As I Lay Dying
(William Faulkner)

Identity

The characters have a hard time dealing with the death of Addie and the subsequent confusion over their identity and existence in general. Vardaman associates his mother with the fish he had caught and cleaned breaking it down into pieces that he no longer sees as fish. He decides once his mother has died that she is no longer his mother, or even a person, but something that does not truly exist any longer.

Darl believes that since his mother no longer exists, and his mother created him, that perhaps he does not exist anymore either. Also, when Anse marries again remarkably quickly he introduces his new wife as “Mrs. Bundren”, a title that belonged to Addie not much earlier.

Reality

Reality is particularly important in this novel because it is subjective. The story is told from the view point of different characters so there are many different realities, yet each one is true. Reality is sad, and intrinsically hopeless to the Bundren’s as they are all weighed down by their psychological issues and conflicting feelings about life and death.

Reality to Vardaman is that his mother is gone so he does not know what she is anymore. Reality to Darl is that with his mother gone he does not know if he still exists and reality to Dewey Dell is that she is, unfortunately, pregnant, needs to end it, finds all men to be sexual predators, and has no feelings about her mother being dead.

Death

For the characters in “As I Lay Dying”, death is either seen as relief or an identity crisis. For Addie’s sons, death causes them to break down mentally. For Addie and Dewey Dell, and perhaps even Anse, death is seen as a relief and an escape from something they are trapped in.

Addie always felt trapped in her loveless marriage with Anse, felt her only duty was to bear children, and had an affair, which produced her son Jewel, just to break up the monotony of her life and to take back some of her own free will, though getting pregnant caused it to backfire on her. Addie seemed to welcome death, and Dewey Dell felt the death of her unborn child would be her only relief.

Poverty

All of the problems encountered by the Bundren family along their journey are only made worse by the fact that they are poor. Cash makes his mother’s coffin, rather than buying one for her, and Anse would have just buried her in the backyard if she did not specifically request to be buried in Jefferson.

On the journey, when they get flooded and lose almost all of their possessions, almost losing Addie, they have to sell whatever they have left to buy new supplies, even using the money Anse had saved to buy himself some new teeth. Anything bad that happened to them was multiplied by the fact that they had no money to help them on their way.

Suffering

Suffering is central to the novel, as it is central to the time and place in the setting. The Bundrens were exceedingly poor, as were many people living in rural Mississippi in the 1920’s. Everything they did was made more difficult by their poverty, and no one ever seemed particularly happy.

All of the characters, especially the women, seem to find death a more welcome experience than life, due to the struggles that they all face on a daily basis. The characters deal with poverty, death, infidelity, unwanted pregnancy, and hypocrisy on a regular basis.

Religion

In this case, religion is not so much reveled in as mocked. In the novel, characters deal with affairs, infidelity, adultery, and abortion. The one religious figure in the novel is an adulterer who has a love-child, all while preaching to the town the value in morality.

In a twist, on the religious pilgrimage, the Bundren family takes a journey to bury Addie, only it is a journey with no real purpose because they could have just buried her in the back yard.

There are no repercussions for unjust actions; in fact, the people who sin the most seem to be rewarded while those who fall moral law are dealt one bad hand after another.

Family

Family is a central, yet twisted topic in “As I Lay Dying”. The Bundren family is one full of secrets, selfishness, jealousy, and general nonchalance over the feelings of the other members. While the siblings all love their mother and want to do what is best for her, even in death, they rival with one another for her affections and care little about the others.

The women feel as though family equals a personal prison they are confined to for the purpose of bearing and raising children. It may seem as though there is much family love in the efforts the Bundrens make to bury Addie in Jefferson, but they are likely making the trip out of duty, more so than love.

Isolation

The characters are all extremely lonely, though no one around them seems to understand that. The only reason it is obviously they are lonely is because the reader sees the thoughts, confessions, fears, and basic inner monologue of each character.

Most of them feel terribly isolated from the rest of the world, as well as the family, but Darl is the most obvious with his feelings. He feels intellectually isolated from the rest of the family but has no problem pointing out the way other family members hide, or stand out, in the big scheme of things.

In Cash’s case, his work as a carpenter is his way of isolating himself, and also what seems to define him as a person.

Sanity

At the end of the trek to Jefferson, Darl is committed to a mental institution and deemed to be insane. The strange thing about this is that to anyone looking in on the situation, Darl is obviously the sanest person in the family.

Darl speaks his mind, is articulate, very intelligent, and insightful. The rest of the Bundren family is full of bitterness, resentment, selfishness, and self-destructive, which makes them a little more mentally confused than Darl. Eventually, Cash deduces that sanity and insanity are not mutually exclusive concepts, and everyone, in fact, is a little bit of both.

The Absurdity of Life

The main event in the novel, the family journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, is a big joke, thus reminding the reader that life is absurd. Addie wants the family to bring her body to Jefferson, not because she truly wants to be buried there but because she wants her family to make that pointless journey as a means of revenge for forcing her to live the boring, domesticated life that she has lived for so long.

The entire event is a pointless journey with no meaning whatsoever. Addie felt that life was absurd, and thus it was her final joke to make the family do something with no rhyme or reason to prove her point.