AS I LAY DYING

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, Random House, 1930, 231 pp

 

I read this esteemed classic by the Nobel Prize winner for Tina's Group. I am glad we chose it. I have read a good deal of Faulkner, mostly the novels published from 1940 and on. Therefore I knew what I was getting myself in for but worried that the other reading group members would find it rough going.

 

Even I, who have been reading some heavy doses of stream-of-consciousness writing over the past many months, was dismayed at first. My blogger friend Dorothy at The Nature of Things not long ago gave me permission to seek help when confronted with a difficult work, so I went on-line and found a character list. There are five children in the Bundren family.

 

As their mother lays dying we get to know them, each taking chapters in turn. In another challenge these characters speak in both dialogue with each other as well as interior monologues, the stream-of-consciousness passages. No quotation marks are provided so you just have to get used to that.

 

It is a dreary tale. When mother Addie Bundren finally dies, father Anse Bundren (one of Faulker's deeply misogynist, southern backwoods males) declares they must take the body back to the town where Addie was born, because that was her dying wish.

 

They do this but it takes forever in a mule-drawn wagon, with the rain, the flooding, the washed out bridges, and then the heat. So gritty. All the many family problems haunt their journey, alternating between various dysfunctions and the dark humor Faulkner inserts into the disastrous incidents they encounter.

 

By the end though, I knew why this novel is often called one of the greatest American novels. The majority of our reading group were similarly impressed. The member who suggested it had done his research and we benefited from it, though thankfully he did not dominate the discussion. 

 

There was a dissenter who purely hated every page and was not won over, but that is the fun of reading groups.