For example, the reader discovers that Dewy Dell, the only daughter of the family, is pregnant. Faulkner, dealing with a recurrent theme in American novels, represents the secrets of a family, digging into the hidden grief inside each character’s soul.

But at the end of the book, the cycle will open again.ĭuring the journey, the reader understands the relationship between the characters. Bundren to bury the body of his wife because of a promise he has to keep.

If considered metaphorically, the novel’s title suggests that the Bundren family is going from Hades to Jefferson, representing a passage from sorrow to something new. The plot tells the journey of the Bundren family from the countryside to Jefferson. The Bundren family as a unit is the unique, authentic, polymorphous character of the novel. Annie is the wife of Anse Bundren and the mother of Cash, Jewell, Darl, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman, whom all act as narrators more than once from their point of view in the different chapters of the book. In Faulkner’s novel, the death is that of Annie Bundren. It is a sentence that Agamemnon tells Odysseus about his descent into Hades, referring to his own death. From Hades to Jeffersonįaulkner takes the title As I Lay Dying from Homer’s Odyssey, Book XI. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Juan Rulfo, Robert Musil, and Malcolm Lowry are members of this cultural movement. Modernist writers wanted to innovate ongoing literary techniques.

This novel contributed to laying the foundations of Modernism, an artistic movement born in the first decades of the 20th century. Every character gives the story a different shape, thus laying a new brick to the book’s structure. Through this formal innovation, Faulkner shows himself capable of exploiting a revolutionary literary style. Fifty-nine chapters make up the book’s structure, representing the point of view of fifteen different characters. The plot centers around the picaresque road trip made by the Bundren family to bury their mother, as per her wishes, in Jefferson, Mississippi. It is his most famous work, along with The Sound and the Fury, and leading critics consider it one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Published in 1930, As I Lay Dying is a monument of Southern Gothic fiction by the American Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner