the funeral parlor.

So . . . read with an open mind. And if the humor throws you at first, find a copy of the short story of *A Rose for Emily*. It will help you to better understand what Faulkner considered funny. Though off on other literary journeys, I'm sure that eventually my morbid curiousity will draw me back to this trainwreck again before too long . . . just can't stop looking . . .


Death Qualified   March 28, 2001
 62 out of 91 found this review helpful

*As I Lay Dying* is the center of Faulkner's achievement, a slowburning pyre of savage eloquence, a funeral expedition in the black of mourning. "I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again." Working as a coal-shoveler at the local dynamo, Faulkner improvised a makeshift desk out of an upturned wheelbarrow, scribbling chapters in-between shifts. "As I lay dying the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyelids for me as I descended into Hades." So spake Agamemnon's shade in Book XI of *The Odyssey*.

But Addie's pilgrimage to her gravesite is (entertainingly) besmirched by the black machinations of the Bundren clan, a tragic farce rolling in the squelch of the wagon-ruts - but without transcendance, without catharsis, almost without hope. Addie's miserly lump of a husband, searching for new teeth and a new wife, Darl's simmering schizophrenia, frittering away at the edge of disquiet, Cash's halfway-demented stoicism, Jewel's hellbent-for-leather mad-dog brutality. By the end of the novel, the Bundrens have spanned the (a)moral compass from qualified heroism to remarkable stupidity to outrageous cruelty and betrayal. But their experiences hardly ever avail them to Epiphany, except in flashes for Darl, whose incipient mental illness seems a sort of Demiurgic punishment for presuming to know as much as he does.

Faulkner's language stutters, broods, crackles, plods, lashes, purls, trots, sashays, and burbles. His ekphrases are sopping wet, mud-splashed, paranoid, opaque, biting, feverish, and yes, even poetical at times. Take the murder ballads of Johnny Cash, darken them further with the withering mosquito-net confessions of Conrad's stoic refugees, then spinal-tap this walking corpse with the elliptical viscerality of Joyce's *Ulysses*, and you have something approaching the claw-hammer prose of Faulkner's slow funeral.

The multiple 1st-person viewpoints make us sad that none of these tragicomic voices, each splintered from an inclusive 3rd-person GNOSIS, each trapped in their own cell of being, will ever be able to synthesize their travails into an intuitive, life-affirming perspective. Indeed, the reader, who has all the separate narratives at his disposal, is not necessarily in a better position. Faulkner, for all his elliptic poetry and stirring folkways, does not throw the buoy out to our drowning readerly hearts. Like the Compsens in *The Sound and the Fury*, the Bundrens (blind and battered) at journey's end don't find themselves standing at the threshold of change, of resurrection. This ain't no Flannery O'Connor parable of anagogical rebirth and communion with Our Lord through violence and misadventure. What is remarkable, finally, is that this depraved clan of agrarian ne'er-do-wells can be capable of such feats of negative triumph and of triumphal negation, or as Faulkner scholar Jan Bakker put it, "Heroism is to be found in the most unlikely places, endurance in the most unlikely people, and both may be generated by the most unlikely circumstances. [But] while exerting himself in the most unlikely manner for the most unlikely causes, it is impossible for the individual to know the whole truth."

*As I Lay Dying* reads like the episodic fever-dream of a long sickness. But our convalescence only cycles us back to a renewed emptiness, to the same heap of gristle and clutch of bones, to the same brooding necroticism. The reader may benefit from Faulkner's moral enema but his characters, Darl, Vardaman, Dewey Dell, Cash, Jewel, Anse, and Addie, are doomed. In all, a masterpiece of literary pathogenesis and one of the ten most important novels of the preceding century.


Alas, but..   November 28, 2002
 34 out of 57 found this review helpful

..this is the worst book I ever read. I hate to say it, because reviews that say "I don't like this book" are generally extremely unintelligent reviews. And generally I write extremely good reviews of books, and I can always find something good in almost any book.

Except perhaps this one, I'm sorry to say.

While Willliam Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness form was unprecendented and original, it does not mean he should be praised for his extremely poor use of it. The idea is good, but his execution makes the novel almost unintelligible. Sometimes it's best to sacrifice the realism of the stream of human thought for the sake of the reader's own mind and dramatic effect.

I disliked the book more when I took it seriously. In order to get the most out of it, you ought to take it as comical, a farcical attempt for a completely inept and dysfunctional hillbilly family to get the rotting corpse of their matriarch to the family burial grounds. And everything goes wrong along the way, with the corpse rotting away as they trek it through the countryside, try to get it over a river, and all the while argue with each other and go crazy and break bones, as the youngest child thinks his dead mother is now a fish. Let's face it - the book is -funny.-

But that doesn't mean it's well-written. Like I said before, it's good in theory, but the stream-of-consciousness is almost impossible to comprehend. And.. these are not people whose minds you want to get into and read every thought of. They're the typical country stereotypes found in literature - the bible-beating, overbearing, hypocritical patriarch; the hardworking but slow-thinking and meticulous son; the bad-tempered but poetic-minded and clairvoyant son; the ethereal daughter who was wronged by a boyfriend and is now pregnant (and gets the particularly irritating name of "Dewey Dell"); and the youngest son, named after a politician and as innocently quirky as they come. That, and none of them -ever- get along, and none of them are terribly intelligent or possess a modicum of decent common sense.

The way Faulkner writes in _As I Lay Dying_ is very good in its theory, running through the same events over again from different points of view. The problem with it is that none of those points of view are terribly intelligible, and you end up with an extremely garbled view of events and characters. It seems as though Faulkner is trying too hard to make each character's thoughts different to the point where it's simply ridiculous.

Very often those books hailed as classics of American literature do not deserve that title. Yes, they were innovative, but that does not make them excellent books - sometimes the first person to do the job is not the best person for it. I can honestly say that _As I Lay Dying_ is the only book that I ever literally -threw across a room- in sheer frustration of both the writing and the irritating nature of the characters.

I truly wish I had something better to say about it, but if I'm going to give my honest opinion, this is it.


The place to start in reading Faulkner   December 18, 2000
 26 out of 29 found this review helpful

This book should be the first Faulkner you read. Not only is it glorious, but it's the best entry point into his writing style and his body of work. The reader is given the most cues to narrator and plot (pay attention to the chapter headings), and gets a taste of Faulkner's wonderful way of putting words together and his way of commenting on family relationships, purity, sex, and the South. As is standard Faulkner fare, it's utterly depressing but a book you can't stop reading and can't help but be glad you read. The characters are memorable, and their narration is wonderful, and As I Lay Dying is home to the famous and utterly breathtaking 5-word chapter (a line delivered by Vardamann that inevitably comes to mind whenever you think of the book later).

As I Lay Dying will put you in better stead to read Faulkner's other (and sometimes even better) works than anything else, and it's well worth the read in its own right. Afterwards, I would recommend reading The Sound and the Fury, which blew me away.