Addie Bundren’s health is deteriorating rapidly, and her eldest son, Cash, is hewing the most beautiful coffin he can manage right outside her bedroom window. Wretchedly poor, the Bundrens watch Addie die, then make their way with her corpse, its coffin in a mule-drawn wagon, across the fictional Yoknapatawpha County to fulfill her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson. Along the way, they curse and fight and scream and hallucinate over the loss of the woman who held their lives together, enduring flood, fire, and all sorts of other calamities. It’s so blackly comic that laughter is eclipsed by a state of fretful, threatened animation that is part Gothic grotesquerie, part ramshackle picaresque, and part Old Testament. In the estimation of the critic Harold Bloom, As I Lay Dying “may be the most original novel ever written by an American.” But originality has its price. It can be tough going for the reader, even if, in comparison to his earlier novel The Sound and the Fury—which Faulkner himself described to his agent as “a real son of a bitch”—As I Lay Dying is a slightly easier read.
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